The Mount Pleasant Mail Centre (often shortened as Mount Pleasant, known internally as the Mount and officially known as the London Central Mail Centre) is a mail centre operated by Royal Mail in London, England. The site has previously operated as one of the largest sorting offices in the world. It is located in the London Borough of Islington, on the boundary with the London Borough of Camden.
Location
It is located on a twelve-acre site in the Mount Pleasant area of Clerkenwell, at the junction between Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue and opposite Exmouth Market.
History
The mail centre stands on the site of the former Coldbath Fields Prison that ceased to function in 1885. Its potential use for Post Office purposes was championed by Frederick Ebenezer Baines, Assistant Secretary of the General Post Office, who had been instrumental in establishing the parcel post service in 1882.
19th century
In the mid-1880s the parcel sorting office was located in the cramped basement of GPO East in St. Martin's Le Grand; Baines was actively seeking to remove it, preferably to a spacious site close to some of the main London railway termini. The Coldbath Fields Prison site fitted these criteria. In 1887 the Treasury sanctioned the use of the former treadmill house as a temporary parcel sorting office, and the GPO moved in in time to meet the Christmas rush. The sale of the rest of the site had to wait until an Act of Parliament (the Post Office (Sites) Act (52 & 53 Vict. Ch. ccix)) was passed. The centre was then officially opened on 30 August 1889.
The Post Office clerks did not like the name Coldbath Fields, which was associated with the prison in the public mind, so Baines took the name Mount Pleasant from an adjacent street (the name-change being announced in November that year). The street called Mount Pleasant had gained its name ironically in the 1730s after locals had begun to dump cinders and other refuse.
The Post Office (Sites) Act 1889 required the Post Office to provide a portion of the site, or £10,000, to London County Council for use as open space. The Post Office chose to retain the entire site, and provided the funds, which were used to purchase Spa Green Gardens in Clerkenwell.
To begin with the prison buildings were used to house various Post Office departments: the prison bakehouse became the office of the Post Office Stores Department, the Governor's house was used by the Telegraph Superintending Engineer (whose workshops expanded into other buildings in the eastern corner of the site); the Chapel housed a hundred clerks of the Money Order Office (with a similar number being accommodated in what had been the Governor's offices on the floors below), while the adjacent long cell-block was used for postal stores. (The Money Order Office moved out in 1897 to temporary accommodation in Fore Street; whereupon the stores department moved into the Chapel and other vacated areas, and the cell-block was demolished.)
Meanwhile, the Post Office began to erect its own buildings on the site (designed for the most part by Sir Henry Tanner, principal architect of the Office of Works): a Telegraph Factory was built in 1890 in the southern corner of the site; and from 1889-1900 a vast new Parcel Office was built, in stages from north to south, over the whole of the northern (north-west) half of the site. (In spite of its name, the third and final section of the building was designed to accommodate the sorting of letters for the Inland section of the GPO, which was transferred here from St. Martin's Le Grand in 1900.) When finished the building was square in plan, with corner pavilions containing offices and ancillary services, and the central areas used for sorting. Two-thirds of the building was two storeys high, but the final section was double that height. On either side were glass-covered loading bays for the mail vans.