Mount Pleasant: '...the largest sorting office in the world'
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At the start of the 20th century, Mount Pleasant in London was reckoned to be 'probably the largest sorting office in the world'. A century later, it is still one of the largest and busiest sorting offices in Britain. It is a landmark in the London 'village' of Clerkenwell, and its staff handle millions of items of mail each day.
The Mount Pleasant complex is also home to the BPMA: our main office and The Royal Mail Archive Search Room are on Phoenix Place, on the west side of the site (look out for the photograph in this exhibition showing the boiler house chimney... it's where the BPMA is now!).
'The Mount' has a fascinating history, even before its role as one of the key centres in Britain's communications network. This slideshow exhibition explores a little of this history, drawing on the many historic documents and images to be found at The Royal Mail Archive.
- Early history: Coldbath Fields Prison
- The Post Office takes over
- Working life in the late 19th century
- The Post Office Underground Railway
- Pre-war expansion
- The Mount under fire: World War 2
- Post-war reconstruction
- Postal mechanisation
- From boiler house to archive
- Mount Pleasant and Clerkenwell today
Take a look at the image below. It shows the Clerkenwell area in 1562, when this was largely countryside on the outskirts of the City of London. You might be able to recognise how some of the roads still follow the same routes today. There are only a few buildings amongst the fields, yet this is less than a mile north of the city walls. The site of Mount Pleasant is marked with a red dot.
Mount Pleasant Community Project
In spring 2007, a group of postal workers captured working life at 'The Mount' on film. They photographed colleagues at work and rest, the vans and machines, and the building itself. Take a look at their new pictures of the Mount.
