A History of Mount Pleasant

Origins along the River Fleet

Originally, the Mount Pleasant site was open fields sitting on higher ground above London’s Fleet River.

The earliest map of the area shows that in 1553 the site was a river valley in a rural landscape. A track on the map could be what is now Farringdon Road. However, the area surrounding the site was slowly seeing rural and urban development.

Approximate location of Mount Pleasant on the Civitas Londinium map, 1561 (c) The London Archives, City of London.

In the 1170s, William Fitzstephen, a trusted clerk of Thomas à Becket, described the area as having ‘excellent suburban springs with sweet wholesome and clear water’. By the 1700s it was a popular place to visit. This was due to the cold bath spring, where people bathed in the icy waters and thought it had medicinal properties. There were lots of springs and wells in the area, reflected in local names like Clerkenwell and Sadler’s Wells.

An inn on the site in the 1740s was called the ‘Sir John Oldcastle’, in memory of the real Sir John Oldcastle, who died in 1417. He was a friend of Henry V and had a house on the site. Some say Oldcastle was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s character Falstaff! There is still a pub in the area called ‘Sir John Oldcastle’, although it’s further down Farringdon Road.

Cold Bath Prison

Sadly, over time the area of Coldbath Fields became a rubbish dump and the Fleet River like a sewer. Then in 1790, the site was cleared of rubbish to make way for a new prison. The prison was a huge, brick building completed in 1794. It had several names but was most commonly known as Cold Bath Prison.

According to observers at the time it was ‘gloomy and formidable-looking’. It had a terrible reputation due to the appalling conditions there for the prisoners. Locally it became known as the Bastille, or ‘The Steel’, and several times public sympathy for the inmates led to riots outside the prison. Eventually, there was an inquiry, the governor was dismissed and the prison management reformed. It was finally closed in 1885.

House of Correction, Coldbath Fields – 1830. Photographic reproduction of an engraving. Artist: Thomas H Shepherd. 1830 (Post 118/5711)

A new home for The Post Office

The Post Office bought the site in 1887 because it needed more space for its rapidly growing Parcel Section. It was also convenient for three major railway stations.

There are differing stories about how the site came to be called Mount Pleasant. However, there a first-hand account of a conversation between two senior Post Office officials soon after the Post Office had acquired the old prison:

I told him that the parcel post officers in the city were raising an objection to work in a building styled “Coldbath Fields”, so long associated with prison life. The Inspector-General said, “Well, what name would you give it?” and happening to glance up at the name-plate of the short street leading from Clerkenwell Road to Gray’s Inn Road and seeing upon it the words “Mount Pleasant”, I pointed to it and said “What could be better?…”. “Mount Pleasant we will name it then,” said the Inspector-General.

In 1887 the Post Office adapted part of the vacant prison for use as a temporary parcel office. The old prison was then gradually replaced with Post Office buildings. The first, for parcel post and postal stores, was completed in 1890. An extension was built in 1900 for letter post.

The last remaining sections of the prison were demolished in 1929 to build an extension of the Letter Office. The Mail Rail station beneath Mount Pleasant was the largest of the eight original stations and housed the main railway workshop.

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Life at Mount Pleasant

Our Archive reveals some of the concerns Mount Pleasant staff had. In 1905, the 93 female staff in the Returned Letter Office at Mount Pleasant made a request for ‘cloak room accommodation’ for women, separate from the men. The Postmaster General refused this. They also asked for a pay rise due to rising living costs in London and because ‘Although the scales of pay have increased in outside employment…the scale of pay of the returner has not only remained stationary but has practically been reduced owing to the abolition of [an] allowance’.

In 1906 over 375 male employees at Mount Pleasant were volunteers in the British Army. So they could practice easily, they asked for a rifle range to be erected on the roof of Mount Pleasant. Their request was approved. Even Boy Messengers were given ‘special facilities for using the range’.

By about 1960, 6,500 staff worked at Mount Pleasant, which covered an area of 9 acres. They dealt with 50,000 mailbags, 1,300 van-loads and 800 underground train-loads of post every day. In an average week 20-25 million letters and 1 million parcels passed along its conveyor belts and chutes. One in eight items of post in the country went through Mount Pleasant then.

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Mount Pleasant pioneered the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) sorting equipment in 1979. OCR used an electronic eye to read printed addresses. The machine converted the postcode into a series of phosphor dots which it printed on the envelope. This allowed the sorting machines to ‘read’ each address automatically.

Nowadays, Mount Pleasant is run by Royal Mail and is still sorting parcels and letters. You may go past it if you visit The Postal Museum and its Archive, where you can explore UK communications history in the museum, see the records used to write this blog in the Archive and ride on Mail Rail.

References:

Mount Pleasant Post Office, An Archaeological Investigation, by Tony Thomas, 1994 (7 THO)

‘The History of the Mount Pleasant Site and Post Office’, photocopy of article taken from ‘Streets of London’, by G H White, c. 1980 (POST 91/213)

St Martin’s le Grand, The Post Office Magazine, Volume 5, 1895, pp. 265-266, 428-432 (POST 92/1124)

https://www.buildinghistory.org/primary/fitzstephen.shtml

https://www.jdwetherspoon.com/pub-histories/the-sir-john-oldcastle-farringdon/

Archive Information Sheet, A History of Mount Pleasant, by TPM Archive Team, 2005.

London Postal Service: Mount Pleasant, plans for rifle range on roof,
c.1907 (POST 30/1470B)

Evidence submitted to the Hobhouse Committee by Miss Mabel Hope on behalf of female telegraphists in the Central Telegraph Office, counter clerks and telegraphists in the Metropolitan Districts, returners at Mount Pleasant, and telephonists at GPO South, 1906 (POST 60/233)

‘Mount Pleasant’, booklet about the running of Mount Pleasant, c.1960 (POST 91/51)

https://www.royalmail.com/lettersbarcoding