Fit for purpose
Post Offices. It is easy to conclude that they’re not what they were. A few decades ago in my local big town, the main post office was housed in a grandiose and spacious former hotel building in the town’s most elegant street. From there it moved to a cramped but serviceable High Street location with shelves for stationery and similar goods at the front, and Post Office counters at the back. From there it has migrated to part of the upper floor in the town’s branch of W H Smith. It’s all rather sad, and reflects the Post Office’s loss of its former grip on our lives.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, on the other hand, the Post Office was very much at the centre of things, and if an important new Post Office was built, it was likely to be a building of some consequence, probably solid-looking and traditional in appearance, like this example in Shaftesbury. With its stone walls, big gables, mullioned windows, and Tudor-style doorway, it wouldn’t look out of place in a Cotswold town, and it fits in well here too, turning the street corner with some style. It all adds up to the kind of Tudor revival style that, along with neo-Georgian, was popular for Post Offices in the interwar years. This one was built, so a plaque on the wall tells us, in 1946, so it’s very much harking back to the time before World War II. This was still a time when a lot of thought went into the design and functioning of Post Offices. Julian Stray, in his useful Shire book, Post Offices, quotes Lord Gerald Wellesley writing in the Architectural Review, around this period, telling his readers what a Post Office should be like:
A Post Office must be in a prominent position. It should look dignified and permanent, and should, as far as possible, harmonize with its surroundings…the public office, which should, of course, be of a size adequate to the number frequenting it, should, in the larger instances, have doors giving on to the streets at both ends…must be very well lit, and this may mean windows on the ground floor which ideally speaking, are disproportionately large compared with those in the upstairs offices. A clock and prominently displayed letter-box are also features of a Post Office front.
The Shaftesbury office ticks nearly all of Wellesley’s boxes. It is on the site of the Angel Inn, which was the home of the town’s first postmaster in the 1660s. Early post offices were often in inns, which could easily accommodate horses and carts delivering mail. Today this Post Office today is kitted out with a red oval sign and one of those brown metal built-in post boxes, helpfully labelled “POSTING BOX” in elegant capital letters. High on the wall, more capitals tell us that this was both a Post Office and Savings Bank. Ah, of course. Banks. It is easy to conclude that they’re not what they were…
6 comments:
I find it very sad that the decline in public buildings reflects, alas, the decline in the concept of public service, willed by our so-called leaders (since the 1980s?) who tend to worship profit for their friends and contributors (“privatization of profits, socialization of losses”, as the phrase goes, at least in French) to the detriment of the rest of us. Think of public health, education, public transportation, post offices and so on…
Ever since my first visit to the UK, in the mid-sixties, I have wondered at the omnipresence, in the UK, of buildings of various dates designed in a “gothic” (or renaissance) style. I think that, in France, no one designed or built in the “gothic” style (whatever that means, but let us keep it simple) between (very roughly) 1550/1600 and 1830. My impression is that gothic building in the UK went on from the late middle ages on to the XXth century without a break.
Perhaps as a result, and also because I am unfamiliar with English gothic styles, I find it very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between real (mediaeval) and pastiche (XIXth or XXth C) architecture in so many English buildings (not Saint Pancras!). I could have accepted this lovely Shaftesbury Post Office as genuine if you had not told us it dates from only 1946.
François-Marc Chaballier
I think the demise of Post Offices as we knew them is a indicative of how society as a whole has changed since the war. A friend of mine ran a Post Office in Worthing for many years but gave it up and moved to California because he felt the Government were slowly undermining the position of sub-postmasters.
(He now works as a film extra in Hollywood and contacted me recently because they were looking for two fat middle-aged gay Jewish men. I only resemble some of that description!)
Hot from the desk of Sir Tom Eagerly:
François-Marc and Bazza: You both have a point about the decline of Post Offices and what they once stood for. The Post Office, having lost various services in various reorganizations has now lost more business as a result of technology (all this emailing rather than mailing). Add to this a decline in what one might call the service ethic, and you have a sorry story. However, in small towns like the one I live in (not the local big town that I refer to in the blog post), the Post Office is still a life-line, much used by the locals, and the staff give a good service. They're still part of a community, and it shows.
I'm just grateful that my local village post office still has the traditional wire mesh grille dividing the stamps and postal orders (what's one of those?- Ed.) off from the stack of Telegraphs and steak 'n' kidney pies.
Peter: Glad to read that you still live in a world of wire mesh grilles, postal orders and those Morris Minor GPO vans.
The article that Wellesley wrote about post offices was in the Architects' Journal, 6 Jan. 1926.
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