The Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office (often shortened as Mount Pleasant) is the largest sorting office

London postal district

The London postal district is the area in England, currently of , to which mail addressed to the LONDON post town is delivered. The area was initially devised in 1856 and throughout its history has been subject to periodic reorganisation, contraction and division into increasingly smaller postal...

 operated by Royal Mail

Royal Mail

Royal Mail is the government-owned postal service in the United Kingdom. Royal Mail Holdings plc owns Royal Mail Group Limited, which in turn operates the brands Royal Mail and Parcelforce Worldwide...

 in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

It is located in the Mount Pleasant area in Clerkenwell

Clerkenwell

Clerkenwell is an area of central London in the London Borough of Islington. From 1900 to 1965 it was part of the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury. The well after which it was named was rediscovered in 1924. The watchmaking and watch repairing trades were once of great importance...

 (EC1

London EC1

The EC postcode area, also known as the London EC postcode area, is a group of postcode districts in central London, England. It includes almost all of the City of London and parts of the London Boroughs of Islington, Camden, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The area covered is of very high density...

), at the junction between Farringdon Road

Farringdon Road

Farringdon Road is a road in Clerkenwell, Central London. Its construction, which took almost 20 years between the 1840s and the 1860s, is considered one of the greatest urban engineering achievements of the nineteenth century...

 and Rosebery Avenue and opposite Exmouth Market

Exmouth Market

Exmouth Market is a semi pedestrianised street in Clerkenwell in the London Borough of Islington.-History:Exmouth Market draws its name from the Exmouth Arms Pub that is centrally situated in the street...

.

It was officially opened on 30 August 1889 when the Post Office Sites Act was passed by Parliament. It was built on the location of the former Coldbath Fields Prison

Coldbath Fields Prison

Coldbath Fields Prison was a prison in the Mount Pleasant area of Clerkenwell, London. Founded during the reign of James I , the prison was completely rebuilt in 1794 and extended in 1850. It was used to house prisoners on short sentences of up to two years...

, that ceased to function in 1885. The original prison gate was incorporated into the post office and not demolished until 1901. The remaining sections of the prison were demolished in 1929, when the new wing was built as an extension to the Letter Office. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mount Pleasant was being referred to as "probably the largest sorting office in the world". At one point all mail sent to or from London came through Mount Pleasant.

From 1927 to 2003 Mount Pleasant was connected to other major Royal Mail offices and railways stations in London via the London Post Office Railway

London Post Office Railway

The Post Office Railway, also known as Mail Rail, was a narrow-gauge driverless private underground railway in London built by the Post Office with assistance from the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to move mail between sorting offices...

. In the 1970s, it pioneered the use of Optical Character Recognition

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...

 for sorting purposes with the installation of a machine in 1979.

Mount Pleasant hosts the British Postal Museum & Archive, located in Freeling House on the back of the sorting office.

External links

• Mount Pleasant, an exhibition curated by the British Postal Museum & Archive