LONDON’S MAIL SERVICE

Shannon News, 24 September 1926, Page 2

LONDON’S MAIL SERVICE

18,000,000 LLTTI .ltS A WEEK. a great Moving feat. Never in tlie history of mail carrying has so big a feat been contemplated as that which was in, progress recently in London. Within 24 hours the new letter soi'ting building'' at Mount Pleasant was inaugurated without any interuption in the post office delivei'y services. It involved the transference of most of the sorting tables in the old sorting building further up the Farringdon Road and the setting' into motion of thousands of yards of “conductors” or bands which eventually mean that London's mail delivery, already the most efficient in the world, will be speeded up to twice its present rate or thereabouts.

The new building resembles a big Government office in India, for it appears to have a flat roof with overhanging. eaves. Its walls are sheer and the number of lights would compare with the latest building erected in the United States, where the value of light in industry was first . appreciated. The result of so much glass both in roof and walls is that inside the building there is not only an Intense brightness every, but also a complete absence of shadow* At a given signal tables of 60ft. in length wore lifted by gangs and dragged by means of ropes and pulleys attached to pillars across a raised ramp to tl*air places on the wood block floor or the giant new office. Here they were fixed down an<L the stamping machines, each capable of stamping 800 letters an hour, attached to them. The new building .is only part of a big scheme, and it has cost something like £700,000. Eventually it will expand down Rosebry Avenue and then there will three giant buildings. The post office handles something like 15,000,000 letters a we\k in the ordinary way and just under one million parcels. Parcels will be handled exclusively in the old building, with letters only in the new.