Mount Pleasant Mail Centre

It is located on a twelve-acre site in the Mount Pleasant area of Clerkenwell, at the junction between Farringdon Road and Rosebery Avenue and opposite Exmouth Market.

[4] In the mid-1880s the parcel sorting office was located in the cramped basement of GPO East in St. Martin's Le Grand; Baines was actively seeking to remove it, preferably to a spacious site close to some of the main London railway termini.

In 1887 the Treasury sanctioned the use of the former treadmill house as a temporary parcel sorting office, and the GPO moved in in time to meet the Christmas rush.

The Post Office chose to retain the entire site, and provided the funds, which were used to purchase Spa Green Gardens in Clerkenwell.

Not long afterwards, however, they too were swept away (the Stores Department having moved out in 1915) for the building of a new Letter Sorting Office, designed by A. R. Myers, which was built (again in stages) across the southern half of the site, beginning in 1920.

The Letter Sorting Office, said at the time to be the largest in Europe and the British Empire, was opened in November that year by the Duke and Duchess of York.

[4] A public post office was built on the corner of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road as part of the same complex of buildings, which opened in 1937.

An intended rebuild never took place, and eventually (in 1984) most of the parcel sorting was moved to Brent Cross and the remains of Tanner's building were demolished.

Subsequently the northern half of the site has functioned mainly as a van park (the last remaining parcel work was removed from Mount Pleasant to Camden Town in 1996).

In 2012 Royal Mail proposed selling off the northern half of the site, together with land to the west (on the other side of Phoenix Place) for residential and commercial redevelopment.