From post office to pub
Andrew Walker from The Survey of Lincoln, explores the history of ‘The Mailbox’ pub on Guildhall Street, a Grade II listed building.
By the early twentieth century, Lincoln’s main post office was described in the Lincolnshire Echo on 17 March 1906 as being of ‘an utterly out of date character’ and there was an ‘urgent need for new premises’.
On Sunday 18 March 1906, the city’s new head post office at 19-20 Guildhall Street was opened, directly opposite the old building, which became the local headquarters of the Inland Revenue and probate office.
Built over three years by the Lincoln Equitable Industrial Co-operative Society, the new building was designed by an architect employed by His Majesty’s Office of Works, W. T. Oldrieve.
At the time, he was responsible for designing provincial post offices across England and Wales. His preferred architectural approach has been described as ‘Edwardian classic’ and was not informed by local building styles. In 1904 he became Principal Architect for Scotland and went on to design many prominent post offices north of the border.
During the Edwardian period, there was a sense that the state had a responsibility to construct public buildings in a way that contributed to the dignity and beauty of the urban space in which they were situated.
Lincoln’s new head post office was certainly striking, with its terracotta ashlar façade, its large windows, providing much light, and its spaciousness. The ability to post letters inside the building as well as outside was regarded as a considerable improvement on the old premises.
The ground floor also provided a ‘silence cabinet’ for telephone calls, a telegraph delivery room, where telegrams were delivered from the instruction room via a pneumatic tube, and space for the telegram boys and their bicycles. The top floor became the site of a telephone exchange, largely operated by female employees.
This remained in place until a much-delayed automatic exchange opened in April 1959, on Broadgate, between St Rumbold Street and Waterside North.
It was perhaps as well that the city’s new larger head post office was opened since customer numbers grew rapidly. From January 1909, the British post office became the payment agency for the new old age pensions, paid to those aged 70 years and over.
The Lincolnshire Echo reported the first payments at the General Post Office on 1 January where ‘knots of prospective pensioners’, ‘venerable figures’, were seen ‘tottering’ to collect their weekly pensions of up to 5 shillings.
Further demands on the post office were made with the coming of broadcasting: Lincoln’s post offices sold 20,000 wireless licences each year by 1934. By November 1937, long queues were reported at the General Post Office postal order counter on Friday evenings owing to the growing popularity of football pools. In 1956, partly in order to deal with the football pools customers, a major internal refurbishment took place.
In 1997, the post office moved to new premises, off Cornhill. This was deemed to be more central, accessible, and spacious than the Guildhall Street site, which became a pub, initially ‘The Varsity’ and then, in 2014, renamed ‘The Mailbox’.
In February 2021, the post office moved again, this time to a much more modest home, in the Stonebow Centre on Silver Street. Sadly, the memorial to 29 city post office employees who died in the two world wars, which had been displayed inside both the two earlier buildings, does not seem to have made the journey to the new premises.
