Mount Pleasant Mail Centre

The Mount Pleasant Mail Centre occupies a site with a transformation far more dramatic than its industrial purpose suggests. Long before it became the heart of London's postal operations, this land was known as Coldbath Fields. In the eighteenth century, the area gained its ironic name, Mount Pleasant, after local residents began using the rising ground near the River Fleet as a dumping site for cinders, ash, and city waste. By the end of that century, the city cleared the refuse to construct the Coldbath Fields Prison, a notorious house of correction that operated on this spot until eighteen eighty-five. Today, the mail centre stands directly over that history, having replaced the former prison cells with one of the most sophisticated mail-sorting facilities in the world.