Postal Depot Building

Postal Depot Building

A post office sorting office built in 1942 by the Ministry of Works and Planning to serve United States troops stationed in Europe and Africa. The building is constructed in red stretcher bond brick with a felt and corrugated iron roof.

The complex comprises a single-storey office wing connected via a corridor with service rooms to a large sorting hall. The entrance front of the office block is symmetrical, featuring seven bays with central double doors and two-light metal framed casements to either side, with those at the far right and left paired. Windows throughout have concrete lintels and tiled sills. Behind the office block, three gables of the sorting hall roof are visible, the left one projecting further to cover the service rooms and connecting corridor. The reveals of the office block feature paired casements.

The platform front includes a fuel store at the right with three small casements, and to its left is the Registered Mail room with four bays of doubled two-light casements. The platform itself, originally designed for railway trucks but later adapted for road lorries, extends 35 bays in length, each marked by an I-beam and has a brick plinth. The left gable end is abutted by later 20th-century additions with service entries and doors. The rear of the building has six emergency exits with paired two-light casements to each bay.

Internally, the office block has had two walls separating smaller rooms and the walling to the registered mail vault removed. The sorting hall roof comprises 40 bays of shallow-pitch metal trusses. Walls to the former Directory section and those separating the Parcels from the former Sorting sections remain in place. The former men's lavatory block, which once featured an observation gallery to prevent pilfering and projected from the back, has been converted to a changing room with a new projecting lavatory block added. The platform has been partially enclosed at its rear to create additional space within the sorting hall. The original Parcels Sorting section now serves as the Post Office sorting office for Sutton Coldfield with a suspended ceiling. The remainder of the building was used for sorting international post.

During the Second World War, following American entry into the conflict, experienced mail handlers were sent to Britain among the first troops. In June 1942, thirty-two enlisted men and three officers arrived in Sutton Coldfield from Liverpool, joined later by a further 19 men. Initially based in an abandoned railway shed near Sutton Park Railway Station, they moved to this new building when it opened in October 1942. The sorting office was first called "Birmingham Z" and then "First Base Post Office."

The original building contained four main sections: Parcels Sorting, Letter Sorting, Registered Mail, and the Directory Section. The latter housed a card index listing every man in the United States Forces stationed overseas and recording their movements and location to facilitate mail forwarding. A railway platform ran along one side of the hall, accommodating 17 rail cars with sidings for another 54 cars.

Staff numbers grew substantially throughout the war. By Christmas and in the run-up to D-Day, approximately 800 enlisted men and around 300 local women worked in 12-hour shifts day and night. Approximately 50 German Prisoners of War were initially employed, a number that grew to almost 500 by the war's end. Women were primarily assigned to the Directory section. Initially, servicemen were housed in the unfinished Holland Road School nearby, but later billeted with local families. A canteen at the sorting office provided lunch, with mess halls around Sutton Coldfield serving breakfast and supper.

Following the D-Day landings, staff numbers at Sutton Coldfield decreased as a sub-station was established in Paris, though all mail continued to be directed through First Base Post Office before forwarding to France. Towards the war's end, Sutton Coldfield served as the collection and storage depot for mail addressed to those killed or missing in action, storing correspondence until families had been notified. After 1945 the building became the sorting office for British Forces Posted Overseas.

A well-planned functional wartime building in good preservation, the structure is listed for its historic interest as a unique survival from the wartime presence of United States troops in the European theatre of operations. Architecturally utilitarian, it forms a group with the former railway shed, also part of the Post Office Sorting Office on Upper Clifton Road, Sutton Coldfield.