Post Office And Attached Outbuildings

The Post Office and attached outbuildings, built around 1835, were extended shortly afterwards and again later in the 19th century. The Post Office was reroofed around 1980. The building was originally constructed for the Whitby and Pickering Railway Company.

The original part is built of hammered sandstone, while the extension uses bordered tooled sandstone with a later red brick lean-to in English garden wall bond. Pantile roofs cover the structure, and stone and rebuilt brick stacks are present. The building is in an L-shape.

The railway front is two-storeys and an attic, with a three-window gable, and a two-storey and basement extension to the right with three windows. The gable end has a plank double door beneath a painted cambered timber lintel where a six-pane sash window has been inserted, set in a painted stone sill. Two mullioned windows illuminate the first floor, flanked by a later inserted three-light casement. A lunette attic window sits within an architrave, itself below a semicircular hoodmould. Lintels to the inserted windows are bordered and tooled. Overhanging eaves have bracket supports and plain bargeboards, with a stack at the base of the pitched roof. The extension features a 20th-century replacement door in a raised elliptical-arched surround, flanked by unequal nine-pane sashes. Twelve-pane sashes are located on the first floor, and six-pane sashes are found on the second floor; the central windows on both floors are blind. All windows are fitted with painted stone sills and tooled lintels. A raised first floor band is also present. A stack is located left-of-centre.

The right return shows a two-storey, one-window gable end with a one-storey lean-to extension to the right. The extension contains two-panel doors with overlights. A tall, eighteen-pane shop window is set beneath a tooled lintel on the ground floor; a large-pane casement window is located in the gable end, beneath an ogee-shaped lintel with blind Gothick tracery in the tympanum.

The original structure was likely built as warehousing and was jointly used by the railway company and the licensee of the Tunnel Inn (now the Station Tavern). A stable adjoining the warehouse on the east side was destroyed by a bomb during the Second World War. By 1856 the Post Office existed, alongside a grocer's shop. The ground floor of the warehouse continued to be used for the grocer’s shop, while the second floor became a reading-room and library, and the third floor housed a shoemaker's shop.