At a public meeting in Churchill Gardens Estate last week, we heard first hand how the Lupus Street Crown Post Office (PO) would effect the local community if closed.

The residents of Pimlico would face a 20 minutes’ walk to the nearest alternative post offices in Vauxhall Bridge Road and Ebury Street with no direct bus links. This when the queues at Vauxhall Bridge Road post office are already regularly stretched outside on the pavement. Furthermore the Post Office in Vauxhall Bridge Road does not have access for disabled customers with wheelchairs and the Post Office representatives could not say how much it would cost to do the works.

We also heard from local small businesses as Lupus Street traders use the Post Office banking facilities and if the post office were to close, local businesses would lose this important business facility, as well as having to carry cash some distance to banks elsewhere. Also experience elsewhere shows that when post offices close down surrounding local businesses suffer badly, leading to more empty shops.  It was also established that the use of Lupus Street post office for Council-related transactions is the highest in Westminster and if the post office is closed residents will have nowhere where they can pay their rent and rates or renew their parking permit now that the Council has closed all its One Stop shops.

We had some Post Office representatives as well at the meeting saying that Lupus Street Post Office loses £100,000 a year and  that for every £1 of income it costs the post office £1.84 (although statistics provided by the CWU suggest that the figure is £1.33). Illustrating well the folly in separating the Royal Mail from the Post Office counter service. Nowhere else in the world has this been done where its normal practise for the counters to be subsidied by the delivery operations.  

As my colleague Cllr Paul Dimoldenberg has said, they will be no “passport to Pimlico” for residents if Lupus Street Post office closes as the neighbourhood would lose one of the essential services from the PO counters, the check & send Identity & Passport Service! 

So watch this space, as local residents show us the “Passport to Pimlico” spirit as its acknowledged the PO is the hub of the community.