Mount Pleasant
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Originally the site of Coldbath Fields Prison, then a Royal Mail centre, now being developed for housing.
Clerkenwell 101
75 The name Mount Pleasant, the site situated on Rosebery Avenue, is purely ironic. Between the 16th to 19th centuries, the site was occupied by a laystall – a vast eight and a half acre site devoted to the dumping of human waste. Most homes would have had, or had access to, some form of cesspit into which human excrement was put. Slowly drying out, these cesspits would be emptied usually yearly by the (rather marvellously named) Gong Farmers – people who worked at night shovelling the dried shit from cesspits into barrels for disposal of elsewhere. Their job was literally shovelling shit. The site was later the venue for Coldbath Fields Prison.
76 Mount Pleasant Sorting Office was regarded as the largest Post Office sorting office in the world in the early 20th century. It was officially established in 1889 on the site of Coldbath Fields Prison
77 Crossrail 1927-style. Or should it be Crossmail? An underground rail service used to carry letters and parcels from Mount Pleasant mail centre to district offices to its west and east. Opened in 1927, the line extended 6.5 miles from Paddington to Whitechapel, originally with six intermediate stops, and ran for 22 hours a day. It closed in 1963 but re-opened as a visitor ride in 2017.