Written by Chris Corbett, Community Engagement Officer, Teesside Archives
Image reference; CC/PL/EX/3
After what feels like a lifetime of packing and sorting, the Teesside Archives team finally say goodbye to Exchange House this week, our home for nearly 40 years. I’ve only had a relatively short relationship with the building having started my job in January 2020 and our new home at the historic treasure trove of the Dorman Museum offers so many opportunities to work in partnership and to grow and develop the service. However, I can’t help but feel a degree of sadness and thought that this week’s blog was the perfect opportunity to explore the history of the building in as much detail as I could find, though if anybody has more information, please do get in touch!
From reading William Lillie’s History of Middlesbrough, it would appear that the early days of sending and receiving letters in the fledgling town were a little haphazard and surprisingly mobile, constantly moving between properties. A horse drawn coach would make three trips a day to and from Stockton, along the railway track, transporting not just people but also letters for the town. Communication was vital to the growth of the town, and still is key to business success though back then, letters were displayed in the window of the Tees Coal Office for people to collect rather than being delivered! I’ve had mail go amiss even now because of the way in which I’ve written the address and apparently, if letters didn’t display ‘Middlesbrough near Stockton-On-Tees’ they rarely made it to the town. The book mentions a number of people who ran the early postal system including John Atkinson who owned a newsagent and stationer business in Dacre Street in 1832 though telegrams were sent from the railway station, certainly in the early days of the town. In the following years, Mrs Patricia Thompson ran the post office from a room behind her husband’s chemist shop in North Street; customers had to knock on a window for attention! However, as Middlesbrough grew, it became obvious that a larger scale and more permanent solution was required and eventually, our post office building was opened on 17th September 1879 as part of the suite of architecturally grand and impressive buildings that marked out the commercial heart of the rapidly growing town around Exchange Square. The surviving buildings from this era form the focus of the current High Street Heritage Action Zone project. The style of the Post Office is typical of its function with lots of classically inspired stone carving and impressively tall doorways, designed by architect James Williams.
Chris Gitsham, from Middlesbrough Reference Library, discovered a fantastically detailed newspaper article from the Daily Gazette , marking the opening of the Post Office and Telegraph Office, which gives wonderful descriptions of the building’s layout floor by floor. We don’t hold the original plans for the post office, the earliest plans we have of the building date from the 1980’s when it was being converted to the archive facility and a multi-purpose training centre, so these descriptions really help us to visualize the feel of the place. The town was experiencing a severe economic depression at the time; the same page of the newspaper carries a story about a public meeting called to look at ways of alleviating the extreme poverty. The opening of our building was a very public statement of confidence in the town’s future by the Post Office officials, having cost around £7,000 (nearly £1 million in today’s money!) to construct and possibly helped to boost people’s belief in better days to come, though would have been of little comfort to those who were suffering. Reading the article reveals some interesting aspects; I’ve always wondered why we have the two huge entrance doors and from the article, I think that the door used by the Teesside Archive service was for the public while the door now used by Base Camp was for postal and telegraph officials. The article includes lots of detail about the fitting out of the rooms, with all retiring rooms (I’m guessing that these were staff rest rooms) boasting cooking facilities, storage space and coat hooks. The second floor telegraph rooms were equipped with Morse machines linked to London, Newcastle and Stockton and powered by batteries kept in the basement. The description of the pneumatic pump system for moving the telegraph messages between floors reminded me of the system used by the Newcastle branch of C&A (a long gone retail blast from the past) to move cash to and from the payment points, a childhood memory from annual clothes shopping trips! Enameled glass screens, polished mahogany folding doors, the details speak of a well-furnished building in which the grandness of the interior matched the imposing exterior.
And it is this exterior that has provided a suitably impressive background to many important events due to its position at the north end of Marton Road, leading to Exchange Square, including the procession that was making its slow way towards Albert Park to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
Our building also appears behind the large group of navies who were resurfacing the road in 1902, which leads to another puzzle. The appearances of the section to the left of the main Grade 2 listed Post Office stone façade, if you stand looking at it with your back to the A66, have changed over the years. In the older images shown, it looks completely different to our building today and apparently was redeveloped and extended a number of times during its life (in 1913 and 1926 according to the internet) probably in response to the changing technology, eventually becoming a telephone exchange room. It was an unexpected treat to stumble upon a picture of what the telephone exchange room looked like from the 1940’s, as part of the Marshall Family collection.
Elsie Marshall (nee Black) standing in the telephone exchange room along with her colleagues
During its commercial role, the Post Office has always played a key role in the town’s life as a communications hub and as such, was a target for German bombers in World War 2. We have the air raid reports from 1940 showing that the telephone exchange room was evacuated in the early hours of 27th June after a bomb fell in School Croft, the street immediately behind the building. Had that bomb found its target, people would have lost their lives and the communication network across the town would have been destroyed, severely hampering the rescue and clear up operations that followed.
Air raid report 27th June 1940
I’m unclear as to when the building was finally vacated by the postal service and how long it lay empty before Cleveland County Council renovated and restored it to provide a permanent home for the archive service and records in the 1980’s. The other side of the building complex was developed as a multi-purpose training suite and has in more recent times played host to arts and cultural businesses including The House of Blah Blah and today’s current tenants, Base Camp. The interior photos from before the renovation show a building in a sorry state and in serious need of TLC. Having been spared from the swathe of demolition that marked the route of the A66, if the building hadn’t been chosen to be repurposed in this way, it may not have survived to greet the 21st century.
Ground floor plan of the post office building prior to conversion in early 1980’s
So, to conclude, I raise three cheers to the rooms that I’ve not visited in the 2 years I’ve been with the service, to the Dorman Long stamped steel beams in the basement and the top floor room which once housed the British Steel collection and possibly the Post Office manager with its excess of fireplaces and ornate ceiling rose. To the slightly temperamental lift and the lovely iron security screens at the base of the staircase, to the heavy doors of the safes in the search room and the views north to the river, east to Eston Hills, west along Zetland Road and south across the town. To the sweep of the wooden stair banisters, the beautiful wood parquet floors and the ventilation turrets on the roof that remind me of mini Victorian school bell towers. To the draughts and the leaks and the quirks which have tested the team’s patience on innumerable occasions and led to ever more ingenious ways of keeping the collections safe. To the people who have worked there and the people to come. To a survivor of the Northern Route that carved its way through the heartland of Victorian Middlesbrough and who’s never ending stream of traffic kept me company at my desk in the second floor education room, only interrupted by the first lockdown travel ban. To the new lighting scheme which throws a rainbow on to the stone and brickwork and even to the dark basement, which I always found unsettling, with its door peepholes and flickering lights. As the curtain falls on this chapter of the archives and a new venue beckons, I raise my glass to the building that housed the history of the Tees Valley, its collections and team for nearly 40 years and wish it all the best in its new guise, whatever that may be.
If anybody has information about the building, including stories or images from people who once worked there, please contact me at christine_corbett@middlesbrough.gov.uk, I’d love to hear from you!
Teesside Archives 
Great info, thank you
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Thank you, glad you liked it!
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Great article Chris, very interesting.
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Thank you!
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