By the 1850s, the rapid growth of the metropolitan area meant that London became too large to operate efficiently as a single post town. A Post Office inquiry into the problem had been set up in 1837 and a House of Commons committee was initiated in 1843. In 1854 Charles Canning, the Postmaster General, set up a committee at the Post Office in St. Martin’s Le Grand to investigate how London could best be divided for the purposes of directing mail. In 1856, of the 470 million items of mail sent in the United Kingdom during the year, approximately one fifth (100 million) were for delivery in London and half of these (50 million items) also originated there.
The General Post Office thus at the control of the Postmaster General devised the London postal area area in 1856, project-managed by Sir Rowland Hill.
Hill produced an almost perfectly circular area of 12 miles (19 km) radius from the central post office at St. Martin’s Le Grand, near St Paul’s Cathedral in central London. As originally devised, it extended from Waltham Cross in the north to Carshalton in the south and from Romford in the east to Sunbury in the west — six counties at the time if including the City of London. Within the district it was divided into two central areas and eight compass points which operated much like separate post towns. Each was constituted “London” with a suffix (EC, WC, N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW) indicating the area it covered; each had a separate head office. The system was introduced during 1857 and completed on 1 January 1858.
The London postal district was never been aligned with the London boundary. When the initial system was designed, the London boundary was restricted to the square mile of the small, ancient City of London. The wider metropolitan postal area covered parts of Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire.
In 1889 a County of London was created from parts of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent which was smaller than the postal district. However the bulk of 40 fringe sub-districts lay outside its boundary including Leyton, Ealing, Totteridge and Wimbledon as four examples.
In 1965 the creation of the new Greater London boundary went beyond these postal districts except for part of the parish of Waltham Holy Cross. The General Post Office was unwilling to follow this change and expand the London postal area to match because of the cost.
Places in London’s outer boroughs such as Harrow, Barnet, Wembley, Enfield, Ilford, Romford, Bexleyheath, Bromley, Hounslow, Richmond, Croydon, Sutton, Kingston and Uxbridge are therefore covered by parts of twelve adjoining postcode areas (EN, IG, RM, DA, BR, TN, CR, SM, KT, TW, HA and UB) from postal districts of five different counties including Middlesex which was abolished upon the creation of Greater London.
The NE and S divisions of the original plan were abolished following a report by Anthony Trollope: in 1866 NE was merged into the E district, the large districts transferred included Walthamstow, Wanstead and Leytonstone. At the same time, the London postal district boundary was retracted in the east, removing places such as (Great) Ilford for good. In 1868 the S district was split between SE and SW.
In 1917, as a wartime measure to improve efficiency, the districts were further subdivided with a number applied to each sub-district. This was achieved by designating a sub-area served most conveniently by the head office in each district “1” and then allocating the rest alphabetically by the name of the location of each delivery office. If you see original street signs from before this period, they only have the letters and not the numbers.
The E postcode, like the rest of the London scheme, was numbered alphabetically outside of E1.
London E4 nowadays, 7.47 miles in width and 3.51 miles in length incorporates some 494 postcodes and was alphabetically assigned by its chief area – Chingford. Numerically it lies between Bow district (E3) and Clapton (E5). Despite its low number, it is the outermost of the E postcodes covering Chingford, Highams Park, Sewardstone and parts of Upper Edmonton and Woodford Green.
Being that the E district was designated in the 1850s and numbered in 1917 before the GLC was created in 1865, E4 has a unique quirk.
Due to the reservoirs upon the River Lea, London’s urban sprawl did not reach as far as the edge of E4. Only a few other London postal districts – such as NW7 (Mill Hill) and N20 (Totteridge) – still stretch (ever so slightly) into the surrounding countryside; other postcodes are completely urban.
Whereas the 1965 Greater London boundary was drawn beyond the edges of NW7 and N20, this was not the case for E4. The Greater London boundary was drawn across the postal zone so that both Sewardstone and Sewardstonebury – part of London E4 – do not lie in London at all but in today’s Essex – the part of the parish of Waltham Holy Cross mentioned above.
Sewardstone E4, remains an area of farms, residential properties and a string of horticultural nurseries. A part of Essex which is forever London.