Blythe House

Blythe House is a listed building located at 23 Blythe Road, West Kensington, London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, UK. Originally built as the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, it is now used as a store and archive by the Victoria and Albert, Science and British Museums. In the 2015 Autumn Statement the Government announced it would fund new storage for the museums and then sell off Blythe House.

Blythe House was built between 1899 and 1903 as the Headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, which had outgrown its previous offices at Queen Victoria Street. By 1902 the Bank had 12,000 branches and more than 9 million accounts, with some 4,000 headquarters staff.

The complex included a post office, "intended mainly to deal with the extensive official correspondence involved in the work of the Savings Bank." The post office handled a ton of post (about 100,000 letters) every working day. The post office building still houses the West Kensington delivery office.

The main hall on the ground floor gave access to the offices of the Controller and his staff, and also the Public Enquiry Office. The first floor housed the correspondence branches, while the ledger branches were on the floors above. The top floor was mostly taken up with dining rooms and a kitchen.

Approximately 1,000 of the staff were female; to avoid the risk of improper mixing of the sexes, females were segregated in the south block of the building, which had its own entrance.

The work of the Bank increased greatly during the First World War, and by 1919 additional staff were spread over six outstations (including at the new Science Museum). An extension to the East (as envisaged in the original plans) was built starting in 1921, which could accommodate an extra 1000 staff, at an estimated cost of £150,000.

By the 1930s continuing increases in the Bank's business, and the proposed move of the Savings Certificate department to Blythe House, necessitated further expansion and Treasury authority for a western extension was given in 1938. However, presumably because of the looming threat of war, the scheme was omitted from the Ministry of Works building programme, and planning postponed indefinitely. The western extension was never built.

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