Post Office: Cogan

This building is a mystery. It stands on the corner of Windsor Road and Pill Street in Cogan, near Penarth, south Wales and, though it is now private accommodation, at first glance, you might well assume that the building once housed the local post office.

The corners of the rectangular addition to the building, on the side facing Windsor Road, are each adorned with impressively decorated stone half-pillars, and, in a peculiar position, down at pavement level, there's a semi-circular-shaped stone with the carved inscription 'Post Office 1881'.

However, when I checked old maps of the location on the National Library of Scotland website, in particular the 'Glamorgan Sheet XLVII', where the area was surveyed between 1878 and 1879, and the map was published in 1885, the post office in Cogan was located on Pill Street, near the corner with Hewell Street, and there were no buildings at all along Windsor Road. And, according to further information found online, the post office in Cogan remained on Pill Street until it was closed in April 2008.

By coincidence – or perhaps not? – a new post office to serve Penarth was opened on Windsor Road in July 1881, the same year as that shown on the Cogan stone inscription. The Western Mail, of 14 July 1881, reported as follows:

PENARTH. OPENING OF A NEW POST-OFFICE. – The post-office at Penarth has been removed to Windsor-road, where Mr. E. W. Jones commenced his duties as postmaster on Tuesday. The premises have been fitted in a much more convenient manner than the old office, and the public generally fully appreciate the increased postal facilities given them.

I wondered if perhaps the stonework on the Cogan building had come from the 1881 Penarth post office building (that post office was also closed and relocated in 2008). However, I found a photograph of the former Penarth post office on the Peoples Collection Wales website, and that building does not have the same stonework.

So, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, the building is a mystery. If I manage to solve this mystery at some future date, I will update this post.