Twice in seven years: how York lost its Post Office, again

Walk down Coney Street this month and you'll see the same banners that have gone up in dozens of towns across the country.

Store closing down. Everything must go.

They're taped to the windows of what was, until fairly recently, WHSmith (or that terrible and very temporary rebrand to WHS in what can only be described as a NHS knockoff brand) - a shop generations of people in York used for stationery, magazines, and since 2019, their stamps, parcels, passport applications, and let's face it... ASOS returns.

The shop has traded as TG Jones for barely a year. Now it's closing too, and taking York's main post Office branch down with it - for the second time in under a decade.

The timing could hardly be worse. The branch's last trading day is 14th October, weeks before we all remember Christmas and start rushing with parcels. Post Office bosses say they're seeking a new retail partner "with extreme and unavoidable urgency" but by their own admission, a replacement branch could take up to six months to open. That means no full-service Post Office in York city centre for Christmas, and likely well into next spring.

To understand how this happened, you have to go back further than this year - and further than TG Jones.

York's standalone Post Office once sat on Lendal, a short walk from where the current branch is closing. That branch shut in 2019, and the service was folded into WHSmith on Coney Street - part of a nationwide pattern in which the Post Office, under pressure to cut costs, moved hundreds of branches out of dedicated premises and into the back of existing shops. It was billed at the time as modernisation. For many customers, it simply meant queuing behind a stationery aisle.

That arrangement lasted seven years. Then one day, WHSmith decided to say goodbye to their crumbling High Street brand and to instead focus on a market where you really have no other option... train stations and airports.

Now, it's easy to think of the Coney Street unit as just another chain store, but the building itself is one of the more surprising ones on the street. The site at 39-41 Coney Street sits on land that's been occupied continuously since Roman times - archaeologists excavating beneath the shop found the remains of a first-century warehouse, along with a substantial haul of grain, brought upriver by boat and stored on what was then the waterfront.

Inside, the shop hides an even less expected secret. Walk into the centre of the store, look up, and you'll see the timber-framed facade of an 18th-century townhouse, conserved intact within the building around it - complete with a retained fireplace, overmantle, cornicing and sash windows on what is technically still the first floor of a much older house. Regulars who've spent decades walking past the pens and greeting cards downstairs may never have noticed it's there.

WHSmith itself traded on Coney Street for decades, long enough to become one of the fixtures of York's high street in its own right - which is partly why its rebranding to TG Jones last year, and now its closure, has landed as more than just the loss of a shop. When planning permission was sought to swap the signage from WHSmith to TG Jones, the application specifically noted the need to keep the works in keeping with the historic street and its facades. The building is also earmarked to survive the wider Coney Street Riverside development scheme in some form. The current plans would keep the historic frontage in place even as the rear of the building is eventually demolished, though that phase of the scheme isn't expected for several years yet.

The Post Office's move into the shop in 2019 was itself contested. When the standalone Lendal branch closed to make way for the relocation, local Labour MP Rachael Maskell criticised the decision as "deplorable" and raised concerns about what would happen to the Lendal building, a purpose-built post office with a historically significant interior, including a war memorial. Spoiler alert: it became an upmarket steak restaurant chain.

The year is 2025, and WHSmith has just sold its entire UK high street business - nearly 500 shops - to the investment firm Modella Capital. Modella have a growing history in not being great at turning around businesses, just look at Claires, another ghost of York's high street which entered administration again less than a year after being bought by them.

The rationale is straightforward from WHSmith's side. It's travel arm, the shops in airports, train stations and motorway services, had come to generate the overwhelming majority of its profit, while the high street stores had become a marginal part of the business.

When you find yourself at Manchester's Terminal 2, let's face it, we're all without very many alternatives than to pay £3 for a bottle of water.

WHSmith kept the travel outlets and their famous brand name. The high street shops went to Modella, and a worse fate was sealed, they needed a new name. Enter TG Jones.

At the time of the sale, unions raised concerns that were, in hindsight, prescient. The Communication Workers Union warned that so many Post Office branches sat inside WHSmith stores that a change of ownership risked creating "postal deserts" if the new owner didn't commit to keeping them open.

When it comes to unions, we hear their warnings but struggle to act until the deed is done.

Modella said it planned few changes and intended to retain the Post Office counters. It also emerged that WHSmith had built in the right to walkaway from its year-long support arrangement with Modella early, in the event the new business ran into financial trouble.

It did.

In July this year, TG Jones secured court approval for a major restructuring plan, the kind of legal process companies use to exit expensive leases and close underperforming stores without going fully into administration. It's expected to result in around 150 closures nationwide and put hundreds of jobs at risk. York's Coney Street branch, opened under the TG Jones name barely a year earlier, is one of them.

At the time of writing, the Monks Cross store which includes a Toys R Us but not Post Office, has survived the initial cull.

A Post Office spokesperson has acknowledged the "challenging trading conditions" facing TG Jones and other high street retailers, and confirmed that the restructuring plans involves seeking new terms with landlords across most of TG Jones' estate. For York, that has meant an outcome the Post Office itself has described, in a letter to the branch, as an "unplanned closure".

For now, the Post Office says the nearest alternatives are the smaller branches at Colliergate and Micklegate - neither of which are built to absorb the volume of custom that used to pass through the city centre's main branch, let alone the surge that comes every December.

Locals are rightfully unimpressed. Shoppers outside the TGJones on a cold Friday described the closure as a symptom of a wider decline on Coney Street, whilst pointing to the empty former TKMaxx unit which remain empty opposite the street.

One shopper called the sequence of events, from WHSmith to TGjones to closure, a "triumph of Tory privatisation" and a further abandonment of our high streets.

Others simply said they'd seen this coming since the WHSmith sign was ripped from the front of the store and painted over with TG Jones lettering.

There's also a quieter frustration at play - this is the second time in seven years that York has lost quite an important service through a decision made by someone else's balance sheet, not by any failure of demand from the people who use it.

There's also a bigger question hanging over Coney Street than where York's Post Office ends up. It's not about stationery and books - there's a Waterstones and a Ryman's a minute walk from the shop - it's about what fills a unit that size on a street that''s already changing shape around it.

Coney Street is at the start of a major redevelopment, and the TG Jones unit won't be closing in isolation. The Next (that I once worked at) recently shut and relocated to the old Topshop unit at Coppergate. The former BHS is now a flagship Sports Direct and Flannels. Lush even moved into a brand new store on the opposite side of the street that is safe from demolition. And with Boots eventually set to be demolished, the question of what replaces these anchor units is very much live.

Could TG Jones be an eventual landing spot for Boots, once its own building comes down? After all, there's not very many large units available in York. Or does it go the way so many other units already have - another vape shop, American candy store or fancy hat store, with a Post Office counter, if we're lucky, shoved in somewhere at the back?

The Post Office says filling the vacancy is a priority and that contracts for a new host will be awarded directly, without the usual lengthy tender process, in order to move quickly, Whether "quickly" means before Christmas, or even before Easter, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, anyone who wants a Post Office in York this Christmas has two choices. Queue at Colliergate or queue at Micklegate... I hear Leeds even has a nice big Post Office (inside a TGJones).

For a city that prides itself on retaining a somewhat strong high street, it's a small but telling sign of how much control over that high street now sits with landlords, investment firms and restructuring lawyers in London - rather than with york itself.