A 1st Class Town With 2nd Class Service

Every student at St Andrews knows the pilgrimage. You shuffle past the birthday cards at TGJones on South Street with a parcel under one arm and join the queue. The wait is deceptively long as you stand behind a retired professor posting a manuscript, a first-year who has just lost their passport, and an American golfer just finding out what it costs to ship a putter to Ohio. It is the most democratic place in town. Come January, it’ll be gone. 

Last year, Modella Capital, a private equity firm, acquired and renamed WH Smith’s high-street shops as TGJones for £76 million. The newly named company is closing its South Street store on 9 January, one of 150 shops cut under a restructuring the High Court approved in July. The post office counter inside closes with it, like a hermit crab whose shell has been repossessed. This raises a question. Why does a national retail chain get to decide whether St Andrews has a post office?

This is not a sudden tragedy but a continuing deterioration. In 2008, St Andrews’ standalone main post office was relocated inside WH Smith. Then, the counter at the Tom Morris Drive Spar closed. This summer, when the Dairsie branch shut, the Post Office sent villagers across north-east Fife to, you guessed it, South Street. Each closure was presented as a tidy solution. St Andrews consequently now has the tidiest postal service in Scotland: a nearly non-existent one. 

Don’t fret, help is at hand (sort of). What remains is a drop-and-collect counter at Sugar Rush Newsagents. Grand, if your parcel is prepaid. Less so if you need a passport checked like that naïve first-year. 

The Post Office’s official notice lists alternatives: a branch in Cupar (almost eight miles away) or Tayport (eleven). Neither offers the full range of travel money or passport services, the notice advised. International students, you will be thrilled that your visa paperwork now requires a day trip. 

The Post Office states that finding a permanent replacement could take around six months. Meanwhile, rescue has come from Space. No, not the final frontier, but the property group, offering the Post Office a replacement counter space out of town. Problem sorted, if the problem was a brisk-walk shortage. Ask a student without a car if they’re keen to carry a parcel through a February haar. Ask a pensioner who has walked to South Street for twenty years. A post office no one can reach is like a letter without a stamp: it does exist, but it goes nowhere. 

The fault then lies in the model. The Post Office has spent two decades renting counters inside other shops, which works nicely until the shop has a bad financial quarter. Then public infrastructure becomes a footnote in someone else’s restructuring plan. 

But who even posts things anymore?

Plenty of us, thank you. St Andrews brings students from across the globe, with visa documents, travel money, and parcels that can’t travel by email. Older residents pay bills at the counter. The post office is not nostalgia; it is more like plumbing or electricity. Nobody thinks about it until it stops. 

Then there’s the card. When birthday wishes arrive as a notification and vanish in a swipe, a handwritten card becomes so much more. You could try to stick an email on the fridge, but then you’ve just lost the appeal.

St Andrews deserves a stamp of approval. It sells itself to the world as the home of both golf and Scotland’s oldest university. Its post office shouldn’t be dictated by a shop’s crisps profits. We need a permanent post office in the town centre, one treated as infrastructure rather than a concession stand.

So make some noise. The Post Office consultation runs until 12 January: email comments@postoffice.co.uk. Write to your MP and MSP, and if you really want to do it properly, put it on paper. Just post it before 9 January. 1st class, naturally. 

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons