Over five hundred miles of shelves, running from floor to ceiling. Red-draped yorks; plastic crates; sorting tables and boxes and bins all filled with weird ephemera. This is the National Returns Centre for the UK – in other words, the dead letter office. This is where Her Majesty washes her hands of the Royal Mail. Letters that have travelled across the world, and found no destination. Parcels returned, only to find that the sender has moved away, or died. Letters to fictional places, fictional people, or to the dead. In these cases, Her Majesty graciously allows us to open the mail; to seek out hidden identities; to divide the gold from the garbage. I am a CEW. Customer Experience Worker. I’ve been here for twenty years, and I’ve seen it all, let me tell you. Two hundred million pieces of mail a year, give or take, pass through our hands. Begging letters, death threats, photographs of lost loves, keepsakes, unopened Christmas cards, undelivered manuscripts. There’s a forgotten Picasso in there, somewhere along the thirtieth stack, plus enough pieces of jewellery to send off a dead infanta in style.
