The Walworth Road Post Office will reopen this Thursday, restoring vitally needed services to roughly 40,000 people.
Customers were “left in the lurch” when the branch closed at very short notice in February after the operator resigned.
Since then, disabled and elderly people have been forced to traipse as far London Bridge for some services.
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Elmington Estate Tenants’ and Residents’ Association Chair, Val Fenn, 81, who uses a wheelchair, had been gearing up to start a petition to get it reopened, and said she was “over the moon”.
Reacting to the reopening announcement, she said: “That’s good news. I’m over the moon! People working on the high street like in Iceland were so desperate to get that Post Office open. They will be over the moon – they really will.”
Customers were stunned earlier this year when they arrived at the branch to find a biro-written sign saying the Post Office had closed indefinitely.
The branch was one of the 84 per cent of Post Offices run by an independent business owner – but the operator had suddenly resigned.
People like Val, who struggles with her mobility, had to reach new branches like the one on New Kent Road post office – half-a-mile away from the Walworth branch.
James Tully, 66, from Walworth, said: “I used to pay my bills and collect my parcels there and now I’ve had to go far afield.”
The reopened branch is in exactly the same place – 234 to 236 Walworth Road – and will still provide 52 hours of service per week.
Nonetheless, there are still worries about how the closure of in-person services is impacting elderly people – a problem sometimes referred to as ‘digital exclusion’.
A study by the Digital Poverty Alliance found 26 per cent of those aged 75 and above had no internet access at home so rely on in-person services.
But between January and April, Barclays bank branches on Tower Bridge Road and Walworth Road also closed.
For people like Peter Donovan, 84, internet and telephone banking isn’t an option. “I’m not on the internet. It’s risky, it’s took dodgy,” he said.
Over the last seventeen years, successive governments have tried to restructure the Post Office to adapt it to modern customer needs.
Between 2006 and 2007, the Post Office network lost £4 million a week, despite getting a £150 million yearly subsidy from the government.
The then-Labour government closed 2,500 branches as part of huge a restructuring, while investing £150 million in other branches.
In 2010, the coalition government announced it would end the programme of closures.
Nowadays, 99.7% of the population live within three miles of a Post Office; and 4,000 branches are open seven days a week.
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