St Martin’s Le Grand was west of an ancient college of secular canons. The institution was situated in the parish of St Leonard, Foster Lane. According to a tradition, the college and church dedicated to St Martin of Tours dated to the 7th or 8th century and was founded by King Wihtred of Kent. It was associated about 1056 during the reign of Edward the Confessor with two brothers, Ingelric and Girard.
The St Martin college was taken over by Westminster Abbey in 1503 as part of the endowment granted to upkeep the Henry VII Chapel. The college was dissolved by King Henry VIII and demolished in 1548.
St Martin’s Le Grand church was responsible for the sounding of the curfew bell in the evenings, which announced the closing of the city’s gates. Until 1697, it had certain rights of sanctuary. The link with Westminster Abbey meant that the precinct was subsequently regarded as part of Westminster and was a liberty – outside the legal jurisdiction of the City of London. The inhabitants voted in Westminster elections until the Reform Act 1832 and the liberty was an exclave of Middlesex.
An early-nineteenth century Act of Parliament annexed the liberty to the Aldersgate Ward of the City of London after the site was chosen for a new General Post Office which established its headquarters on the site of the monastic precinct in 1829. A French Protestant chapel stood on the corner with Bull and Mouth Street from 1842 until 1888, when it was demolished to make way for new post office buildings.
From the Post Office, mail coaches departed for destinations across the country. Coaches bound for the north went up St Martin’s Le Grand – the first section of the Great North Road (now the A1) to York and Edinburgh.
Guglielmo Marconi and his assistant George Kemp successfully demonstrated the wireless telegraphy system over 300 metres between two Post Office buildings on 27 July 1896.
The neoclassical Post Office building was demolished in 1911 and replaced by new premises immediately to the west.
