The closure of the Cowley Mail Centre, scheduled for early 2009, will bring to an end a history of sorting post in Oxford that dates back more than 350 years. The event is sad twice over - once because of the disruption it will cause the 460 workers at the sorting office, and twice because of the atmosphere of simmering discontent in which the reorganisation is taking place there; discontent which last summer boiled over into a wildcat strike and the sacking of two workers.

A spokesman for the Communications Workers Union, Noel Fay, said: "The decision to close the Cowley Mail Centre and transfer the work to Swindon was a knee-jerk reaction to the strike action in support of the workers and is viewed by most postal workers as an unnecessary escalation of the situation at Royal Mail and will lead to a worsening of the already dire industrial relations there."

The closure programme and those "dire relations" hit the news again this week, when the two sacked workers, union official Steven Gill and colleague John Doran, won their jobs back on appeal.

Royal Mail spokesman Jaquie Stenson said: "I can confirm that both employees have been reinstated following our internal appeals processes." She added: "Royal Mail does not comment on the details of individual cases."

CWU officials maintain stoutly that they have been victimised.

Mr Fay said: "It is disgraceful that Oxford has seen union reps and activists sacked by managers because of false accusations.

He added: "This was a case of union-busting by rogue managers intent on bashing the CWU in Oxford. The sackings were used to target union representatives and those taking a strong pro-union position for the national dispute over pay and conditions."

In June last year, 2,000 of the county's postal workers went on strike as part of a national dispute, after the CWU rejected a 2.5 per cent pay rise and a proposed restructuring of the service.

Tensions grew locally with a stand-off between the union and management, coming to a head in July with the suspension of two workers at Cowley.

A wildcat strike ensued, with workers out for six days, building up a backlog of more than five million items. More strike days followed and matters came to a head in September. There was a scuffle at the sorting office and Steven Gill, one of the men at the centre of the wildcat strike, was dismissed. John Doran was sacked for alleged gross misconduct.

Oxfordshire CWU representative Bob Cullen said at the time that he believed the dismissals would be overturned.

For consumers, namely Royal Mail customers in the OX postal region, the questions remain: what will be the impact of that closure, and how is the programme for the Cowley Mail Centre's removal to Swindon shaping up?

Royal Mail spokesman Richard Hall said: "The total investment in Swindon is about £20m and work on the extensions there started in September. We expect to close the Cowley office and move operations to Swindon in early 2009."

After the move, the region's mail will be sorted in Swindon, and then transported to local delivery offices from there instead of from Cowley.

According to Royal Mail, the environmental impact will be neutral, despite the longer distances travelled by mail lorries up and down the A420. The mail centre in Reading is also scheduled for closure.

As for the impact on jobs in Oxford, Mr Hall said: "Approximately 460 employees, including managers, admin people and engineers, currently work at the Cowley site. They will be given the option to transfer to the new operation at Swindon or another role within Royal Mail in the Oxford area, or further afield depending on personal circumstances. There may also be the opportunity for voluntary redundancy."

However, he admitted that the reorganisation would cut the total number of people employed in Oxford, Swindon, and Reading.

All this rationalisation and modernisation is occurring against a backdrop of declining jobs at Royal Mail nationally - 229,400 in total in 2001-02, compared with 184,800 in 2006-07 - as the organisation faces up to the new world of electronic communications, spearheaded by emails and texts, and to competition.

In the face of a 2.3 per cent fall in the UK addresed mail in 2006-07, some might be interested to know exactly what types of mail are being hauled about in Royal Mail lorries. Could much of it be junk mail?

Mr Hall would say only: "We do not break mail volumes down by type."

Here, perhaps it would be relevant to mention that one Royal Mail office in Oxford is definitely not due for closure. It is the Door to Door Opt Out Office (Freepost RRBT-ZBXB-TTTS, Kingsmead House, Oxpens Road, Oxford, OX11RX), to which householders should write if they no longer wish to receive junk mail delivered courtesy of Royal Mail.

A tip for readers: having registered once to cease receiving it, you need to register again every couple of years. Otherwise the stuff will once again start dropping through your letter box.

The doomed Cowley Mail Centre now sorts about one million pieces of mail a day. We don't know this compares withthe amount of post sorted in Oxford back in 1635, when Charles I decreed that the London-Bristol mail coach should run through the university city.

What is known is that when Oxford's main post office in St Aldate's opened in 1879, the postmaster gave out a few statistics that make interesting reading in this age of emails and postal disputes: in those days, there were 121 postal employees in Oxford and the number of letters and packages sorted each week was just 240,000, of which just over a third were delivered in Oxford and its immediate neighbourhood.