All the postcodes on the Wirral changed from L to CH for Royal Mail operational reasons. I had a relative who worked on the reorg. Essentially it is not very efficient continually carting mail through the Mersey Tunnels.
That may well have been the blurb they put out at the time but it's not the real reason, nor even necessarily true. There's nothing especially inefficient about carrying mail through the tunnel from large towns like Birkenhead and Wallasey to a sorting office in Liverpool which is at most a few kilometres away. It's certainly no less efficient than going a fair bit further down the peninsula to Chester. The real reason was their intention to shut down the Liverpool sorting office. Moving the Wirral stuff over to Chester was the first phase. The rest, on the other side of the river, was then eventually moved to Warrington.
And I worked years back in the Warrington centre. The amount of Wirral mail we got because the person sorting it at the other end saw Birkenhead or some other Wirral town and immediately thought "Liverpool" and so chucked it in the "L" pigeonhole; we got that much, we had a local "CH' pigeonhole for outbound distribution, even though it wasn't our area.
Additionally, we got tons of stuff meant for Western Australia or Washington in the US, because of the "WA" both those states are commonly abbreviated with.
None of which ever struck me as efficient, exactly.
EDIT: additionally, I just remembered all the North Wales mail we would get thanks to the "LL" postcode. It was especially the case if the person had written it in mixed case -"Ll".
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