A weekly newspaper is fighting a campaign to save a local post office for the second time – 20 years after it successfully fought off a previous closure threat.

The Maidenhead Advertiser is aiming to save the town’s High Street post office, echoing the paper’s successful bid to prevent its closure in 1996.

Maidenhead was named in January as one of 42 directly-run crown post offices whose future is up for consultation.

The Post Office wants to transfer the crown offices to franchisees which would see the high street office close and services move into a shop.

This week’s edition of the Advertiser features a response form for readers to fill in, pictured above, which will be collected along with other petitions opposing the closure and presented to the Post Office.

Advertiser editor Martin Trepte was the paper’s deputy editor at the time of the 1996 campaign.

He said: “Twenty years ago the Advertiser helped force a U-turn by the Post Office over plans to shut the Crown Office in Maidenhead High Street. Two decades on and we face the same battle again.

“It was a bit different back then in the pre-broadband age. But while lots more things, like car tax, can now be bought online, the post office still offers a vital range of services that can’t all be done with the click of a mouse.

“In today’s paper we have printed individual response forms to ‘Save Our Post Office’ which readers can sign and hand back to us. We will present them to the Post Office before the consultation ends.

“With Maidenhead’s long-awaited regeneration finally getting into gear the future prosperity of our town demands a Crown Office, and we want to give them an overwhelming response they can’t ignore.”