In its campaign to preserve traditional British screen-free pleasures, English Heritage is promoting a variety of wholesome pastimes this summer, such as puppet shows and fairground and circus skills. Children will lap those up; but will they respond equally enthusiastically to English Heritage’s new initiative for 2026: to revive the habit of holiday-postcard writing?
This is the vision: that their young visitors, inspired to verbal exuberance by the castle, stately home or ancient ruin they’re enjoying, will snap up a couple of the new limited-edition postcards specially commissioned by English Heritage from the artists Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake, and (ideally in the café) will write to their grandparents, aunts, uncles and godparents.
A morning of every holiday was spent ‘doing your postcards’ – it was an empathetic skill we all learned
It’s an attractive vision: children of the 21st century staring into the middle distance, chewing their Biro, forced for a few minutes to think of other, older people and try to imagine what they might like to read. It was an empathetic skill we all learned in the 20th century, when a morning of every holiday was spent ‘doing your postcards’.
‘All things worthwhile in life require a little bit of effort,’ says Matt Thompson, the conservation, curatorial and learning director promoting this venture. It’s ‘the physicality of postcards’, he says, that make them superior to round-robin social media boasts, ‘the smell, the feel of them’ – as well as the pleasure they bring to the recipient, touched that the sender has taken the time and trouble to write personally to them, by hand.
