Join Coast's save the postcard campaign

Where have all the seaside postcards gone? Nudged aside by an invasion of camera phones and texts, that’s where. We say bring them back: they’re an important record of our changing coastline and a cheap and easy way to say ‘thinking of you’.

 

A postcard on the doormat always lifts the spirits. A sunny, seaside picture with an amusing message, peeping out from a pile of bills and junk mail, is guaranteed to raise a smile. Why, then, have so many of us stopped sending them?

 

According to a recent survey by itv.com, there has been a 75 per cent drop in postcard traffic over the past ten years. People say they have no time to write a card and can’t think what to say, preferring to send a text or make a call instead. What they don’t realise is that time taken to source, write and send a postcard is always time well spent.

Not only does a card in the post entertain whoever receives it, it is also an important record of our changing shoreline. Vintage cards from the early days of British resorts chronicle scenes of bathing huts and ample costumes. Hand-tinted pictures from fishing villages show quaysides bustling with life and teeming with fish. If these cards had not been sent, these photographic memories and their written messages recounting bygone holidays would be lost.

 

Postcards are as important an element of British seaside life as fish and chips and sticks of rock. Tittering holidaymakers clustered around revolving stands of comic cards are as much a part of the seafront as crazy golf and buckets and spades. But the cards are no longer produced. The tradition started by artist and king of comedy cards Donald McGill is fading. And Bamforth, the company responsible for the double-entendre cards in the Seventies, featuring weedy husbands and doughty mother-in-laws, has stopped production.

 

We can’t let this happen! It is time to bring back the art, the landscapes and the humour. It is time to save the British seaside postcard!

Clare Gogerty, editor of Coast 

Click here for full details of the campaign...