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

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.

The longstanding postcard firm Judges (established 1902), which is printing the cards, tells me that postcards used to represent 70 per cent of their turnover, but it’s now down to 5 per cent; most of its business is now printing images on mugs, tea towels, key rings and fridge magnets. It longs to reverse the downward trend.  

I wish I could say that the images on the three new limited-edition postcards were worthy of this noble vision. Of the three........

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