PICTURE PERFECT

Whether written as love notes, letters home from the front line, or greetings from the seaside, postcards offer us a tangible link to the past. Emma Longstaff explores their fascinating history

- Emma Longstaff

Wish you were here?' We tend to think postcards go hand in hand with a traditional seaside holiday, along with fish and chips, sandcastles, and disappointing weather. But Georgina Tomlinson, a deputy curator at London's Postal Museum, explains that in their early days, postcards were used more like emails or text messages: 'When we go back to the first postcards, they were very plain, with a pre-printed stamp. They were designed to be a functional communication tool - and very quick and cheap to send at half the price of a standard letter. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, postal collections and deliveries were so frequent, especially in central London, you could send a postcard in the morning and it would arrive the same day.

The first stamp in the world was issued in England in 1840, but postcards actually originated in Austria-Hungary; the earliest British postcards were produced in 1870. The British Post Office accepted picture postcards at the halfpenny rate in 1894, but one whole side was still left free for the address - any message had to be squeezed around the image. It wasn't until 1902 that the divided back cards we're more familiar with today were approved for use.

Anyone could potentially read the message on a postcard, so some senders resorted to code, like Morse or mirror-writing. There was also a language of stamps - the angle at which the stamp was stuck said something specific, like "I love you" - but as this seems to have been quite widely known, it wasn't really very secret,' laughs Georgina.