A stationery shop owner misses the childhood thrill of getting correspondence in the post – so she’s brought back the lost art of letter writing and started a global movement.
Rebecca Maguire’s great-uncle Colin used to send her sketches and art materials through the mail, and it brought her great joy.
When 35-year-old Rebecca and husband Karl, 39, opened stationery shop Wildflower Illustration Co in their hometown of Cheltenham, customers repeatedly asked her what had happened to the lost art of letter-writing.
‘People were mourning the fact that as a society we have stopped doing that as a regular practice. A lot of people thought if they suddenly wrote someone a letter out of the blue, they might think they were dying, or something weird was going on,’ says Rebecca.
Every Sunday afternoon, Rebecca, Karl and daughter Alba, now seven, would sit down and write to their loved ones despite the fact that she was busy with new baby Edie and running the business.
‘We made a promise to ourselves that we would do it. Then it became a practice and we really enjoyed it as a family. So in October last year, we launched the http://www.thesundayletterproject.com,’ says Rebecca.
The free project invites people to pledge to spending a little time each Sunday writing to loved ones, and within a few weeks more than 1,000 people had signed up.
So then Rebecca set up a pen pals project where people could write letters to strangers via one of 200 stationery shops and bookstores across the world.
‘It just caught people’s imaginations. People were getting fed up of the internet, and doom-scrolling, and everything being online, and feeling like they don’t have any physical memories to hold any more,’ she says.
Writing letters can provide people with an alternative to being sucked into their phones, Rebecca says, as a landmark study found that people in the UK spend an average of 4.7 years of their lives doomscrolling.
Rebecca’s movement went viral with one Instagram post from @thesundayletterproject, getting one million views. Now, with 12,000 members writing 52 times a year, three million letters will be sent over the next five years.
‘Now people can go into some really cool shops across the world and help themselves from a basket of letters that are called introductory letters and they can write back.’