Small cards, large human weather.
Podcast From The Past uses guests' saved postcards as prompts, clues, and odd little emotional machines. A single card can lead toward architecture, family memory, holidays, census research, places, or the stubborn question of why cardboard survives.
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Podcast From The Past makes old picture postcards feel newly active. Each conversation starts with cards a guest has kept, collected, researched, or carried through life, and the show follows what is printed, scribbled, stamped, and sometimes half-forgotten on them. Tom Jackson gives the format a clear shape without flattening the surprises. The cards are small, but the range is wide. Recent conversations move from London museums and architectural memory to New York and San Francisco postcards, from Swansea family traces to Swiss glaciers, from cruise-ship photography to Dalton Carnival, village blacksmiths, bell ringing, and the afterlife of personal archives. The show is particularly good on objects that seem minor until someone looks closely. A postcard sent by a child can preserve worry, pleasure, pocket money, and a whole domestic scene in a few lines. A street view can reveal a synagogue in the distance. A set of glacier postcards can show landscape change over time. A village postcard can turn anonymous faces into people with occupations, homes, competitions, costumes, and relatives. That attention gives the show its warmth. It does not treat nostalgia as enough. Instead, it asks what survives, what can be traced, and what ordinary objects can still say when someone brings patience to them. The register is playful and precise: there are jokes about banal captions, spinning musical postcards, shaky handwriting, and the resilience of cardboard, but the conversations can also hold tragedy and loss. Guests bring their own areas of knowledge, including architecture, design, mountains, archives, autographs, and family history. The show then lets those specialties meet the humble postcard on equal terms. It is a good fit for listeners who enjoy social history through texture rather than grand summary. The reward is not a lesson delivered from above. It is the sense of watching memory, research, and curiosity gather around a small object until it becomes unexpectedly full.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes social history, material culture, archives, family memory, and the odd comedy of ordinary messages. It will especially fit someone who enjoys close looking more than sweeping historical summary.
What sets it apart: The show uses postcards not as decoration, but as the primary clues that steer each conversation. Its strength is the scale: handwritten scraps, holiday views, and saved cards become a way to talk about place, memory, preservation, and everyday lives.
In each episode of PODCAST FROM THE PAST, Tom Jackson - who curates the hugely popular twitter feed and book Postcard From The Past - welcomes to the studio two guests, each armed with old postcards they couldn’t bear to throw away. Together, in funny, human and sometimes moving conversations, they explore the memories, mysteries and stories held by those postcards. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A glacier retreats across old postcards; your junk drawer may never look quite so harmless again.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A kept stack of postcards becomes a tender journey through cities, childhood, and the memories objects carry.
Podcast from the Past turns a kept stack of postcards into a quiet route through Tom Dyckhoff's life, with Tom Jackson guiding each card toward the memory or question it still holds.
A 1983 postcard catches the hopeful, practical texture of touring life in America and Canada.
A New York postcard dated 11 February 1983 opens onto a touring life counted in road miles, family calls, and chart positions. Written home to the writer's mother, brothers, sister-in-law, and niece, it moves from Boston and New York toward a 12-hour drive to Toronto, with the…
A Swansea postcard becomes a quiet study of family affection, archival patience, and ordinary lives recovered from small traces.
A postcard from Swansea's North Dock turns into a small social history when two Georges are found to have been in the same place on the same day.
A postcard collector's family story opens into autograph dealing, preservation, and lives hidden in ordinary street scenes.
A collector's eye gives the episode its shape. Tom Jackson speaks with writer and autograph dealer Adam Andrusia about postcards as small objects that carry memory, mystery, and story.
Max Leonard's Rhone glacier postcards frame a changing landscape as quiet visual evidence.
Podcast from the Past is strongest when it sits with the tension between mountains imagined as timeless and mountains visibly changed by human presence.
Fast chat, blunt laughs, real-life oversharing.
Real stories for bold, curious kids.
Land, collapse, and radical ecology.
Afro-Hebraic scripture with historical fire.
Childhood history, argued through evidence.
Sex work history with sharp community memory.
Podcast from the Past uses Tom Dyckhoff's scrapbook to move from St Albans paving slabs to Exmoor postcards and Bath aerial views.
["Podcast From The Past spends this episode with Helen O'Hara, whose postcards trace Dexys Midnight Runners tours from Utrecht to Taipei.", "Tom Jackson and O'Hara talk through a 1962 Tissington card, a 1982 blue-bikini request from Birmingham, and a Berlin postcard that names Checkpoint Charlie.", "O'Hara also reads a New York card that places 'Come On Eileen' at 42 in the Billboard charts and a Taipei card tied to an Amadeus live-performance job.", "The episode treats postcards as dated records of family, touring, charts, and place, not just souvenirs."]
Julia Gillen argues that Edwardian picture postcards were a communications revolution because they paired images with short messages that could arrive within hours.
Tom Jackson talks with autograph dealer Adam Andrusia about postcards, signatures, and the strange intimacy of receiving a card from Ted Hughes or Jonathan Miller.
["Tom Jackson and Max Leonard start with Port Lockroy in Antarctica, where Leonard won an Instagram cruise that did not happen until 2023.", "Tom then moves from the Rio archive in Hackney to F.
Podcast from the Past pairs Tom Jackson with writer Lucy Lethbridge, whose books `Servants`, `Spit and Polish`, and `Tourists` frame her interest in how the British traveled.
A Disney Cruise Line postcard from Castaway Cay includes Jill's note 'Yes, I'm disposable,' and Tom Jackson uses it to frame how postcards record work as well as travel.
["Podcast from the Past speaks with Ella Ravilious, curator at the V&A and a photographic-history PhD student at De Montfort University, about postcards linked to Dalton in North Devon and her father James Ravilious.", "Tom Jackson and Ella trace museum postcards, Professor Elizabeth Edwards's research, and the V&A's first photographer appointment in 1856, including Charles Thurston Thompson and his sister's later run of the studio.", "Ella then describes James Ravilious's Beeford Archive work: 8,000 copied photographs, names recorded for people such as Robert Hurd and Reuben Clements, and new photographs of the same Devon community in the 1970s.", "The episode closes with a 1978 blizzard photograph of Ivor Brock and a lamb in deep North Devon snow, plus a Colourvox musical postcard of Hungarian women spinning."]
Tom Jackson opens with a 1960s card from 'Dad' to Penny that promises 'dinging frocks and shoes', then a 1972 Bamforth Blackpool card from Pamela mentioning 'Mutiny on the Buses'.
Podcast From The Past uses old postcards to connect Scarborough, The Strand, Inverary, and Bridlington to memory and place.
Host Tom Jackson and guests discuss the memories and stories behind old picture postcards in a live recording at the Margate Bookie festival.
Host Tom Jackson and guests explore the memories and stories behind old picture postcards.
Host Tom Jackson and guests Rachel Johnson and Nick Asbury discuss old postcards, exploring the memories and stories they hold.
Guests share and discuss old postcards, uncovering the memories and stories behind them.