‘Foreign Correspondence’

Is the past really a foreign country?

In this podcast I set out to see if reading letters to editors from century-old newspapers makes the past feel more present. Not to me, a student of history, but to so-called ‘ordinary’ people, adults and children whose relationship with the past is personal and non-professional.

By recording strangers I meet on the street, people who agree to read an old letter aloud and to reflect on the experience, I hope to make history – a kind of live and living history that is at once both personal and public.

Will the voices of the letter-writers – and of their modern-day readers – come through loud and clear or will they be lost in the hisses and hums?

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