Tape Letters
PROJECT WEBSITE
tapeletters.com
PRIMARY FUNDERS
National Lottery Heritage Fund
Arts Council England
Audio Content Fund
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Bishopsgate Institute
Between the 1960s and 1980s, many Pakistanis who settled in the UK kept in touch with family by recording messages on cassette and posting them. Tape Letters is an audio archive, podcast and exhibition built from those recordings: domestic, unedited, mostly in Pothwari, and shaped by the limits of the format.
We work from the tapes and from new interviews. The project looks at the cassette as a medium of intimacy at a distance, at the language on the tapes, and at what the recordings tell us about migration and identity.
The project has run in three phases. The 2018 pilot was exhibited at Rich Mix, the People's History Museum in Manchester and Bishopsgate Institute; 15,206 people saw it at the People's History Museum. The second phase, delivered during the pandemic, extended the collection across England and added a WebXR exhibition, a photography series by Maryam Wahid, a poetry collection by Suna Afshan and a six-part community radio series. Tape Letters Scotland (2024 to 2025) worked with Scottish-Pakistani families, recorded 77 interviews and showed at the Museum of Edinburgh, Tramway in Glasgow and Dundee Central Library, all three extended at the venues' request.
The tapes are archived at Bishopsgate Institute in London and the National Library of Scotland.
Tape Letters has won three awards: Bronze at the Audio Production Awards 2022 for the radio series, Best Arts and Culture at the Independent Podcast Awards 2024 for the first podcast season, and Gold in the Arts and Culture category at the Audio Production Awards 2025 for Tape Letters Scotland. A portrait from the project's photography series by Maryam Wahid was selected for the British Journal of Photography's Portrait of Britain 2021.
The narrative around immigrants has too often focused on survival and hardship, with more personal and everyday stories forgotten. Tape Letters Scotland is a laudable attempt at going deeper. Within these accounts lies a softer, more intimate truth: of the ways people fought to clutch a thread that led home.
The List
