Are letter boxes, postage stamps, Christmas and birthday cards, love etters, thank you notes, pen pals, and postcards all destined to become archaic curiosities, like telephone kiosks? Denmark’s national postal service, PostNord, ended traditional letter delivery on 31 December 2025, becoming the first country to do so, following a 90% decline in letter volume, with letter boxes now being removed from the streets and sold.
In the UK, the most recent Ofcom postal service monitoring report said that 7.3 billion letters were sent in the UK in the 2022-2023 financial year, down from a peak of 20 billion in 2003. Of these, only 2.2 billion items were letters or greetings cards, the remainder being ‘bulk mail’ – the polite term for unsolicited junk.
Reacting to this trend, The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society was founded by Dinah Johnson in 2017 with the aim of preventing letter writing from becoming a lost art form. The Society now has more than 2,000 members, and has received numerous celebrity endorsements: King Charles III (an inveterate letter-writer himself, as was his mother) has described the society as ‘inspirational’.
