Old Postcards of
Oxfordshire villages
The postcards shown here all date from the golden era of the picture postcard, between 1902 and 1918. The photographs used for the cards are obviously always older than the cards themselves.
In September 1894, a postal rate of just ½d. was introduced for postcards within the UK. Although picture postcards soon started to appear, they were not used much because people were only permitted to write a few words in a small gap on the picture side of the card. But from 1902 the Post Office allowed the plain side of the card to be divided into two, with a space for writing a message on the left-hand side, and picture postcards then became very common. Their popularity waned, however, in 1918, when the postal rate for cards went up to 1d.
There are old photographs of almost every Oxford village o
on the Historic England and the Picture Oxon websites