The project brings together old postcards as small but meaningful witnesses of urban history. Each card preserves a view of a street, square, railway station, waterfront, monument, hotel, bridge, park or everyday city scene as it appeared in another time.
A postcard may seem modest at first glance. Yet it can contain a remarkable amount of historical information: architecture, transport, clothing, public space, advertising, street life, urban planning, social habits and the visual identity of a city. Through these details, postcards become part of visual history.
A Journey Through Cities of the Past
OLDCITYPOSTCARDS.com is built around a simple idea: to travel through the cities of the past by looking carefully at historic postcards.
The site is not intended as a tourist guide or a commercial catalogue. It is an archive of urban memory. The focus is on the postcard itself, the place shown on it and the historical atmosphere captured by the image.
Some postcards show famous landmarks. Others preserve ordinary streets, local buildings, markets, tramways, public gardens or residential districts. Together they help form a visual record of how cities looked, changed and were remembered.
Why Old City Postcards Matter
Historic postcards are valuable because they stand between photography, publishing, communication and memory. They were made to travel, to be sent, collected, kept in albums and sometimes rediscovered many decades later.
For historians, collectors and curious readers, these images offer more than nostalgia. They help us observe the built environment of the past and compare it with the present. A single postcard can show a vanished building, an altered square, a lost skyline or a way of life that no longer exists.
In this sense, postcards are small visual documents. They do not tell the whole history of a city, but they preserve fragments of it with unusual clarity and charm.
A Short History of Picture Postcards
The postcard developed during the nineteenth century as postal systems expanded and printed communication became cheaper and more accessible. At first, many postal cards were plain and used mainly for short written messages.
By the late nineteenth century, illustrated and picture postcards became increasingly popular. Improvements in printing made it possible to produce large numbers of cards showing city views, monuments, railway stations, hotels, resorts, ports and public buildings. These images could then travel across countries and continents as affordable visual messages.
Around 1900, postcards entered a period of extraordinary popularity. City views were among the most common subjects. For many people, a postcard was a simple way to send not only a message, but also an image of a place: “This is where I am,” “This is what I have seen,” or “This is how this city looks.”
The early twentieth century brought further changes to postcard design. The divided-back format, with space for the address and the message on the reverse side, helped shape the familiar modern postcard layout. This allowed the picture side to remain devoted to the image, strengthening the postcard’s role as a small printed view of the world.
The Aim of the Archive
The goal of OLDCITYPOSTCARDS.com is to build a large international collection of historic city postcards and make them accessible as visual material for exploring urban history and culture.
The archive is intended to include postcards from many countries, periods and types of cities: capitals, ports, industrial towns, spa towns, historic centers, railway cities, seaside resorts and smaller urban places that are often overlooked.
The project pays attention not only to famous views, but also to ordinary urban scenes. These everyday images often tell us as much about the past as grand monuments do.
What You Will Find Here
- historic postcards of cities from around the world;
- views of streets, squares, landmarks, stations, bridges, parks and waterfronts;
- short historical notes about places shown on postcards;
- visual traces of urban change across decades;
- postcards as documents of architecture, travel, memory and everyday life.
Historical, Cultural and Educational Purpose
OLDCITYPOSTCARDS.com is a non-commercial project. Its purpose is historical, cultural, educational and archival.
The website does not promote political, ideological or religious viewpoints. Historical images are presented because of their documentary and visual value. Their inclusion should not be interpreted as approval of any political system, institution, event or message that may appear in the material.
The project is dedicated to visual history: to the study of cities, architecture, public space, travel culture and urban memory through old postcards.
A Growing Collection
OLDCITYPOSTCARDS.com is an ongoing archive. New postcards will be added gradually, expanding the collection by city, country, decade and subject.
Over time, the aim is to create a broad visual journey through the cities of the world — not as they are advertised today, but as they were seen, printed, sent and collected in the past.