Tape Letters

Published May 22, 2025

Tape Letters opened today in the Gallery space of Loading Bay as part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture (Bradford 2025). Tape Letters is open from 22 May to 15 June and is an audio-visual exhibition that showcases the innovative use of audio cassette tapes as a method of long-distance communication by British Pakistanis who migrated to the UK between 1960-80.

Curated specifically for Bradford 2025, the exhibition will feature portrait photography, quotes and audio recordings of 12 families from Bradford, who are part of the Tape Letters archive which includes 200 individuals from across the UK. The archive is held at the Bishopsgate Institute, London and National Library of Scotland. From love stories to family news, the Bradford exhibition explores themes of migration, identity, language, technology and communication.

Sending physical audio cassette recordings became popular amongst British-Pakistani communities in the 1960s, as a means of communicating with friends and relatives in Pakistan. The format offered a cheaper alternative to international telephone calls, whilst also providing a more accessible option for those unable to read or write letters. However, the practice has since remained largely unknown to many, even within British-Pakistani communities, with many original tapes lost or later recorded over.

Tape Letters is a pioneering project by Modus Arts which aims to unearth, archive, and represent a portrait of this method of communication for communities during this period. A time when the telephone was communal, the tapes left room for intimacy in messages to loved ones. It enabled the speaker to convey humour or capture disbelief, sing songs, or speak poems aloud.

Modus Arts launched Tape Letters in 2018, with Director, Wajid Yaseen, discovering his own family’s history of sending personalised cassette tapes to relatives. Modus Arts have since had exhibitions across the United Kingdom, recently in Glasgow.

We’d sit in the front room, tape recorder on the table, and listen like it was the news. My mum wanted to hear every detail — family updates, who was ill, who was visiting. For us kids, it was just hearing his voice that mattered. Sometimes he’d reply to what we’d said on our last tape, like he was right there with us. It brought a kind of closeness that phone calls never could.

There was no cordless phone, and I couldn’t speak to Asim in front of my family — not even a proper hello. So he sent me a cassette and said, ‘Tell me what’s in your heart.’ That’s how it all started. I kept those tapes locked in my suitcase so no one else could hear them. They were more than just messages — they were how we stayed connected.

The Tape Letters project has turned out to be far more fruitful than I could have envisaged, and analysing the archive has felt akin to undertaking a sort of 'sonic archaeology' – a deep dive into a wide range of fields and themes, including memory studies, linguistics, migration, discrimination, communication technologies, class and socio-economic dynamics, and many others.

Although it has become a surprisingly complex social history project, it primarily demonstrates the deep and inherent need for people to communicate with each other in whatever way they can, wherever they're originally from or wherever they find themselves in the world.

I’m delighted to welcome Modus Arts and their special edition of Tape Letters to Bradford as part of our UK City of Culture celebrations. My childhood is full of memories sat with parents recording greetings to family I’d never met or seen. My fondest memory is when a tape would return and only then realised that Culture Club songs were interspersed with distant family's voices, cultural fusion before we knew it.

This special version of Tape letters has been curated specifically for Bradford 2025, focusing on the real voices of 12 families from Bradford. Visitors will be able to tune into the tapes, enjoy the stories and celebrate the real- life connections formed through this long- lost method of communication.

Credits →

Image Credit David Lindsay

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