How the A-List fell in love with snail mail – and you can too

Times

3 days ago

If you are one of the 120,000 audience members who've attended a Letters Live show, you have Shaun Blanco-Usher's awkwardly timed budding relationship with the woman who is now his wife to thank.
'After we met in 2002 she moved away to Spain for a year as part of a university course. And we decided to stay in touch by letter — this was before we started using emails and before Facebook and all that. So we wrote to each other, handwritten letters. We fell in love by letter, and I also fell in love with letter writing.'
Years later, stuck in a job he 'hated', he started a website. Letters of Note was where Blanco-Usher published what he called 'correspondence deserving of a wider audience', written by figures as diverse as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Iggy Pop. The site gained a cult social following, which in turn spawned a book. For its 2013 launch, the publishing house Canongate's chief executive, Jamie Byng, gathered some of London's cultural lights — Benedict Cumberbatch and Gillian Anderson among them — to read from the book. It was a hit.
Benedict Cumberbatch launches our Dear London competition
London has always been part of me. It's in my bones, it's the background noise of my life — the hum, the sirens, the buses exhaling as they pull away. I've seen it from stages and street corners, in its chaos and its calm. It's the city that shaped me.
It's where I trained. Where I stumbled, steadied myself, and tried again. I've danced through its puddles and trudged through them too. I've watched it change, and I've changed with it. Like so many others, I carry my own London, stitched together from small, private moments.
That's why I love this idea. Dear London is a competition inviting anyone, anywhere, to write a letter to this city. Or to something or somebody within it. Maybe it's to the barista who never forgets your order, the bridge you always cross, the friend you lost, the version of you who lived here once.
Letters ask us to pause. Putting words to paper is an act of connection: slow, deliberate and often more revealing than we expect.
I've written my own letter to London. Now we'd love you to do the same. Pick up a pen, or dust off the old typewriter, or open a new document, and begin. Perfection not required; just honesty. Keep it under 500 words and say what you need to say.
Your letter will be published in The Times and read aloud at Letters Live at the Royal Albert Hall this November. But once it's written, it lives, and London will be larger for it.
For full competition details see below
'I thought my parents, my wife and I would read the website. I literally did, because it sounds like such a dry subject, and then [the readings] went so well and the feedback was universally positive and we just decided to continue doing these events,' Blanco-Usher says.
The concept is disarmingly simple: notable letters, read aloud by the right person, each performer lending a touch of their personality and theatricality to bring the text vividly to life. Now co-produced by Blanco-Usher in partnership with Cumberbatch and Adam Ackland, Letters Live has captivated audiences in New York, Los Angeles and a sold-out Royal Albert Hall with readers including Cynthia Erivo, Carey Mulligan, Idris Elba, Florence Welch and Woody Harrelson. There have also been special editions broadcast live from Brixton prison and the Calais Jungle. Those who love Letters Live really, really love Letters Live; shows sell out almost instantly and most are partnered with a charity — this year's show, announced last week, supports Arts Emergency, a group working to open up careers in the arts for those from less privileged backgrounds.
Cynthia Erivo is one of dozens of Hollywood stars to have read at Letters Live
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Looking back at recordings of those early events, including a lengthy run at London's Freemasons' Hall and literary events like Hay, proves Blanco-Usher's point that there is something deeply personal about these moments of private correspondence. The actress Louise Brealey's reading of Virginia Woolf's suicide note to her husband, Leonard — 'If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness' — is extraordinarily affecting, the author's pain evident in every word. In 2024 the singer Patti Smith read to an audience a 'goodbye' letter she wrote to her friend the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe — a victim of the Aids epidemic who never lived to read it. Another highlight is a letter to the RNLI from a 71-year-old man whose life was saved by the charity half a century earlier in an incident off the Scottish coast.
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Some are less personal but no less historic. One came from the White House speechwriter to Nixon's inner circle containing the address the president would have given had the moon landings ended in tragedy: 'In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.' Its reading was accompanied by a climactic moment from the score for Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar — a pairing that, Blanco-Usher says, still gives him goosebumps.
Others are at times poignant, comic, even flippant. Olivia Colman's reading of the novelist Lydia Davis's letter to an undertaker — in which she objects to the use of the word 'cremains' to refer to her late father — has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, and brought a sold-out room to tears of both laughter and sadness. A spectacularly crude letter from the Irish novelist James Joyce to his future wife, Nora Barnacle — in which the Ulysses author describes the many different ways in which he is looking forward to being intimately reacquainted with her — was read by the actor Ferdinand Kingsley at a Wilderness Festival event last year. 'F*** me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy' was, by most accounts, the most printable line, and earned the imaginative British Sign Language interpreter a standing ovation.
Many of the letters that Blanco-Usher and his co-producers select are, unsurprisingly, from a bygone era, when sitting down with pen and paper was more commonplace. His study is a library of collected works and letters from authors, musicians, socialites, artists and war generals. Today, he acknowledges that so much of our communication is fragmented and 'pixelised' that it is unlikely ever to be archived.
'But in our own small way we're trying to keep it alive. I think there will always be people, a small percentage of people perhaps, that write letters because there's always a small percentage of the population who reminisce about that kind of thing. I do have faith it's not dying out.'
Letters Live returns to the Royal Albert Hall on November 28. Remaining tickets are available at royalalberthall.com
Dear London competition
The Times's and Letters Live 'Dear London' encourages you to write a letter to London — its people, its places or the city itself. The winning letter writer will be invited to the Letters Live show at the Royal Albert Hall in November and their letter will be read on stage on the evening.
To enter your letter, email it to [e-mail] or send a physical copy to Dear London, PO Box 81900, London, WC1A 9RH, with contact details.
Letters will be read by an independent editor appointed by Letters Live and the winner will be selected from a shortlist by an independent judging panel. Entries must be received by midnight on September 19, 2025, and must be no more than 500 words. Entrants must be 18 or over.