Award-winning podcast, Tape Letters, returns in January 2025 with brand- new second season, Tape Letters Scotland

On 20 January 2025, Tape Letters, the award-winning podcast series, returns with a brand-new second season entitled Tape Letters Scotland. Created as part of the Tape Letters Scotland Project, which shines a light on the practice of recording and sending messages on cassette tape as an unorthodox method of communication by Pakistanis who migrated and settled in Scotland between 1960-1980, the series features original tape recordings and oral history interviews with Scottish-Pakistani families who used cassette tapes in this way.


Produced by Steve Urquhart, the series is split into four episodes, each referencing the record and playback functionality of the cassette tape system: PLAY, REWIND, PAUSE and FAST FORWARD. From sharing moments of joy to ones of heartbreak, series narrator Tabassum Niamat takes listeners on a journey charting individual and familial experiences of using tape letters, as well reflecting upon questions around migration, language, identity and what it means to be Scottish-Pakistani.

First launched in 2018, Tape Letters is a pioneering social-history project by Modus Arts, which aims to unearth, archive, and represent a portrait of this method of communication for Pakistani families and communities in the UK between 1960-1980.

The project began with Modus Arts Director, Wajid Yaseen, discovering his own family’s history of sending personalised cassette tapes to relatives. Initially the project focused upon England, uncovering a wide-spread history of the practice across the country. The support of The National Lottery Heritage Fund has been a key part of the Tape Letters project. Launched in 2022, the Scotland- Edition of the project, Tape Letters Scotland, which is made possible thanks to National Lottery players, has been unearthing and preserving stories and histories from individuals and families living across Scotland’s central belt.

The first season of the Tape Letters podcast, which was originally released in July 2024, was created as part of the Tape Letters England project, and featured original tapes collected from families in Pothwari and English, oral history recordings and behind the project interviews with the people involved in collecting this body of work. The podcast won the Independent Podcast Awards 2024, Arts & Culture Category.

Also from Tape Letters Scotland, a series of three audio-visual exhibitions showcasing the stories and experiences of individuals and families interviewed as part of the project are currently on display at the Museum of Edinburgh, Tramway, Glasgow, and Dundee Central Library.

Serving to both broaden access to the project, and preserve these unique historical accounts, Tape Letters Scotland is set to launch a WebXR-based digital exhibition in January, as well as an educational resource for early Secondary School classes which will be made available to schools and educators from early January.


Wajid Yaseen, Director of Modus Arts, said: “Sound as a medium is inherently at the heart of the Tape Letters Scotland project and podcasts are a natural platform, reflecting the way that people listened to these cassettes in the first place. Following the success of the Tape Letters England podcast, it felt like a natural output to share the Scottish-Pakistani stories and experiences.

“We look forward to sharing the series with both people from the Scottish-Pakistani community themselves and second or third generation listeners interested in the heritage and history of their own community, while also introducing new audiences across the UK and beyond to this important area of social history and many of the universal themes the series explores. Steve Urquhart’s use of ‘audio transport’ as a thematic framing for each episode (play, rewind, pause, fast forward) is conceptually pleasing and means universality is kept at its heart. It reminds us that when we use these functions online, when we press ‘play,’ that triangle derives from these physical, mechanical buttons on a tape recorder.”