About Nell
One box, one wall, and no particular itinerary.
Postmarked is one person, a secondhand camera and a market-stall shoebox that has been the filing system since 2019. It is not an agency or a media brand. It is a record of places walked slowly, written up so that you can walk them too.
Seven years, mostly by accident
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2019
A cardboard box, and no plan
Came back from six weeks in Portugal with fourteen rolls of film and nowhere to put the prints. Bought a shoebox from a market stall in Alfama because it was the right size. It is still the box everything lives in.
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2021
The wall started
Ran out of box. Four prints went up on the kitchen wall on the understanding they would come down at the weekend. They did not. There are now sixty-one up there.
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2023
The first letter, sent to nine people
Wrote up a crossing of an alpine pass because a friend asked what the fog had actually been like, and it turned into four thousand words. Sent it to nine people. Seven wrote back. That is the whole origin of the Sunday letter.
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2024
The first paid guide
Readers kept asking for the costs, so the Lisbon notes became a 64-page PDF with every price in it. It paid for the next trip, and the one after that.
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2026
Still the same box
41,000 readers, six guides, two more in progress. No sponsors and no press trips, which is the only reason I can tell you when a place was disappointing.
Three rules I have not broken
They make the guides slower to write and more expensive to research. They are also the reason people buy them.
- I pay for everything
- Every bed, ticket and meal in the guides. No hosted stays, no discounts in exchange for coverage.
- I go slowly
- Two to three weeks per guide, never a long weekend. The routes are written at the speed they were walked.
- I go back
- Prices and timetables are re-checked every spring and autumn, and the date is printed on page one.
Say hello, or ask about a trip
I read every message myself and reply within three working days.