During my lockdown spring cleaning I've come across a small number of little folding leaflets. Here's a selection.
Each is about 5½cm wide and 8½cm long, sandwiched between two cardboard covers, and inside is a sheet of paper which unfolds to show useful information.
They were usually printed by a public body with information to share, in the hope you'd carry their handy-sized leaflet in your pocket. My selection includes mini-leaflets from councils, event organisers and railway operators, amongst others.
The city of London Cycling Guide was particularly useful because one side included a fold-out map of the City including the names of almost all the streets. The leaflet also included a list of cycle racks and cycle shops and guidance on how to cycle safely, which would have been a lot more useful if I'd only had a bike, but the detailed pocket-sized map was good enough for me.
Hackney's leaflet featured a double-sided map aimed at support walking in the borough, while the Brent map was supposed to promote tourism, nudging readers towards the Welsh Harp reservoir or newly-opened Wembley Stadium. The Mayor's Thames Festival issued a foldable map in 2007 otherwise you might not have found everything or known when to come back for the fireworks. These are like relics from a different era.
My earliest mini-leaflet is from 2003, but the Annual Gold Card information listing is from 2018 so they haven't completely died out yet. As far as I can tell their heyday, was around 2006-2011, before the age of smartphones made them mostly redundant. Today we have all the information we need in our pockets in digital format, including scrolling maps, travel guides and regularly updated listings. It's barely a decade since a folded bit of paper might have been your best option.
My collection includes a whole series of little folding leaflets from 2008-2010 promoting leisure travel on the DLR. Maps showed how to get to East London Pilates, Greenwich Market or the Dockmasters House restaurant, plus whatever special events were on at the time. Further editions were used to list station closures and engineering works, back when TfL still printed full details of rail replacement buses rather than expecting you to check online. They'd never waste money on them now.
Crossrail's tiny leaflets are intriguing, especially the one from 2009 providing an overview of how the project was due to proceed. I'm impressed to see that most of the information inside is still true, except for the map that shows trains terminating at Maidenhead and the proposed start date of 2017. More recent online information may have blinked out of existence overnight, but my printed leaflet remains a permanent record frozen in time.
The company that invented these folded leaflets was called Z-Card, indeed still is because they still sell to every corner of the globe. Internal pockets and lenticular covers cost extra. But you don't see their products around anywhere near as often as you used to, because printed information has been mostly superseded. Didn't take long.
And that's a quick nostalgic look back at something I could have blogged about at the time but didn't. If I find anything more interesting during my clearout I'll let you know.
Update: I should have mentioned that Z-cards were invented in 1992 by George McDonald, a travel writer and consultant for British Airways. He founded the Z-Card company in 2003. Update: I'm told they're still quite popular in continental Europe, notably in Budapest. Update: Yes, some of you have some too.
