Comment by globular-toast 15 hours ago
In the UK at school in the 90s we were taught how to write a letter including addressing and stamping the envelope. It's quite strange to see it done "wrong" like in the OP. You're supposed to have the first line of the address centred vertically, leaving the top half for stamps. At least they got the stamps on the correct (right) side, though. I've seen a lot worse.
Yes, I was taught to do it staggered, but I think this was dying out at the time and I believe that by the time I wrote any letters of my own I didn't do the staggering. My theory is it's because of the prevalence of printed labels. I haven't seen it for a long time now.
Now that I'm reminiscing a bit, it was also fairly common at the time for people to order a batch of sender labels that they could affix to the envelope. My grandparents had particularly distinctive golden metallic labels which meant you could instantly tell who it was from (if you didn't already recognise the handwriting).
I wouldn't say it's that different from how the Royal Mail currently recommend one write the address:
https://help.royalmail.com/personal/s/article/How-to-address...
My father writes the address staggered; that is, each subsequent line being indented a centimetre or so relative to the previous line. Were you taught to stagger the address at your school in the 90s?