What was England like in late 1998/early 1999?

[breaksinthedayforyou]

Interested to know.

I am a late 90s baby and can't believe that was now over 25 years ago

One of my earliest memories is going into Woolworths in Poplar. I was in a buggy and remember feeling cold

It randomly occurred to me that 1998, my birth year, is going to sound ancient to my own grandchildren/great grandchildren. Much like my great grandmother shocking my mum years ago by being born 'in the 1800s' 😃

I was 13 in 1998. It was a great time to be young, spice girls mania was real. I don’t think there’s been a band as big, cultural influence wise, as them since.
youth clubs in dingy halls, the dawn of the internet and mobile age. everything seems more free. If we went out with friends, we were not contactable until we came home. Had to work things out alone (eg buses being late or cancelled meant had to find alternatives). No danger of people filming your stupid moments.

I don't think that things were great for teens under 18 to be honest; drinking was normal, hanging out in a field/park/somewhere dodgy drinking and smoking. Loads of girls going out with older guys (as in 20+), some 14/15 year olds used to get picked up from school by their older boyfriend in his boy racer car.

Getting into pubs/clubs at 15/16 where you'd be drinking and smoking plus being hit on by older guys. I remember a bunch of us were 15, met a couple of guys who were 26 and happily went around in his car smoking pot.

All this was great to us teens at the time but looking back was dodgy af. I couldn't imagine letting my teen do any of that and I doubt she'd want to. It was all far too much too young.

I also suffered from depression from age 14 but it wasn't recognised at all back then so I suffered a lot.

@PumpkiPie, we didn’t do any of that, must have been sheltered!
I also suffered with my mental health. Looking back, I was acting out at school in year eight and nine (low level disruption and refusal to participate) and very clearly unhappy and in need of help. But of course was just told off and labelled. I think now they might ask more questions.

Yeah I appreciate not all teens did.

Poor mental health was definitely real though and as you say, now they'd ask more questions. I also had a learning disability completely overlooked which has now only come to light in adulthood as people are more aware.

The late 90s was very fun, but from an adults point of view looking back now, it was very irresponsible to under 18s.

I definitely have a rose tinted view of the 90s. I was a child for it, so no experience of adult worries. And as I said, fairly sheltered!
Although I do also remember the normalisation of smacking and other questionable child rearing practices. No seatbelts necessary in cars and cramming five or more kids I to the backseat unrestrained. We used to have four teens in the seats and a smaller child laying in the footwell of the back seat. Shocking to think of now! (Probably also illegal then, but nobody cared)

I would have only been 8/9 but when I think of the late 90s it was a simpler and safer time. Like I said could be because I was in year 4 with no kids or mortgage though 😂

Awwww I was 22. Just moved to London and lived in a shared house on zone 2/3 borders for 300 quid a month.

It felt fun and full of possibilities. I had no real plan and was finding out about what I wanted to do. I had enough money to pay for the life I was having. No debt because I didn't have to pay uni fees, no real worries.

I had a few different bunches of mates through school, uni, work and flat mates so I was out all the time. I had started shagging the tall lad at work who turned into dh a few years down the line.

A few years later I managed to buy a zone 3 1 bed flat on a wage of 25k. By myself.

When you left work you left it. Looking back a lot of lad culture but also less porn culture.

I do feel very lucky and I don't think my teens will have the same opportunities as I did. The 5 years I had from 1998 - 2003 were amazing for me.

I agree with this.

Yes about the predation. I am now horrified looking back to realise that my best best friend was groomed into a sexual relationship by the school bus driver, but at the time although I thought it was dodgy and that my friend was making a mistake, I really didn't appreciate the level of abuse involved.

I also remember two friends of mine, both 14, who used to babysit someone's 2 year old boy whilst his mum (19) went to work in a bar until the early hours. We would all go round there, smoking and drinking, whilst the child was in bed, basically being typical teens. My friends were paid "a pack of fags each" and allowed to have mates round. They then walked home in the early hours.

I mean imagine that now!

@GonnaGetGoingReturns gosh yes, I spent a fortune at the Chanel counter in our local Debenhams. In fact I knew the ladies there so well and had been such a good customer over the preceding decade that they did my wedding makeup. I'd forgotten about that.
i do remember crying because they couldn't get hold of the Vamp nail varnish and by the time I finally got one it was Rouge Noir.
i still have all the eye shadows etc I bought then, one of which is completely untouched. It was a limited edition and so beautiful I couldn't bear to use it.

It was a very positive time

economy was good, London was the place to be and it felt like things could only get better 😊

it was a great few years then well we know what happened that changed everything

It was a much more optimistic time. I was tuening 30 and looking forward to that next stage in life.
New Labour made a massive difference to my native North-East afyer it had been ddcimated by Thatcher.
The minimum wage was coming into being, so having previously been on little more than £2.00 an hour with an agency, this was a boost.
Dial-up Internet, if you were lucky enough to have it.
I think I got my first mobile phone, and it was only for making calls, in 1999.
No social media!
I used to buy a newspaper (The Daily Mirror) on my way to work each day.
We still had Woolies, BHS, Debenhams, proper shoe shops etc and all my clothes were bought on the High Street/in the town centre.
Pretty much everyone I knew went on package holidays; no booking individual parts of holidays for me back then!

Fun times (not as hedonistic as the late 80s and early 90s) but still a fun optimistic vibe. You could still live your life free of social media (despite the start of the internet) and no one was addicted to their smart phones/devices like they are today.
People socialized a lot more than they do now and I think that’s a sad thing about today’s society. It’s not good for our collective mental health.

The economy was good for most. Where I lived you could walk into an employment agency one day and have a decent paying job the next. Food and housing etc were affordable compared to today.
Travel was more affordable than today and there was lots of freedom of movement around Europe (I’m sad about this for my own DC).

This still happens in France, though not the whole queue. The check-out person can take the cheque and print the amount which speeds it up a bit. I still carry a cheque book as you never know when you will need it. If I pay with my Apple Watch people look at me as if I am a bit strange.

I was 12 then so rosy childhood memories of the time. I had my first phone but none of my friends had one so it wasn't much use, but at youth club me and my friends all used to gather in the toilets and call a boy's house phone on my mobile and talk to him

I remember car safety wasn't such a thing then, lots of cramming extra children into the car with no seatbelts, we all thought the one boy who still sat in a booster seat had really weird parents (but now I realise his parents were just ahead of their time). Once my friend's mum put the back seats down and let me and my friend lie across the back of the boot/back seat area and we loved it. Another time a whole bunch of children sat in the boot of a Volvo estate and the boot door wasn't shut properly so we kept kicking it open while we travelled.

I remember walking everywhere, across town to go to friends' houses - no getting dropped off or picked up, if I wanted to hang out with friends I had to make my own way. Calling house phones to arrange with friends to hang out and having to talk to their mum or dad first about school and how my parents are. Despite no whatsapp groups the parents in my school were very connected - if I did something at school or if there was a friendship issue my mum knew about it so quickly!

And then of course there was all the excitement about the Millennium - that New Year's Eve was the best. For some reason the phone company I was with (Orange, I think) gave free phone calls (I realised because I had no credit but could still call) from midnight until about 3am, me and my brother called everyone we knew until 3am when it stopped.

What was England likes in late 1998/early 1999?

Better.

It was pretty great until after the Olympics in 2012 and didn't go completely to shit until the Brexit-Tory years of 2015-present day.

I feel bad for my kids that they only know this country as a rundown basket case that keeps taking rights and freedoms away from them.

I was 17/18 in ‘98 and went off to uni in 99. It all just felt positive.

labour were in, people seemed to feel positive, I certainly did. The mystic was absolutely belting and it didn’t cost much to feed and house yourself.

it felt alive. We did have the madness of the millenium bug, but the New Year’s Eve party in 99 was spectacular .

When I finished uni in 1997 there was a computer suite with internet access in the library. It had 20 computers in and you had to get a letter from your head of course giving you permission to book a slot.

I did it once and had no clue what to do, could not find a website and left!

We were still allowed to hand write our assignments.

Best days of my life, was in college in London.....spent many a night in the pub, remember seeing my first mobile in a pub and was amazed . Line dancing was a big craze, had to go to a travel agent shop to buy a plane ticket. College assessment were all hand wrote. Great memories with college friends.

We had recently bought a home computer in 1997, it sat in the corner on a desk with a large tower underneath and had a big fat screen and was dial up for a while so you couldn't use the phone at the same time we then got a very slow wifi which was about 512mb from Tesco with a Tesco email address. We were in our 40s and DS was primary school age. I remember queueing for all the Next sales, got loads for me and DS, DH avoided going😁

i think DH and I would have still shared a Nokia mobile phone which was mainly for emergencies rather than general chit chat and whoever was out had it and rang the home phone

Yeah, there was good and bad. Labour had just got in after a terrible decade with the Tories, rightly or wrongly, destroying an industry and way of life that had existed for 200 years at that point (mining) with nothing to replace that. They were privatising everything too, so with Labour there was a genuine feel that things were going to change. Women’s rights were still pretty shit - being a teenage girl was very shit, unable to walk down a road in peace and then be blamed for that or told you were lying if anything happened, but there was movement there too. ‘New men’ were going to take responsibility for their actions. Environmental knowledge was increasing and the new www made it easy to gain and share knowledge outside of the control of elites. It was a genuinely hopeful time.

All to be sold down the river.

That's the opposite of my experience.
As I said I started uni (as a mature student) and few students were using email or other IT.

After a lecture most of my class would schlep over to the library to get the required books, I'd head to the 'audio visual room' and reserve them on the computers.

In a previous job, decades before we didn't have email but we did have computers linked to other branches and we could send messages / check stock.

I bought my parents a modem one Xmas.

In the 1980s and 1990s there were lots of IT courses in local libraries, help the aged, even on TV. I remember one called, "Computing for the terrified".

Yeah, it's been interesting to hear such differing opinions on internet usage at the time, that differed so much from my own experience.

Re: being a teenage girl, it is good that things have moved on. But,* *for example, a few weeks ago I was walking down a narrow path that ran alongside a main road behind a teenage girl, and couldn't overtake. I saw that every car with a male driver was gawping at her, slowing down to get a better look, revving their engines unnecessarily and accelerating. They may not have shouted anything or beeped their horns like in the 90s but they did everything but that. I don't think men have really changed.

I was born in 89, so I was 9/10 around that time. All the kids on my street would play out together, we were in and out of each others gardens. Me and my best friend loved going out rollerblading. Going down to the corner shop with 30p for a pic 'n mix and a panda pop.

I never let DS play out at that age as it's not really the done thing in big towns any more. Too dangerous.