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 am so glad I was a teenager in the 90s before all the pressure of social media. You could go out and have silly evenings with friends without worrying about it being preserved for posterity for the whole world to see.

I remember starting university in 1999 and queuing for the payphone in halls. Most people stuck a notepad and blutacked a pen to their door so you could leave messages to friends. If parents rang the hall phone whoever was close would answer, and might have to run up three flights of stairs to find someone!

January 2000 lots of people had a mobile phone for Xmas and it started to change. I had one and remember the daily dilemma over which text message to delete to make space to receive a new one - there was only space for 10 messages!

It just felt like not the end of times.

it felt very hopeful and music was great

This, 100%

The millennium was approaching, it felt like things were only going to get better. Progressive society, educational opportunities...Towns had proper high streets, there were loads of shops to choose from..You could spend a whole day in town and not go in the same shop twice.

Everything was still analogue, but worked - I struggle to remember how we functioned before mobile phones & the Internet now!

Had time to use our minds & imaginations.

People smoked everywhere - just walking down the street and in pubs, cafes, restaurants. Most had smoking & non smoking sections but nothing separated them except a couple of empty feet of space.

Ladette culture was mainstream & the spice girls were the biggest band in the world - it felt an empowering time to be a girl.

The hole in the ozone layer was the big climate concern.

1999 there was a lot of fuss in the press about the Millenium Bug.

I was 16 in 1998. We had the internet at home and my sister and I would spend hours chatting to dodgy men online. We thought it was great.

It felt very hopeful. I remember when labour won the 1997 election. It was the day of my year 11 class photo and we had our picture taken under a blossom tree. That photo just makes me feel so optimistic, all those young faces ready for a great future (that didn't happen but hey).

They have said it all, I had a new lovely boyfriend (DH) was still a student biked everywhere, Hoxton, Camden, Portebello Road. Sweet as.

I was 20/21. Felt like a great time to be alive for my age group.
I vividly remember the night Labour won their landslide election. I went into work the next day and everyone was buzzing and felt optimistic

My first child was born at the beginning of January 1999. I don't remember it being much different to now really apart from the lack of mobile phones and the fact you had to dial up to get an internet connection on a home computer. I remember the dial up tone that it made as it was trying to connect. We had a wanadoo email address. I was in my second job and we did have computers on our desk.

I think the growth of the internet and the ease of connectivity is the single biggest change since then. I remember spending some time with a friend on our computer looking on Friends Reunited for our ex uni friends! There was no social media at all. We had to phone for a takeaway and use a paper menu to decide what we wanted.

Oh I had 5 months off when I had my baby. I had to go back full time in the May of 1999.

Those years in London were really fun - Tony Blair, cool Britannia, all that- but I suspect my dc who are now a similar age to the age I was at the time are having as fun a time as I did.

1998 was basically yesterday. Things have changed and they haven’t.

It wasn’t amazing tbh. Music went downhill for a few years after 1996/7 (with the odd exception: Cornershop etc.) and improved again early 00s. I was always getting thrown out of pubs/clubs for looking too young. Fashion was vest tops, cargo pants and trainers. New Labour felt optimistic and improved things for many people.

I preferred the mid-nineties!

It was a positive time. And New Labour did a lot to support families. I’m so grateful that my severely disabled son grew up under a Blair government (even if I’m not a huge fan of TB himself).

The eighties were gritty and a bit angry. The late nineties much gentler and kinder. The Berlin Wall had been down for a decade, there was peace in Northern Ireland. Obviously there were problems but there was a positivity that is missing today.

I had two little children, all I can remember is looking after them!

Heather Shimmer lipstick was around when I was a teenager, so I think of it as an 80s thing.

Yes, exactly that, it didn't feel like the end of times.

I was 16/17. It was a fantastic time to be young - and only half of that was the optimism of youth I'd say. Music was great, Britain was CooI Britannia, I had a Saturday job and could pop to London, I was out with my friends lots, doing my GCSEs then A-levels.

I didn't have a phone but we did have a computer, the internet and instant messaging (MSN I think) at home! My dad worked in IT, for a bank on the Millennium Bug project.

I used to instant message my boyfriend... And I can remember my dad giving me (justifiably!) The Talk about being careful about what you instant message...

I was studying Politics A-level, and at that time it didn't feel like the who shebang was corrupt. It probably was (like I said I was young) but it wasn't so blatant.
There was at least an illusion of integrity. MPs resigned over scandals for a start!

The environment was still a big topic, but it didn't seem so apocalyptic. Our Geography text books had predictions about what the UK would look like by 2050- how much sea levels would rise and what land we'd lose. And it actually seemed like we could do something about it.

I was an early teen then. It was fun! I didn't worry about much. Just running around town with my mates, talking about music, starting to get into fashion.

My mates loved shoplifting, glad I wasn't into that. We did a bit of drinking and smoking but everyone behaved, nothing dodgy went on, no one was treated badly. It was innocent, in a way. We had time and space to just be teens. We learned how to socialise in person.

Unlike the previous generation, we weren't worried about nuclear war. My dad recalls being seriously worried about the prospect, and doing school drills to prepare.

I am so glad I got to be a kid/teenager then. Things were simple. It horrifies me how stressful and complicated life seems to be for teenagers now. So many things to worry about and get wrong.

I was just starting uni.

£1 a pint nights. Smoking everywhere. Terrible makeup.

I remember a uni pal telling me about a new online bookshop, called amazon. And email was new. I got a brand new apple mac laptop, with a dial up connection.

Libraries weren't full of computers yet, I still searched individual journals.

The millennium was incoming and was going to ruin everything that was run by a computer. Phones were beginning to get popular, pagers were fading. Payphones were still used a lot. I was paid £3 ph in my weekend job. A night out would cost a tenner. People would be offered a new box of fags to trade in their old one out in town by scantily clad pr women. You had to call a private hire taxi from the nightclub payphone.

The next sale was insane, with people queuing from 5am. The body shop was still cool, ish. Trainspotting had changed cinema and tarantino was incoming.

Gucci Envy! I freakin loved that stuff.

Flights were cheap. £25 to Amsterdam.

There was no social media, in fact although there were mobile phones most people didn't have them and you couldn't get the internet on them. I was 20 at the time and it was a gloriously optimistic time, the future was going to be wonderful 🤷‍♀️ Blair's government were going to change the world which I suppose they did just not in the way we'd have thought.

It was a really positive time. The late 80s with double figures inflation, subsequent housing market crash and masses of people losing their homes in negative equity had subsided. From about 1995 onwards, the country became more and more positive. We were Cool Britannia. The Spice Girls were everywhere and Zoe Ball was big on the radio. It felt like a really positive and empowering time for women.

Dh and I bought our second house and house prices were affordable on half decent salaries. We moved for dh’s job, the chance of promotion and what was a large salary increase in 1997 and we paid 109k for a 3 bed semi in a really nice Midlands area in 1999. For context, he went from 16k to 25k in 1997. I also worked so my income was factored in. But with our deposit of 10k, he could have bought the house alone on what was the maximum loan available of 4 times his annual salary. The house today is probably worth 500k. You’d need a 50k deposit and a 90k income today…

The millennium bug was a scary time. Would everything stop working? What we didn’t know at the time is that masses of computer programmers (who’d worked exclusively on dos and knew all the pre windows coding) came out of retirement to fix the date issue for us so that everything ran smoothly.

Millennium parties were massive. It felt like the end of the world as we knew it. And sadly it was the beginning of the end but that took a few years more for us to fall from grace.

I got my first mobile phone in 1999. I was 28.

I was 48 and working as an Inspector of ICT in schools for a local authority. We were starting to get lots of money to put new IT suites into primary and secondary schools and chasing providers to get everyone a decent internet connection. I was spending a lot of time running courses training teachers and TAs to use ICT to support individual pupils and enhance learning in the classroom. I was also training the Advisory Teachers who were bring appointed with money from central government. It was a great time to work in education.

It was the back end of a golden decade (fall of the Berlin Wall in 89 to 9/11 in 2001) - globally the Cold War had ended, democracy was in the ascendant, The Democrats and Labour were in power.

The Uk was prosperous, music was great and there was generally a buzz here (Brit pop / Cool Britannia ). Mortgages and rent weren’t cheap but they were affordable. Lots of people had money to go out. Mobiles were mini bricks that meant you could go out and make arrangements to meet as you went. The NHS was in a considerably better state. Labour was about to do some genuinely great work closing the wealth gap.

Levels of sexism had moved on a lot from the 80s. in many professional workplaces women had been present for sufficiently long, in great enough numbers and at some seniority - and young female graduates were flooding in in such numbers - that work felt much more egalitarian that it did a decade before. Ladette culture, for all its faults, was genuinely fun and freeing.

Saying all that.. there was s huge amount of sexism that often wasn’t recognised as sexism. In my industry sexual harassment was rife, casual racism was regular and the leadership were mostly male, white and middle class (they always been male and white, but in the 70s/80s post war social mobility meant they were more likely to be working class). I was moving into my late 20s at that point, but younger women were growing up with huge pressure to be very very thin.

And then 9/11 happened, making the Cold War feel quite cozy, followed by the crash of 2008… the rest you will remember.

It was a fun era for sure

I was 15 in 1998, we used to go to smoke filled pubs and buy half a larger for 50p and no one ever checked out ID, lads mags were everywhere and getting drunk was cool, I don’t think young people today binge drink quite as much as we used to. We hardly ever took photos and we never took selfies, we had one mobile phone to share between me, my brother and my parents and we’d take turns taking it out, it didn’t text only calls and the most exciting feature was that you could choose the ring tone. If I went out with friends on a Saturday id leave the house in the morning and turn up home in the evening with my £10 pocket money and not contact my parents in between. We used to watch Eurotrash and Game On and Men Behaving Badly, I don’t think any of those could be made today!

I was only 8 in 1998 but I suffer from the worst 90s nostalgia ever! I really wish I was a young adult in the 90s… they really were the best of times.

I had just started secondary school.

My main memories of that time were the Spice Girls and the Girl Power message (we truly believed we could be anything), and great childrens books.... (not great works of literature... but Babysitters Club, Goosebumps, Point Horror, Point Crime... and Harry Potter had just been published and was starting to get momentum)

My London bus pass cost £15.60 a month... I know its free for a child now, but it was considered barganious!

Bought my first house with an endowment mortgage because the interest rate was high as a pp mentioned.

Had a job, but not a career at that point. The Labour landslide in 1997 was huge. There was a sense of optimism, but also I had fewer responsibilities as I was younger.

I read Bridget Jones's diary on the bus home from work. I remember that.

Hopeful.

The biggest different between them and now is that then it felt like the world was going to get better and better. Now I fear it'll get worse and worse.

I was 26 in 1998. Great memories. No social media, music scene was brilliant. I never had a mobile phone back then so had to ring the landline to organise nights out with friends. I was nursing and loved my job. Lived in London so everything felt good at the time.