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 honestly think racism is a bigger problem now than it was in the 90s. Perhaps not in terms of violent attacks but definitely in terms of attitude.

People are no longer treated as individuals, they’re defined by their race, sex (or ‘gender’) and sexuality, and there is widespread anxiety about saying the ‘wrong’ thing about these characteristics. This has led to either conscious or unconscious discrimination. People choosing to only have friends like themselves because they don’t want the constant vigilance and self-censorship required to have a diverse group of friends these days. It’s tragic.

I was just back from working overseas and it was fantastic to feel the enthusiasm and positivity which definitely wasn't there when I left 5 years before. Housing was affordable! Even as a young single woman I could buy a flat. Everything looked rosy. We didn't have mobile phones or social media but always managed to meet up and have fun. Life was really good.

For a 16 year old NMW is now £4.81.

I was 12 in 1998. I loved reading Smash Hits and watching Top of the Pops, my bedroom walls were covered in posters of 5ive, Backstreet Boys and Westlife. I used to go and hang around the city centre on a Saturday with my mates, we’d spend hours listening to the headphones in Virgin Megastore, playing with stuff in the Gadget Shop and The Natural World and looking at posters in Athena. All we ever used to actually buy was a McDonald’s for lunch and endless gel pens from Partners stationers.
I used Microsoft Encarta to do my homework.

Oh the gel pens!! I had so many of those!! (…but never enough!!)

This was a bit later (as I started secondary school in 1997!) But we drank on school trips with the knowledge of the teachers from about Yr10.
By Yr12 we were in the pub with them.

It was a bit shit really. Now 1978, that was a year!

People saying there was no internet are categorically WRONG.

There was internet and had been for several years at this point, it really annoys me when people say there wasn't. Usually when you delve deeper it turns out they are late adopters or technophobes, but that's no reason to misrepresent the past.

I was a teenager then and the internet was the big part of our lives just as, for example, TikTok or Instagram is now. It was already sooo important. The only limitation was that it wasn't on our phones in any usable manner.

I was 24 in an office admin job. You could still smoke in the office, which seems incredible now. Only in the stairwells, but a lot of people did. Drinking at lunchtime was also considered acceptable (this was in the media, in London)

Magazines and newspapers were so much more widely read. You'd often see teenagers with a copy of NME or Melody Maker, young women with Grazia, everyone on the tube with their Standard of an evening.

Music was more unifying. Everyone who liked pop music had a rough idea of what was topping the charts. In fact all culture was less niche: you could talk to most people about the latest hot TV programme or film, and chances were they would have seen it, because there wasn't so much choice.

The office was a bear pit - practically every straight man would try it on with the younger women sooner or later, given the chance.

Cheap meals out were easier to find because not everything was a franchise/chain. We were always going to Pollo and the Stockpot on Old Compton Street, the Jewish place on Charing cross rd, Gita's for curries, various caffs.

I had so much fun that decade - it's all a blur !

A lot of these replies are just about being young. I was in my thirties.
The previous Conservative government had run down services. Cru.bling sxhos, terrible NHS, etc. Things were slowly getting better but still had a very long way to go. Lots of people used private health care for tests to jump long waiting lists in NHS.there were still plenty of run down towns thY gentrification had not yet touched.
But it was such a hopeful time. Thi gs really were getting better. The national mood was hope. People seemed much happier than now.

What a time to be alive! Music felt real and not mass produced. Gigs, clubs, pubs, everyone smoked! I’d go out with a tenner, drink vk/lager and lime, dance all night and share a taxi home. Wake up with cigarette smoke in all my clothes and hair. Never lost my purse because it was a little bag round my wrist. No one had phones to record dancing or the lad you got off with. Pre-night pictures were taken with a camera and printed if someone remembered to take the film to the shop.

Combats, vest tops and clumpy trainers were in style. Asymmetric skirts and tops. Boob tubes. Little hair grips. Everyone had a denim jacket. And top shop moto jeans! I had coffee shimmer lipstick!

We were the latchkey kids so parents let us get on with it. So much more freedom. There was more debate and more curiosity. And much less bad faith. Friendships were kept through going out and landlines. You made a plan and you didn’t flake on it or your mate would be stuck waiting outside Woolies.

Films were great. There was something decent on at the cinema every week. Cinema was a cheap night out.

I think the late 90’s was the last hurrah of freedom before the internet really took hold and we started to live out online lives. I really miss it!

For "no online life" think 1991-1995 for most people, @breaksinthedayforyou. Even then, some people were active from the beginning on message boards that you can read the archives of on Google groups.

We were using it in the 1980s in the IT dept where I worked to dial up to IBM’s knowledge base and though I used it regularly in work, we didn’t have it at home until 1998. The cost of our first home PC (Christmas 1998)was a whopping £1200 from a company called Mesh.

It was amazing , we had proper summers ,28-30 degrees in May to August, great music oasis, blur , ocean colour scene, Keane , Travis you absolutely name it !
I loved it

Well for one thing, "in the 1800s" USED to mean in the Regency period or thereabouts. Say 1800 to when Victoria took the throne?
Otherwise it was "the nineteenth century".

Yes, OP, the difference was that you accessed the internet at home, work, school or library on a PC (personal computer), usually shared. So you would rush home from school to check your email on the shared family computer, for example. Or rush to the school library to check your messages at lunchtime.

But in the last 10 years or so I've seen the meaning of the term shift in how it's used.

I first used the Internet in 1996 on a work training course although I remember people talking about it being on its way in around 1991. We didn't all get it at work until 1998. Yes things were more optimistic then, I think that was lost on 9/11. There was alot less what I call identity politics so people were colour blind and sexuality blind, we had been brought up that way. People much happier.

I was working, getting paid about £10k a year back then. I bought my first house with my then partner for about £50k

We had the internet at home via a modem, which meant you couldn't use the landline while you were online - important as mobiles were not ubiquitous in those days.

My DP had a mobile phone but it didn't have text messaging facility. You could buy pagers to text via BT but the messages were vetted - no swearing - and I remember a row because people couldn't page one another in Welsh.

We had 'cable TV' at home which provided 30 channels.

There was an air of optimism following the Labour landslide in 1997 - I stayed up to watch the results come in, like many others.

There was no chip and PIN for card payments - your card would be swiped and you'd have to sign a receipt for your purchases which would be checked against the signature on the back.

We were members of the video library at the newsagents round the corner - I think it cost about £1.50 to hire a film for a week.

Certainly on these threads they are, but I don’t think being young has been as fun as it was in the 90s, since the 90s, on account of the world becoming more unstable, costs going up etc. Obviously some things are better (sexism, racism, the good side of the wonder that is the internet).

In terms of the Internet it was a transitional time. We had a home computer that had cost a £1000 to buy.
I had just moved jobs fom an office where I had my own PC to one with secretaries who you gave handwritten letters to type. A friend worked in an accounting firm that still used paper ledger books.
So you could be working in a job using computers every day and at home. Or working in an office and never having used a computer.
Hmrc gave tax breaks to small businesses to encourage them to buy a computer.
There was no smartphones. Mobile phones were basically used to text.
Things changed quickly in the next few years. But the fact this was a transition time means people have widely different experiences of whether they were using the Internet or not.

Just to prove what I said, here's a link to a Princess Diana conspiracy chat group that is archived on Google. I've linked to that because the search function doesn't seem to let me only show results from the 90s so I tried to think of something relevant to that era.

You can see that it reads much like anything now:

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.conspiracy.princess-diana/c/1QjResTkhOA/m/YJEzLVZVAtUJ

Ha - OK that is a fantasy, summers are overall better now

www.statista.com/statistics/912027/hottest-summers-in-united-kingdom/

In fact it's exactly the sort of bonkers thread that might appear on here today.

That was one of the best times In my life. I was 28 in1998 and had been married two years. We bought our second house that year , moving up from a small 3 bed semi to a large 4 bed detatched which cost us £118k. Within two years it had doubled in value and just kept increasing. I was a mortgage advisor at the time and couldn't believe how quickly house prices were increasing.

We had investments in banking shares at the time through our jobs and they just kept going up and up. It was boom years. We seemed to have so much money for meals out , lots of expensive holidays and so much shopping. We'd frequently come back from shopping trips with bags and bags of new clothes, shoes and stuff for the house. We were on fairly average salaries but life was so good. I just can't imagine that now.

There was a lot of hope around due to the new Labour government. Even Tory voting friends were eventually swept up in the good vibe.

We didn't have internet access at home but started visiting internet cafes to get on line around that time. We eventually got internet access at home in 2001 ( on the day of 9/11 weirdly ) but my parents had it earlier than that.

For us it was the financial crash in 2007 that changed everything and life hasn't been as fun and carefree since .