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'd just got married in 1998.
I didn't have a mobile phone - but my husband had a Nokia 3210.
He played games using dial up internet. No such thing as Wifi or social media. Photos still had to be developed from a camera.
I think a few years earlier SKY + had revolutionised the way we watched TV by being able to pause and rewind and record series so easily.
Everyone was panicking thinking planes would fall out the sky due to the "Millennium Bug"

This is a song that really brings back the era for me:

sen provision was really bad. I remember a police man came in to do a talk and the teacher picked a 9 ish yo boy who in retrospect had ASD, got the policeman to handcuff him to a table leg and everyone laughed as he cried (inc the teachers!!!!) This was more 1995 😥

I was mid to late 20s.

Work was easier to find.

We had mobiles but only for texts/ringing people. Email was fairly new too.

It did seem much happier, relaxed and safer.

Photos still had to be developed from a camera

There were digital cameras but they were in their infancy - very low-resolution. and super-expensive, and associated software was also in its infancy so you couldn't do much with the pictures other than print them.

@HilaryThorpe

We had internet at home from the early part of the decade, but it was very slow dial-up until we got cable with NTL by the late 1990s. We were both working in IT, DH since 1972.

Had Telewest cable installed Feb 2001 as soon as it was available in our area. My first computer was an Acorn Atom in 1981 and then a Sinclair ZX81 in 1983 followed by a QL of very fond memory in 1985. I was the only woman I knew (still am!) that taught herself to write 6502 assembly language.

The first computer I ever actually saw was a Leo III/19 on a school trip.

Sending a text was expensive as I recall, 30 or 50p, but as teenagers that didn't stop us! I think I found one of my old mobile bills once and it was astronomical!

I’ve just saw you mentioned Allders so you must have lived or known where I’m from in Kent/Surrey.

Shopping was much more of a thing but we had lots of independent shops too.

If you wanted to see a doctor you just phoned, they would answer it (no message or phone tree) and offer you a time without even asking why, and that appointment time would usually be within the week or so! 😲😔

There was also barely anything on the internet in 1998. It was unrecognisable from the internet we have today where everything is online

Older women looked different too, they often had set hairdos ("set" means it was fixed by the hairdresser with a solution into tight curls that didn't move) that were all very similar and they wore similar clothes, I can't remember exactly but long skirts etc. This would have been the look for women that we would consider relatively young/not old these days! I don't know why that was the case 🤔

From a personal point of view, it was glorious. I met DH at the end of 1997 and moved from Middlesex to Gloucestershire when we got engaged in 1998, aged 24. Previously, I'd been living in a house share with 4 schoolfriends, we were all working / training in professional jobs and thought we were living This Life.

When I moved to be with DH, I took a paycut of 1/3 to move to a regional office of an accountancy firm, and could still afford to live and save for a wedding. We went to France without even thinking about it, really, that summer. So easy.

We got married in 1999 and bought a 2 bed flat while I was still earning £13k, our mortgage was £340 a month. DH was part of the dot com bubble and had home internet from when I met him, albeit dialup. Our first joint computer cost £1,000.

It was brilliant partly because we were young, in love, solvent with disposable income and only had ourselves to please.

On the other hand, the world had felt so hopeful since the labour landslide in 1997. You could see things were genuinely getting better for the poorest and most disavdantaged in society, there were fewer rough sleepers, more support for early childhood. Whatever one thinks of Gordon Brown as a PM, as Chancellor I felt we had someone who knew how ecomonies worked, rather than just funnelling money where it has always gone i.e. into private fat cats' pockets. There was a Democrat in the White House, with every expectation of another one at the next Presidential Election; the Good Friday Peace Agreement was brokered and the need to be watchful in public areas in cities was gone. The Twenty First Century was coming, and it was going to be GREAT.

You do realise that the vast majority of us were young in the late 1990s. I was in my early 20s, young, free, single and living in staff accommodation with other early 20 somethings. We all had plenty of cash. The internet was definitely not on our radar.

I cringe when I think of how much I spent on CDs, £10-12 for an album and I had hundreds!

Now I pay £10 a month for unlimited streaming on Spotify. So some things are better now, I suppose!

Completely agree

There was not "nothing on the internet" and I'm not wrong, if you personally came to it late that's just you. Here is proof:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/christmas_internet_shopping/zj9shbk

Optimistic and hopeful.

Relatively speaking, but things like the MSN chatrooms were extremely lively nonetheless. America was ahead of the UK in internet adoption, and they had 'toll free' local calls so they could stay online via dial-up for as long as they liked in an era when this would have run up a phone bill in the UK - so there was a higher proportion of Americans relative to other nationalities.

EBay and Amazon were also up and running by 1998. Folk like me suddenly finding obscure books and music we'd scoured shops/fairs/paper catalogues for for years was available at the press of a button.

How interesting!

I had home internet in 1999 and it's odd to see I was just one of 19% of home with it.

In around 2003/4 I remember drilling a hole in the ceiling so I could pass the ethernet cable up through to upstairs and get internet upstairs! I felt very posh!

Blair and Brown brought in the minimum wage.

It's good to see that other people remember optimism and hope as the vibe of that era. It was a very bleak time in my life due to a bad relationship but I had DS and the general feeling socially was far less negative than now. Things were better for ordinary people without a lot of money.

Yes - the optimisim was a big thing. I came from a family that definately wasn't well off, but it just seemed like everything was OK and would only get better from then on.

I also agree with PP: the 9/11 attacks stand out in my mind as the point at which that really started to change. Suddenly the world felt much more dangerous.

I was on £3.50 an hour in my first job in the mid-90s - equivalent to about £7 today, so considerably less than the equivalent of min-wage today.

I was 19, worked and went to college in Greenwich London.
The music was great and the clubs/raves were amazing.
Hardly anyone used a mobile but some of my friends used pagers.
I knew a few people still living in poverty but it seemed to be better in regards to social housing ect than the 80s
I remember the misogyny being really bad.. it seemed common place to let 16 year olds into pubs and clubs (which I thought was brilliant) but the downside to that was it was also the norm for middle aged men to have a crack.
Also don't know if this has changed but I also remember as a teen in the 90s that Ecstasy and Coke were everywhere.
The thing I miss most though... My wash board stomach and Cadbury spira bars.