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 a mum of an 18m old.
We got given a 2 bed council house and had an income of about £80 a week after rent.
There were play groups everywhere for the little ones, most were run by churches.
99p Littlewoods breakfasts were great.
There were markets in most towns, and you could buy lots of bargains, think if it as Poundland departments on each stall.
I could afford to run a car and go out a lot.
Adams was the place to buy baby clothing, they only did smaller children sizes, also Woolys Ladybird range was like Asda George of today.
We all had cake and coffee in cafes that were on the main shopping street.
Shopping was amazing, you could spend all day looking in the shops, and each week there would be new stock.
Dad's worked and most did no childcare, shock horror if you saw one pushing a pram.
Kids TV on a Saturday morning was still brilliant, The tweenies arrived. How my child loved them, also come fly with me... with a dog.

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

There weren't many good websites. 'The Internet' of course dates from considerably earlier than the web (I played Mornington Crescent online in the first half of the 80s) and by the late 90s was being used more by companies for work purposes.

99p Littlewoods breakfasts were great

I used to love the Littlewoods cafe when I was a student!

It wasn’t my experience that everyone was accessing the internet. I was in my early 20s, buying first house etc, low paid job. I didn’t have a computer until 2002 when I went to uni as a mature student, that was my first email address. I worked in the charity sector so we had word processors in the office - no money for the internet. I went to internet cafes to play about on occasions. It was the same for all of my friends.

I used university internet and first had internet at home in about 2005, when I could afford a computer - I was 30 then.

I had my first mobile in 2001, a work phone. First personal mobile the following year maybe?

They were all really expensive and I didn’t earn very much in those days.

I had forgotten about Littleworth breakfast. Five items for a £1. I used to go before work smells days.

This was pre-tax credits. And at a time when receiving any child maintenance reduced any income support you received.

It was a very, very hard time to be a single mum.

Does anyone remember minus-2p baked beans at Tesco?

The baked beans were priced at minus 2p so the 'cost' would be deducted from your shopping - there was a limit on how many cans you could buy.

They were value baked beans and pretty crap, it has to be said.

Kwik save, somerfields and Netto were around.

Orange Wednesdays.

If we were really skint What She Wants was a fairly decent cheap clothes shop. Plus Bay Trading and other cheaper shops.

I remember paging my boyfriend to ring me!!!

Thankyou.
today I access the internet for almost anything I want to find out. Yesterday I watched YouTube videos on restaurants in Venice, a 1990s documentary on poverty in Glasgow, how to make Hiroshima style Okonomiyaki. I listened to a podcast on my journey to where I needed to go.
today I have bought windscreen wipers assisted by online shopping where it told me what I needed according to my index; browsed Christmas food from m&s, the price of a Colin the caterpillar cake, looked up info on the 2022 opening of Parliament.
in 1998 none of this would have been possible, to say that the internet available then was anything remotely approaching the same as now is ludicrous.
I worked in a wine shop in the early 2000s. We sold wine online. Every time we changed the stock I had to manually code the product. It was a right hassle, hardly the really easy job it is now.

in 1998 none of this would have been possible, to say that the internet available then was anything remotely approaching the same as now is ludicrous.

Google wasn't founded until the second half of 1998!

I'll ask my sister but I'm surprised I don't remember that

I remember the scrapyard giving money for drinks cans.

Staffing was better so work wasn't so bad - in my experience, they hadn't yet cut staff numbers to the bone. Tony Blair didn't have his plan to turn London into Monte Carlo (never been there so not sure if it's worked but it certainly feels like it's only nice for the very very rich now).

used dial up internet at work in 1998.

didn't have a culture of kids everywhere. That was fab!

Wikipedia launched 2001, YouTube 2005. Twitter 2006, Facebook 2009. Hard now to imagine the internet without those.

A job in Aldi was the most coveted because the wages were great. But you had to memorize about 600 prices and if you failed you were sacked!

There was no Brexit and freedom of movement.

I applied on impulse for a job in the Netherlands. A couple of weeks later I loaded my worldly goods into my car and drove to Amsterdam. Spent 5 happy years there.

I'm heartbroken that my kids won't have that kind of freedom. .

I was 17 in 1998. You could have a decent night out from the £3 an hour I earnt. Platform boots were in and those massive trainers. I can't really remember much about the outside world but it seemed a lot less bleak back then.

Posters saying the work environment was more sexist. I dunno on that, I worked in The City and those women gave as good as they got! In fact as a bright eyed graduate I was taken aback at the...ahem...robust language. The difference was people were not the absolute wet wipes that they are now.

I've always said this country started to lose the plot once Diana died, so the late 90s really were the last hurrah of normality imo.

I still own some shorts from Bay Trading 😂.

Thinking back, we got the internet in 1997/8 (to follow a specific sailing race). It was dual up then.

However, I was aware of a form of internet in late 80s, called JANET - Joint Academic Network. It was at university and you could send messages to other students.

Walking my dog today, I noticed his many dads were taking their kids to school. That wasn’t such a thing then, I guess wfh has changed that a lot.

And eighties was the best decade, not nineties.

I was a graduate trainee (outside London) and felt like I had a huge amount of spare money after rent, bills, food etc. I went out a lot, bought lots of clothes and could afford weekends away, holidays, CDs etc without a second thought. I bought a brand new car and went to loads of festivals, gigs etc. I have not felt that well off since.

My best friend bought a small 2 bed house with a garden in a nice area for about 2 x my annual salary and I considered doing the same but decided that I'd be better off waiting a few years when my salary would have increased so I'd be able to buy a 'forever home' instead. Plus I was not sure what town/city I'd want to live in so it seemed sensible to wait a few years to avoid the hassle of selling up or letting out a house. This turned out to be a big mistake - by the time I wanted to buy a house a few years later even with my higher salary I could still only afford the same sort of house as my friend but I had a bigger mortgage and hadn't paid any off.

Although smoking was not permitted in my workplace in general, several of the bosses smoked in their offices including during meetings. There was a staff smoking room and this was generally seen to be a pretty cool place to meet for a chat. There were also smoking carriages on trains. Even if you didn't smoke yourself your hair and clothes would stink of smoke after a night out in pubs/clubs. My friends and I had mobile phones and texts were quite a new thing- but mobile calls were incredibly expensive so we tended to only use them for very quick calls. If we wanted to chat we would call on the landline (and everyone had one). On an average month then my mobile phone bill cost me more than I currently pay for all 4 of my family's phones now, with unlimited calls and texts. Some months my mobile bill cost over £100.

Of course no era is perfect, but what the U.K. generally had then, which it is generally missing now, was a sense of optimism. The over riding feeling was that things were getting better and the U.K. was a great place to live, work and visit. The future really was bright.

I was in my second year at university in London. We had very good access to the internet as it was free for universities so we have free access at all computers in the libraries and computer centres (and unlimited emails from our university email account). A lot of websites and social media we take for granted did not exisit but the internet was defnitely out there - a more anarchic and interesting place full of live chats and early adopters.

Tech was more expensive and less used - for example only well off students have laptops and mobiles (although that was changing as Natwest gave a mobile hand set as a welcome present when people opened a student account). We had pagers in my shared house and thought ourselves very fancy.

We went out a lot to clubs and gigs. We drank a lot. People smoked indoors (i remember coming back from clubs and even my shoes smelt of cigarette smoke).

Young women did not care so much about hair and make up - it was about fun rather than looking polished - i wore a lot of face and body glitter, neon nail varnish and hair twisted in to little buns like Bjork.

We had a dial up connection to the Internet at work (a tiny staff library in the middle of London). It wasn’t quite true there were ‘no good websites’ back then - true, online shopping was still unreliable but if it was information and knowledge you were after, you just needed to know where to look. I did a whole presentation on relevant websites at a work conference, with the help of Freenet - remember that?

I also used to visit newsgroups and early message boards.

I remember in buying a book that was just a list of websites! Mad to think that in the early days it was quite hard to find websites unless you knew the actual web address. I still use the same yahoo email address that I created and in 1998.

Were texts charged per letter? Remember the 'txt spk' to get the length of the text down? 'We r goin out. R u comin?'