what before your time events do you wish you could have seen?

[ThePinkDreamer]

the 1966 world cup for a start

To be honest, I am not sure why an epic high-budget film has not been made of the Crystal Palace and The Great Exhibition. On the big screen it could be awesome.

Think Ridley Scott, who took us into the Roman Empire. Or the brooding gothic directing of Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker's Dracula. I just feel there is a great story to be told there.

I'd love to have gone to the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition.

I studied the Industrial Revolution in History and it has always fascinated me. I like nothing better than looking around steam engines, mining, shipbuilding, steel works exhibitions and farming museums, and places like Beamish, Blasts Hill, etc., to see the "old" technology and how innovative it was.

The 1851 exhibition showed Worldwide technology and innovations, and not just that, but the building itself was innovative and futuristic (at that time).

The whole thing showed how quickly things changed around that time.

Edit: Cross posted with covus above.

Moon landing for me too.

I would love to live through the 1960s counterculture and summer of love. My parents lived through it and said it didn't really reach their northern mill town, so I'd have to be in the centre of it - London or San Fran 😀

Time of dinosaurs would be interesting as long as I was safe.

I’d like to visit popular tourist areas like Venice before they became full of tourists.

I guess these don’t properly answer the question as not so specific.

Likewise, at 61 I remember a lot of the events mentioned which makes me feel very old!

I would love to have been at the Tudor court happily married and quite safe but to have watched the Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn saga play out. I’ve always been fascinated by that story.

If anyone is interested there’s a great series by an author called Jodie Taylor about a madcap bunch of historians who ‘investigate historical events in contemporary time (just don’t call it time travel!)’. It’s the St Mary’s series and there’s a companion series about the Time Police. Great fun and and interesting.

I too remember a fair few of these! Queen at Live Aid was phenomenal. The footage on YouTube gives you a fair idea.

I'd like to go back to the late 1950s or whenever the planners started talking about demolishing Euston Station and somehow put a stop to it. I travel from Euston quite often now and it's utterly soulless. The other London mainline stations survived and thrived in their original Victorian buildings. Here's what we have now and what we lost.

My mum and dad young

Ooh me too. I have a polish friend and am always asking her questions. I am fascinated by it.

Oh, @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g, I’m always thinking the same thing, not just about Euston, but other demolished buildings or landmarks, or preventing disastrous bits of urban planning. I’d read the hell out of a time travel novel where the time traveller is trying to preserve the Euston Arch.

Another vote for Woodstock.

I'm another whose Mum remembered Crystal Palace burning down (so she reckoned)

Along the lines of Euston station, I would love to have seen the stately homes that were demolished after the war, in their heyday.

YY to Soviet times, I was a bit obsessed with May Day parades as a child
Belle Epoque-era Paris
Weimar-era Berlin
Various World Fairs and Expos

Aren't they supposed to be putting the Euston Arch back?

V.E. day anywhere. And to see The Beatles playing a normal venue (not a stadium or tv studio). I would have screamed myself hoarse.

50s New wave Jazz scenesters, Mods, punks, new romantics, even decent ecstacy tablets like in 88?!
I was a 90s teen so anything before that seemed cool!

I'd like to know what Stonehenge/Newgrange people really believed and lived like, what way did society work. So I'd need a quite a few dates I suppose rather than a specific day in time.

That's shameful wilfully knocking down a beautiful building and replacing it with ugly.
They do the same here all the time, it's a disgrace.

Most of us would only have got anywhere near those places by getting a job as a skivvy! I often think this when I see the castle on the island where my Mum lives. It belongs to the National Trust for Scotland now and keen volunteers, many of them recent incomers to the island, talk fawningly to visitors about 'the Duke' and 'the family'. My grandfather worked there as a gardener and didn't have a good word to say about the Duke and his family, who unilaterally cut his wages on one occasion when they were feeling the pinch and had to find some economies (nothing as radical as selling off one of their stately homes, of course!). In their heyday only the very wealthy and/or blue-blooded got inside the castle. The rest of us would have been directed to the tradesmen's and servants' entrance.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g oh definitely. I would have been in the kitchen. (My ancestors are all mill workers and servants.)

Travelling the route of the The Hippie trail in the 1970s and seeing many popular tourist destinations before mass tourism took off.

Kitchen for me too, I think. I'm not very good at cleaning or laundry and I'd have made a rubbish parlourmaid or lady's maid.

Me too! 🤣

We didn't have a telly at the time that the World Cup was on, but even if we had we wouldn't have watched it as neither of my parents was interested in football.

I would love to go back in time and see versailles after the extension/building work was done changing it from a hunting lodge to what it is today. I wonder what it was like living there under the sun king.

I've often sulked over missing the Great Exhibition. The 1924 one at Wembley Park looked really fun too.
But almost everything I'm passionate about happened long before I was born, my favourite band formed and then split up 30 years before I was born, my two favourite female singers were successful in the 1920s and my favourite male singer was a music hall star in the 1890s.