🎵 Music

1950s 1956

The Coffee Bar

Gaggia machines arrived from Italy and gave British teenagers the first indoor space that was theirs.

🍽️ Food & Drink🎵 Music

1950s 1956

The Dansette Record Player

Portable, two-tone, with an autochanger that stacked eight singles and dropped them one at a time onto the turntable.

🎵 Music🛋️ Around The House

1960s 1962

The Transistor Radio

Pocket sized, leather cased, powered by a PP3 battery, and held against one ear at low volume after lights out.

📟 Tech & Gadgets🎵 Music

1960s 1962

Vinyl Singles With A Pushed-Out Centre

British 45s came with a removable centre for jukeboxes, and everyone had a drawer full of the little plastic bits.

🎵 Music

1960s 1964

Radio Caroline

A ship anchored in international waters playing records all day, listened to under the bedclothes on a transistor radio.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

1960s 1964

Top Of The Pops

The chart show that decided what was in your ears for the following seven days, whether you liked it or not.

📺 Telly🎵 Music

1970s 1974

Watching The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club

Granada recreated a working men's club in a studio: singers, comics, a gavel and a bar.

📺 Telly🎵 Music

1970s 1977

The Cassette Recorder And Taping The Charts

Sunday evening, Radio 1, a C90 in the deck, and a lifetime of recordings with the last two seconds of the DJ on them.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

1980s 1981

The Sony Walkman

A cassette player with headphones and no speaker, which sounded absurd until everybody had one.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

1990s 1993

Mr Blobby

A character from Noel's House Party who became a genuine Christmas number one and then a theme park.

📺 Telly🎵 Music

1990s 1994

The Discman And The Anti-Skip Button

A portable CD player that skipped if you walked, ran on batteries for two hours, and was carried perfectly flat like a waiter.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

1990s 1998

MiniDisc

Rewritable, skip-proof, and you could name every track. Sony's finest format and a commercial disappointment.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2001

Free CDs On Magazine Covers

PC magazines with a CD or two taped to the front, full of game demos, utilities and one very large free ISP installer.

📰 Comics & Magazines🎵 Music

2000s 2002

Burning CDs For People

Nero Burning ROM, a stack of CD-Rs, and a compilation handed over in a paper sleeve with the tracklist on the disc.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2004

Limewire And The Wrong Song

Peer-to-peer file sharing, where the file you wanted was 40% likely to be something else entirely.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2004

The iPod Click Wheel

Apple's music player, and the click wheel that made scrolling through 5,000 songs genuinely pleasant.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2005

Ringtone Adverts On Late-Night Telly

Subscription ringtone services advertised relentlessly, which signed up a generation to charges they could not cancel.

📣 Adverts🎵 Music

2010s 2010

The iPod Nano And The Last Click Wheel

The sixth-generation Nano dropped the click wheel for a touchscreen the size of a postage stamp, and people wore it as a watch.

🎵 Music📟 Tech & Gadgets

2010s 2013

HMV's Last Days

HMV went into administration in 2013, closing dozens of stores, and became the last mainstream place to buy a physical album.

🎵 Music🏬 Shops & High Street