✏️ School

1950s 1950

Listen With Mother

Fifteen minutes of stories and nursery rhymes on the Home Service at quarter to two, aimed at under-fives and the mothers who needed a sit down.

📺 Telly✏️ School

1950s 1952

Spam Fritters

Tinned meat in batter. A school dinner staple that divides every family gathering to this day.

🍽️ Food & Drink✏️ School

1950s 1958

Clackers In The Playground

You swung them until they clacked top and bottom. Then they shattered, and that was the end of clackers.

🧸 Toys & Games✏️ School

1960s 1963

Blue Peter Badges

Send in something good enough and a shield-shaped badge arrived in the post. Nothing else at that age came close.

📺 Telly✏️ School

1960s 1965

The Spirograph

Toothed plastic wheels, a biro and a lot of pins, producing patterns that looked far more impressive than the effort involved.

🧸 Toys & Games✏️ School

1960s 1968

Green Cross Code Man

Public information films that terrified and instructed a generation in roughly equal measure.

📣 Adverts✏️ School

1970s 1978

Grange Hill

Phil Redmond's series about a London comprehensive, with bullying, truancy and a sausage on a fork in the title sequence.

📺 Telly✏️ School

1980s 1982

The BBC Micro At School

Acorn's machine for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, which ended up in nearly every school in Britain.

✏️ School📟 Tech & Gadgets

1980s 1984

Choose Your Own Adventure Books

Fighting Fantasy and its imitators: gamebooks where you rolled dice, kept score, and cheated constantly.

📰 Comics & Magazines✏️ School

1980s 1985

Blue Riband And The Lunchbox

A thin chocolate wafer in a red wrapper, permanently at the bottom of the biscuit tin.

🍬 Sweets & Chocolate✏️ School

1990s 1994

Trainers With Lights In The Heel

Light-up trainers were the most desirable footwear in any primary school, for roughly six months each.

👖 Fashion✏️ School

1990s 1995

Pogs

You stacked them, slammed them, and kept whichever landed face up. Then every school in Britain banned them.

🧸 Toys & Games✏️ School

1990s 1995

The Encarta CD-ROM

An entire encyclopedia on one CD, with video clips that ran at postage-stamp size and a "Mind Maze" game nobody finished.

📟 Tech & Gadgets✏️ School

1990s 1995

The School Overhead Projector

Before whiteboards and projectors, learning happened via a bright box that hummed and got hot enough to burn.

✏️ School

2010s 2014

Loom Bands

A plastic loom and bags of coloured elastic bands that produced bracelets, and then covered every floor in Britain.

🧸 Toys & Games✏️ School

2010s 2017

The Fidget Spinner

A bearing in a plastic frame that spun. Every child in Britain had one by May 2017 and none by September.

🧸 Toys & Games✏️ School