📱 2000s

2000s 2000

Big Brother Launch Night

Channel 4 put strangers in a house and ran it 24 hours a day, and Britain could not look away.

📺 Telly

2000s 2000

Nokia 3310

Snake II, composer ringtones, and a reputation for surviving anything, which was mostly deserved.

📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2000

The Ford Focus Replacing The Escort

Ford replaced Britain's most familiar car with something genuinely modern and it worked immediately.

🚗 Cars & Transport

2000s 2000

The PlayStation 2

Sony's machine that was cheap enough to buy for the DVD playback and then quietly became the games console everyone owned.

🕹️ Video Games

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 2001

Frosted Tips And Hair Gel

A haircut that required a plastic cap, a hook and forty-five minutes in a friend's bathroom.

👖 Fashion

2000s 2002

Blockbuster Trying To Sell You A Membership Card

Joining a video shop was a small administrative event involving a utility bill.

🎬 Film🏬 Shops & High Street

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 2002

Texting On T9

Predictive text turned nine keys into a keyboard and created an entire dialect of abbreviations.

📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2003

Low-Rise Jeans And The Bootcut

The defining silhouette of the early 2000s, and the reason a generation is wary of any photograph taken between 2001 and 2006.

👖 Fashion

2000s 2003

MSN Messenger

Where an entire generation did its socialising between four o'clock and bedtime, in front of the family computer.

📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2003

The Digital Camera With A CompactFlash Card

Point and shoot digital cameras that ate batteries, filled a card in an afternoon, and were still a revelation.

📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2004

Household Broadband And The Router On The Stairs

ADSL arrived with a microfilter on every phone socket and changed the household relationship with the internet permanently.

📟 Tech & Gadgets🛋️ Around The House

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 Argos Pen On A Chain

The stubby pen used to write catalogue numbers on a paper slip, deliberately too small to steal and stolen constantly.

🏬 Shops & High Street

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

Football Manager On The Family PC

A spreadsheet with a football badge on it, and one of the most compulsive things ever put on a computer.

🕹️ Video Games⚽ Sport

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

2000s 2005

The Motorola RAZR

A flip phone thin enough to be a fashion object, sold on looks rather than function.

📟 Tech & Gadgets👖 Fashion

2000s 2006

Bebo And MySpace Top 8

Social networks before Facebook, where you chose a profile song and arranged your friends in order.

📟 Tech & Gadgets

2000s 2007

The Nintendo Wii In The Living Room

Motion controls, Wii Sports in the box, and a strap you were told to use and did not.

🕹️ Video Games

2000s 2007

The Smoking Ban

Smoking in enclosed public places was banned in England in July 2007, and the British pub changed overnight.

🏬 Shops & High Street

2000s 2008

Woolworths Closing

807 stores, 27,000 staff, and the moment the British high street visibly changed.

🏬 Shops & High Street