How would you sum up the UK in the 1990s to an alien? Most likely, you’d mention Britpop in music, the YBAs in visual art, New Labour in politics – it’s bragging, but then the decade is one of the few times we’ve ever been cool, so you’d be forgiven.
However, if all the extraterrestrial tourist had to go on was the 1991 time capsule recently dug up at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), they’d be altogether less impressed – probably leaving earth in a hurry, and carrying straight on to Jupiter on their Milky Way grand tour.
That’s because – how to put this delicately? – the two children who chose the capsule’s contents, aged 9 and 11, picked the most tedious array of tat you could imagine. Among the objects apparently representing life at the turn of the 90s were: a photo of Princess Diana, who helped bury the capsule in the first place; a snowflake hologram; five tree seeds; and a piece of recycled paper. No, really.
The closest they got to choosing anything interesting was Kylie Minogue’s Rhythm of Love album, but as any fan knows, that’s hardly her best work.
OK, OK, I’m being harsh – I suspect adults living in the middle of Cool Britannia wouldn’t have done much better. After all, it’s notoriously difficult to analyse something when you’re in the midst of it. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” is a cliché for a reason, and it turns out it’s just as applicable to decades as romantic relationships.
The capsule’s contents also included a pocket television, a solar-powered calculator and a copy of The Times (Photo: Great Ormond Street Hospital/PA Wire)Humans need distance to see something clearly – but that’s not to say that the close-up view offered by immediate experience is totally without merit. The objects in the GOSH capsule might be dull, but they were evidently representative of the texture of daily life for the kids who chose them.
As such, they reveal something quieter (and probably, truer) than a box of the decade’s objective highlights – say, a Pulp Fiction video tape, a flyer from a Tracey Emin exhibition, and a bottle of CK 1 – could ever hope to. The best bits only tell a small part of the story – certainly, there’s something salutary in being reminded of the 90s’ humdrum aspects, especially as we’re so prone to romanticising them.
What’s more, the story begs the question of how we would sum up our own time. The mid-20s feels defined by general shittiness, but who can say how future generations will look back on it? Impossible to know, but let’s give it a go – how to parcel up the UK in 2025 for my imaginary alien? Maybe a vape, and a St George’s flag? An iPhone, playing terrible music through tinny speakers? How do you put the internet in a capsule? Can we fit in a Lime bike? How about a food bank parcel?
And how can I stop my choices from telling you far more about me – my political affiliations, the part of the country I live in, my age and priorities – than about wider society? I take it all back: confronted with the impossible task of encapsulating life now, the 1991 lot have my endless sympathy.
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No matter how objective I was trying to be, my 2025 capsule would look very different to someone my parents’ age, living in Cornwall, say, rather than London, or working at a school instead of writing silly little articles, because our lives are impacted – defined – by different forces.
Part of what is so exasperating – but ultimately, so touching – about the GOSH capsule is how personal the children’s selections were. It goes without saying that snowflake holograms did not represent life in the UK in 1991. Yet clearly, for one nine-year-old from Norwich, hers felt pretty special. And in that counterintuitive way in which culture so often operates, that which is most subjective becomes most universal after all.
In the 1990s, as in the 1690s or 1290s, humans have comically limited perspectives on how their experiences fit into a wider narrative. As such, time capsules can never tell us as much about a time as they can the people who inhabited it: reliably inward-looking across centuries and continents, far less changeable than the world around them.
All this to say: you can pack as many Lost Marys and iPhones into a box as you like, but it’ll be decades before we have any insight into what’s really going on in 2025. Though god knows we could do with it a lot sooner.
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