Hello there. My name is David and Nostalgia Central is my online blog and scrapbook filled with memories of the music, television, movies and pop culture I love.
I created Nostalgia Central in 1998 because I thought it would be “a good hobby” . . .
Originally housed at a free Geocities URL – with the catchy address www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/3451 – within 6 months the site was attracting over 2,000 hits a week.
At the time there wasn’t much quality nostalgic content on the Internet and the site soon grew much larger than I had ever envisaged.
This ultimately drove a move to a dedicated server in December 1999, and the site was re-launched as nostalgiacentral.com on 1 January 2000.
By 2001 Nostalgia Central housed close to 200MB of pages, graphics and sound files and was attracting a million hits per month – so much for the hobby!
My intention is for Nostalgia Central to be a giant online scrapbook looking back at five decades of music, movies, television, pop culture and social history.
It is full of photographs and images, incidents and anecdotes, facts and figures, which will strike a light in the memory of anyone who lived through these decades, evoking all kinds of half-forgotten experiences and memories.
Alas, my love of (my wife would say “obsession with”) the music, television and pop culture of the second half of the 20th century has never provided me with an income, and in the “real world” I have worked in the world of information technology since the 1990s.
The past, it has been said, is another country. If so, it is a place in which all of us have travelled. We remember its customs. We recognise its highways. We all know people there. If the past is another country, then each of us is a passport-carrying citizen of that land.
Nostalgia Central does not say everything there is to say about the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but it touches on everything significant – that is if you believe that the joy of a new Batman episode or the feel of a Raleigh Chopper are at least as important as the annual rate of inflation or the winning majority at an election. I certainly do.
You can use this site like a reference guide, a library, a map, or (if you want to do yourself some permanent damage) it can be read end-to-end like a long, long story.
Videos at Nostalgia Central are hosted by YouTube. Audio files and playlists are streamed from Spotify.
There are no audio or video media files hosted at Nostalgia Central.
Nostalgia Central is updated on a daily basis. In researching and assembling a website of this size and scope, there will be inevitable inaccuracies or omissions. Please report any errors here.
To date, I have received a great deal of support, particularly from the academic and media communities who use this site as a research and reference tool, and from individuals who cherish the memories and enjoy the site as pure nostalgic entertainment.
Thank you for your patronage and support of this site over the past 19 years, and I hope you continue to enjoy your trip in the time machine.
Big thanks to the following people who have helped make the journey a lot of fun over the years:
Steve Berry, Graham Kibble-White, Martin Fenton, Chris Freeman, Chris Hughes, Mike Meade, Tony Moore, Gareth Randall, Tony Roberts, Jon Shelley, John Vineburg, James Macleane, Chris Mikul, Will Plunkett, David Bodycombe, Martin A. Fairgrieve, Stephen Lewis, David Savage, Glenn Spiteri, the Basa family, the staff at the Westminster Central Reference Library in London, and all my friends for their support, inspiration and memory-joggers. An extra special thank you to all past members of the old TV Cream and Bullet mailing lists.
