Hi, and welcome to Nostalgia Central. My name is David Turner, and I was born in South Yorkshire, England, in 1961. You can read a bit about my growing up in the 60s and 70s here.
I’ve been obsessed with music, movies, TV and pop culture from an early age, and I created Nostalgia Central in 1998 as a personal online “scrapbook” of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
It was intended as a recollection of things that were either my personal favourites or which were particularly representative of the era, without necessarily being critically acclaimed.
At that time, there wasn’t much quality nostalgic content on the Internet – and besides, I thought it would be a good hobby . . .
Originally hosted at a free Geocities URL, the site quickly received over 2,000 visitors a week within six months, and by 2001, Nostalgia Central housed close to 10,000 articles and 200 MB of images and was attracting a million visits per month.
So much for the hobby.
What began as a pet project quickly expanded into an all-encompassing popular culture encyclopaedia that ultimately became a major internet (and media) guide to six decades of Pop Culture, Television, Music, Movies, and Social History.
I added the 1950s in 2007, and eventually the 1990s too, finding myself writing nostalgically about events that occurred after I began Nostalgia Central.
Having launched in 1998, I guess the site itself now qualifies as nostalgia. That’s very meta!
I debated for a long time whether to venture into the noughties. And so Nostalgia Central now comes to an end with 2009.
This is, of course, an arbitrary cut-off point. There are no checkpoints to mark the frontier between the past and the almost present. But we know somehow when that border has been crossed.
Photographs, TV shows, and music from the year 2010 and beyond do not, for me, evoke the spirit of the age in quite the same way.
The dust has yet to settle on the events; the detail has not been forgotten, and so the remembering of it is not accompanied by the joyful rush of rediscovery . . . Not yet, anyway.
So, whether you are looking for reference material or simply entertainment, if it happened between 1950 and 2009, you will probably find it here.
You can use Nostalgia Central as a travel guide, a library or – if you want to do yourself some permanent damage – it can be read end-to-end like a long, long, bizarre story.
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, hopefully evoking all kinds of half-forgotten experiences and memories.
For those born later, it’s a travel guide to the past.
A ticket to the time machine, if you like.
I usually update Nostalgia Central every day, but it is still just a hobby and generates no income. The site carries no advertising, so I rely entirely on your donations.
If you find the site informative or enjoyable, please consider a donation – no matter how small – to help cover the site’s running costs and ensure I can keep Nostalgia Central running for your entertainment and education.
Thank you so much.
Take care, have fun, and I hope you enjoy your trip in the time machine!
Cheers
David
PS: I forgot to mention, we have an online radio station now, too. NC Radio broadcasts 24-hours a day, and you can listen here. It’s nostalgia for your ears!
