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.
Most families own a box or a scrapbook full of tokens and mementoes of their lives. Every object unlocks an attic in the mind, a storehouse of reminiscence.
Nostalgia Central is a scrapbook providing a trip from the rockin’ fifties, via the swinging sixties, the mirror-balled seventies, and the Day-Glo eighties, to the Britpop nineties.
I created Nostalgia Central in 1998 because I thought it would be “a good hobby” . . .
The site was originally housed at a free Geocities URL – with the catchy address www.geocities.com/SoHo/Atrium/3451 – and 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 and graphics – 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.
For those born later, I answer the question “what was it like?”. For you, this website is a travel guide to the past. A ticket to the time machine.
Did television really stop broadcasting during the day? Did men actually sit on the beach in a suit and tie? Was there truly a time when the motorways were as empty as the open seas?
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.
It was Homer (Simpson) who said: “Every time you learn something new it pushes something old out of your brain”. If that is true, where does it leave our nostalgic memories? Worry no longer, because that is why Nostalgia Central is here – to remember for you. So now you can go ahead and learn new stuff without fear of having some great memories pushed out of your brain.
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.
Thank you for your support of the site over the past two decades, and I hope you continue to enjoy your trip in the time machine.
