Telephonic Youth

Young people’s phone cultures in the 80s and 90s
Share your memories of where you used phones as a child and teenager: at home, out, at work, or in school

Submit your memory View the Digital map

Step 1

Fill in some details of your phone memories and view other people’s submissions

Step 2

Upload images, videos, audio files and text of your telephone memories

Step 3

Become part of the community telling a new history of young people’s phone use

Find out more

Mapping memories of phone use

Share your memories of where you used phones as a child and teenager: at home, out, at work, or in school

We want to build a map that shows where and how young people used to use telephones. We need your memories of phones you used growing up – pay phones, home phones, maybe your first mobile phone – please share your memories.

View the Digital map

Why contribute to the digital mapping?

1. Go on a memory journey

This is your chance to recall forgotten memories of using telephones as a child and teenager

2. Tell your own story

Get involved and make your memories part of how we tell a new history

3. Reminisce and learn together

Share your recollections and think about where your phone stories fit with other people’s

4. See things differently

Look back on your child and teenage years using phones, and think differently about debates about young people’s phone use today

5. Find a community

When you submit your memories you are not only recording your story, you are joining our community, and helping to shape history

Add your memories

Latest news and articles

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Telephone memories and the importance of place

Our research explores the changing nature of children and young people’s telephone use and telephone cultures in late-twentieth century Britain. Within this w...

Tracing themes in our digital map

As we look back on a year of submissions to the Telephonic Youth digital map, in this post we identify key themes in the memories that are now published on our ...

Digital mapping one year in: our research methods; or what we did

In August 2021, the Telephonic Youth team began to collect memories through our social media channels and at in-person public events in Southampton. Over the ne...

About the project

Be part of our work uncovering the untold recent history of children and young people’s telephone cultures in the UK

This research project is the first study of young people’s telephone use in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Aswell as archival research, we want to learn from you about your childhood memories of accessing and using telephones in this era.

Learn more

Listen to our audio library

Hear people discussing what they remember about how they used telephones when they were growing up

We are doing interviews with people who grew up in the UK about their childhood memories of using phones in the 1980s and 1990s. The interviews will form a new collection of previously unrecorded information, helping us to tell this history.

Listen here