About the project

Our project is telling the untold history of young people’s telephone cultures as phone technologies revolutionised over the 1980s and 1990s – share your stories and be part of this history

Telephonic Youth

Children’s phone use today is much debated. This project thinks about the history of children and teenagers as telephone users in the 1980s and 1990s: how young people accessed phones, the experience of children’s phone use at that time, and how it was imagined. This project uses a range of methods – archival research, arts methods, crowd-sourced research and oral history interviews – to uncover this recent history and trace the importance of phones in children’s lives in this era.

This research is the first study of young people’s telephone use in the 1980s and 1990s. Get involved and be part of how we remember and tell this story.

The research on our website

Digital mapping

Using your memories, we’re mapping how and where young people used telephones, at home and elsewhere, as part of growing up.

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Audio interviews

Capturing childhood memories of when and why phones were so important in young people’s lives, as phone technologies revolutionised over the period.

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Online exhibition

We’re collaborating with BT Group Archives to curate an exhibition of BT materials aimed at children, young people and parents in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Digital mapping

Using the memories that you share, we’re creating a digital map to chart the changing history of the locations and spaces that children have used phones since the 1980s. Please submit your memories from wherever you lived in the UK as a child or teenager. We are collecting memories covering the whole of the UK and particularly encourage any stories covering Southampton and the surrounding area.

View the map

Audio interviews

We are interviewing adults who were aged between 5 and 19 years between the years 1984 and 1999 to share their memories of using telephones as children and teenagers. These interviews are creating new data about childhood memories of telephone use, giving us a previously untapped record of the experiences and memories of children and young people as telephone users in their own right. You can listen to clips of these interviews on our audio interviews page.

Listen here

Online exhibition

With BT Group Archives, we are curating a new online exhibition, ‘Growing up with BT on the phone’. The exhibition will feature published materials from BT’s archive, tracing how the organisation marketed telephones and telephone use to children and families in the 1980s and 1990s, aswell as its work educating young people in telecommunications technologies.

View the exhibition

Researchers

This research was made possible by a successful application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, under its Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship scheme. The Arts and Humanities Research Council is part of UK Research and Innovation, which is sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The research project is based within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Southampton.

Dr Eve Colpus

Principal Investigator

Eve is a cultural and social historian, and Associate Professor in British and European History post-1850 at the University of Southampton. In her research to date, she has been interested in the impact of media technologies in everyday life and on individuals’ senses of self, and this has inspired the development of this project. Eve is overseeing all strands of the project, and is aiming particularly to centre children’s own experiences and feelings in the research.

Dr Aaron Andrews

Research Fellow (2021-22)

Aaron is a digital and urban historian and was a Research Fellow on the project in 2021-22. Aaron is interested in using digital technologies to research and share histories. He worked primarily in this project on the digital mapping research strand. Aaron’s previous research has investigated the history of the ‘inner city’ in the 1970s and 1980s and the impact of burns injuries on urban communities and everyday life in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Project Partners

We are undertaking this research in collaboration with two project partners spanning the heritage and creative arts sectors. Our collaborations support our ambitions to encourage public contributions and engagement with the project, including through opportunities for creative responses to the research and the creation of new research resources.

BT Group Archives

BT Group Archives preserve and give access to BT’s heritage, dating back to 1846. Few companies in the world have such a rich heritage. Telecommunications has had a profound impact on society and improving people’s lives, and BT has been at the forefront of innovation. BT’s archival collections are recognised as part of the UK’s cultural heritage by both UNESCO and Arts Council England. BT has always acknowledged its duty of care to safeguard this legacy on behalf of the nation, and to make it accessible for the widest possible audience.

John Hansard Gallery

John Hansard Gallery, part of the University of Southampton, is one of the UK’s leading contemporary art galleries, supporting, developing and presenting great art by outstanding artists from across the world. John Hansard Gallery’s mission is to be a locally engaged and an internationally recognized contemporary art gallery in the heart of Southampton. The Gallery strives to engage the broadest possible audiences through creating innovative and critically acclaimed contemporary art exhibitions, events, learning and research projects that excite, challenge, reflect and reach diverse experience.

Want to part of the project?

Visit the digital map and submit your memories

View the digital map