The telephone is an everyday object which serves a practical purpose: enabling communication at a distance.  Having spoken to hundreds of people at a range of events, for many, the everydayness made the telephone into something of a mundane object—it was ‘just there’, in the hallway, living room, or street corner (if a public call box). However, the very utility of the telephone—something which, by the 1980s was ‘just there’ for a majority in the UK, nearly always to hand—made it especially important for LGBTQ+ youth growing up during an exciting, liberating, and traumatic time. While phones played a variety of roles in LGBTQ+ youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s—and we’ll turn to that later—its use as a source of information and support, through organisations like (what is now called) Switchboard LGBT+ Helpline, made the telephone indispensable.

The London Gay Switchboard was established on 4 March 1974 to provide information, advice, and support to gay people. The service grew out of the short-lived Gay Liberation Front (1970-73) and way in part a response to the high number of calls being received by Gay News (1972-1983).[1] London Gay Switchboard was not the only such service—one was also established in Brighton in April 1975 and by 1979, there were similar services in Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leicester.[2] It wasn’t even the first, being pipped to the post by the Edinburgh Briefing Service—which served LGBTQ+ people in Scotland where homosexuality was still illegal—by two days. However, it was the largest, has since grown to become a national service, and its work is extraordinarily well documented.

Calls made to the switchboard are confidential, but records of calls now held at the Bishopsgate Institute in London provide an insight into the role of the telephone and dedicated telephone services in the lives of gay people. These stories have been thoroughly explored in a Heritage Lottery Funded project and podcast, the Log Books. As the podcast explores, Switchboard provided a range of vital services. London Gay Switchboard also worked with the National Council of Civil Liberties and Gay Legal Advice (GLAD) to provide legal advice to callers. Given that the Sexual Offences Act (1967) had only partially decriminalised homosexuality, legal advice was crucial in many areas of people’s lives, including their interactions with the police.[3]

The kinds of calls that Switchboard, and other services like it, received were wide-ranging and provide a rich insight into what it was like growing up as an LGBTQ+ person in late twentieth-century Britain. But telephone support services were particularly important, especially to young gay men, during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Before much was known about HIV; before there were preventative treatments; before it was conceivable that undetectable could mean untransmissible, many young LGBTQ+ people called Switchboard. In fact, Switchboard organised the first symposium on AIDS in Britain.[4]

Short video of singer-songwriter Tom Robinson volunteering for London Gay Switchboard. Tom Robinson, ‘London Gay Switchboard in 1979’, YouTube (2018).

London has a long queer history and is a place where many young LGBTQ+ people have moved to find and create communities. For those newly arriving in the 1970s, London Gay Switchboard provided advice on LGBTQ+ friendly housing—and warned against potential exploitation—as well as social spaces where people might make new friends. This role was particularly important for one young man when he began going to London, from his family home in Surrey, in the early 1980s. In an oral history interview with historian Sebastian Buckle, he remembered, ‘if you were new to London and gay you’d phone up the switchboard and they’d put you in contact with um the befriending group. Sounds a bit, yeah, but the idea was it was run by a group of volunteers and every Friday night it met so it alternated in different parts of London’.[5] The befriending group’s association with Switchboard lent this potentially hazardous practice of turning up at a stranger’s house an air of safety: ‘it was all above board it doesn’t sound like it was but it was all above board. The fact that it was run. The switchboard knew about it’.

The London Gay Switchboard, a voluntary telephone information and support service, clearly played a vital role in the lives of young gay men in the capital in the late twentieth century. But it wasn’t the only way that young gay men used the phone to connect to one another. As the oral history interviewee recalled: ‘[b]ecause there was no, obviously in the 80s there was no internet or Grindr (laugh). So it was, it was just when you were going out you socialised’. If you met people while you were out, ‘you’d probably swap numbers but again back in the 80s there was no mobile phones so it was really if you were home and the landline rang otherwise it was actually quite… so you could just miss people I suppose if you weren’t there to answer the phone’.

Changing telephonic technology has also shaped the experience of, among other things, gay dating, as chatlines became available: ‘Some of them were free and some of them you had to pay. I suppose you phoned and you put a description and you just talked to people. So I suppose it is, if you imagined now a Grindr but with no pictures or anything and you just talked to people’.

This very brief history of LGBTQ+ youth and the telephone is far from comprehensive. We’re still collecting memories for our online interactive map. You can share your own memories, completely anonymously.

[1] Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain: How the personal got political (Manchester, 2007), p. 87.

[2] Clifford Williams, Courage To Be: Organised gay youth in England, 1967-1990 (Kibworth, 2021), p. 47.

[3] Kate Bradley, Lawyers for the Poor: Legal advice, voluntary action and citizenship in England, 1890-1990 (Manchester, 2019), p. 138.

[4] Robinson, Gay Men and the Left, p. 174.

[5] Southampton City Archives: D/OH/SHP 6, Southampton’s Hidden Past and Present: An Oral History of the Gay Community, Interview by Sebastian Buckle, 2013.

Main image: London Gay Pride 1991, featuring a banner for Bristol Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. Photograph by Fae, March 1991. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gay_Pride_London_1991_2_March.jpg>

We were incredibly proud to see the first of our two community art exhibitions launched in Southampton at the start of April 2022. Dial up featured the artwork of a group of young people based in Southampton and reimagined the phone as an object, image and communication device and its effects on young people.

Description of the exhibition and accompanying materials.

The exhibition was the result of interpretative work undertaken by the group as part of Telephonic Youth’s collaboration with John Hansard Gallery. Beginning in November 2021, the young people worked with artist Russell Squires in a series of workshops over five months in which they responded to materials and themes from our research.

The young artists, known as The Telephonic Trio, experimented with a range of photographic styles. Inspired by Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series, they took photographs of the parts of disassembled landline telephones. They also drew on the traditions of vanitas still life artworks which used symbolic objects to remind the viewer of their mortality. Playing with this genre, The Telephonic Trio created atmospheric photographs that centred the phone.

The Telephonic Trio’s work spoke to the iconography of the 1980s and 1990s – our historical era – in playful ways. In their light painting photographs, the artists created colourful representations of the telephone number pad that were inspired by the neon colours in advertisements for phone chat lines found in teenage magazines of the late 1980s. In a nod to the zine culture of the 1990s, they created zines reflecting on varied associations of young people’s phone use, drawing on materials from BT Heritage & Archives’ collection, ephemera and creative writing.

Dial up has made a wonderful contribution to our research project and the questions we are asking. Moving between the imagery and the language of the telephone, it explores shifts and connections between young people’s phone use past and present. There are ways in which this is a distinctively Southampton show: all of the artworks were created in the city’s John Hansard Gallery or city centre by young Sotonians. But the show also points to the scales of connection and influence far beyond the city itself. Notably, The Telephonic Trio referenced the influence of Jamaican patois on the way young people from different cultural backgrounds in Britain speak on the phone today. Through this, Dial up presented a global story of contemporary youth culture.

Exhibition keywords.

Dial up was on display in John Hansard Gallery from 6 April until 7 May 2022. Some of The Telephonic Trio’s photography is also reproduced in our second community exhibition, Thinking inside the box, in K6 Gallery (located in the two red telephone boxes on Castle Way, Southampton), which is on show from 6 April until 10 July 2022.

Featured image: Photograph of Dial up at John Hansard Gallery by Reece Straw.

Throughout March and April, our friends at Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery have been running their 2022 Community Takeover events. Exploring the themes of environment, sustainability and wellbeing, the Gallery has worked with schools, local charities, artists, community leaders, and us to explore big questions about how we can help our planet and health.

The Telephonic Youth team was very excited to be part of Community Takeover on the first day of its programme. Joined by two History undergraduate students from the University of Southampton, we set up an activity in the Gallery  to turn old phones into community art. Where phones have become disposable items for many, we encouraged people to remember the stories that are attached to our old phones, and to think in different ways about how phone use and production impacts the environment.

We invited people to create an archive tag for one of their old phones. The tags asked people to describe an object, add the date of their memory and a description. The names people gave to their old phones pointed to intimate and personal connections that people have with their phones: ‘My old nokia’, ‘First telephone ever’, ‘The phone under the stairs’. Data left behind on sim cards were a reminder that phones themselves are made of many objects and are themselves miniature archives, holding memories of their owners’ everyday lives. As people stuck their archive tags onto a large 1980s map of Southampton and an even larger map of the world (on loan to the project), the community artwork began to take shape.

Professor Ian Williams, from the University of Southampton’s Engineering Faculty, also joined us on the day and spoke to people about e-waste. We learned about the amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that are caused during the manufacture of a digital device, but also what we can do to try to reduce the impact of e-waste. For example, if you keep your smartphone for 5 instead of 2 years, you can halve its carbon dioxide and water impacts. Community Takeover provided an opportunity to make a very small contribution to reducing e-waste, as some people also left behind old, unused mobile phones to be recycled or re-used.

The archive tags created during Community Takeover told stories about phone boxes and old landline phones, but memories about mobile phones featured prominently.  We shouldn’t be surprised at this: the heritage of mobile phones is now explored in dedicated museums, such as the Mobile Phone Museum. As mobile phones become museum exhibitions, consumers increasingly turn back to ‘dumb phones’, and the climate crisis and resource finiteness threaten consumer habits, there has never been a more important time to re-think the mobile phone’s past, present, and future.

Featured image by Nosa Malcolm.

The Telephonic Youth team have been spending a lot of time in libraries recently—though we weren’t there to borrow books (even if there were more than a few which caught our eye!)

The team at Southampton City Council Libraries kindly allowed us to stage a series of pop-ups across Southampton throughout February and March. It was a bit bumpy—and we had to re-schedule our last one because of covid—but it was also an enriching experience. In the process, we’ve added more stories to our interactive map. We’ve also learned a lot about how we can and should work in public spaces to gather memories (we spoke about this recently at the Institute of Historical Research’s Britain at Home and Abroad seminar). So, what did we learn?

Librarians are your best friends. We already knew this, but it was good to have it reinforced. At all of the libraries we visited, the librarians were there to offer us support, advice, and cups of tea. They directed visitors to our pop-up and even shared their own memories.

Local stories are also global stories. We talked a lot about this in our seminar paper, but visiting libraries across Southampton once again showed the diversity of the city. It was really striking how similar the memories people shared of growing up in Southampton were to those of growing up in other countries—the telephone is definitely something which can unite us all!

The best laid plans of mice and [historians] often go awry. Expect the unexpected is easier said than done, but it was especially true of our pop-ups. We began this research project during a pandemic, and even as restrictions have eased and we were finally able to go out and meet people (masked) in person, covid is still with us and so we’re especially grateful to the library teams for allowing us to reschedule when needed.

More than anything, we were reminded that public libraries are really important spaces which need to be available. Not just to loan out books, DVDs, board games, and puzzles, but also to provide a place for people to meet for a chat, to study, take part in family-friendly activities, or just spend the day learning about people’s experiences of growing up and using the phone in the 1980s and 1990s.

Do you remember using the phone when you were growing up? Share your memories here!

Colourful heads, beautiful prints, drums and memory maps. Perhaps not your first thoughts when someone asks you about telephones. But with the artistic inspiration encouraged at John Hansard Gallery, families have been exploring all of these themes as part of Telephonic Youth’s Southampton-based activities.

Over the last few months, artist Joey Walters has led a series of workshops suitable for ages 4+ as part of the Gallery’s weekly, free Space to Create! programme. And it’s been wonderful to see what creative thinking telephones have sparked in those who have taken part.

Joey took inspiration from  the research we are doing at Telephonic Youth in a number of ways. The first workshop asked visitors to think about the journeys they make with their phones across the city.

A second workshop used binary coding to get families thinking about the words they associate with telephones. Once people had thought of their word, they were able to collage it onto the shape of a human head using tissue paper matching a colour-coded alphabet designed by Joey. The shape of the head encouraged families to think about how they communicate when they use a telephone. Using binary code meant that people could keep their chosen word secret – an added bonus, if you didn’t want to reveal all!

One of the colour-coded collages produced at a Space to Create.

Inspired by how different it feels to hold a rotary dial telephone to a mobile phone, in a third workshop visitors created cyanotype prints. In this workshop, children and adults had fun taking apart old telephones and using disassembled telephone parts to create their prints. The results were beautiful, atmospheric prints in striking blue and white colours.

Telephones, of course, also make sounds, and in the fourth workshop, Joey was inspired by the sound of the phone ringing in a public phone box, and asked visitors to design their own ringtones. With the kind loan of tongue drums from Soco Music, everyday objects, and iPads, visitors got to compose, record and and take away their very own ringtones.

The final workshop linked to our Hands on Humanities Day where we had collected memories of young people’s telephone use. Joey asked visitors to think about what pictures they create when they map their memories of using phones. The prompt inspired people to draw and collage their phone stories in wonderfully creative ways. Joey’s customised ‘polaroid frames’, meant visitors captured their memory as a moment in time.

We want to say a really big thank you to everyone who created such amazing art at these workshops, to Joey for designing such brilliant activities, and to John Hansard Gallery for hosting us.

Saturday 20 November was a great day for the Telephonic Youth team! With the help of two of Southampton university’s fantastic History undergraduate students, we spent the day speaking to members of the public in person about their memories of using the phone while growing up in Britain from the 1980s to the present. You can read their stories on our map.

Hands-On Humanities Day

Hands-On Humanities Day is an annual event organised by the Public Engagement with Research unit here at the University of Southampton. Part of the national Being Human Festival and the university’s own Southampton Arts and Humanities Festival, it is a celebration of research and a great opportunity to meet members of the public (masked)face-to-(masked)face.

As a project which puts your stories at the heart of our research, we are incredibly grateful to Silvia, Emma, Lou, Jo, Steve, Bethany and Connie for everything they did to make the day possible—and to all of the student ambassadors for their hard work throughout.

The Telephonic Youth stall at Hands-On Humanities Day 2021

The Telephonic Youth team spent the day at our stall, speaking to passers-by about their memories. And it was certainly hands-on. While we were speaking to adults about their memories (all of our participants need to be over the age of 16), a raft of budding engineers—and, hopefully, more than a few future historians—set about trying to reconstruct some old telephones kindly lent to us by our friends at BT Heritage & Archives, and which have frequently featured in our Space To Create events at John Hansard Gallery.

One of our disassembled telephones

It was amazing to see both how much the technology changed during the 1980s and 1990s, as rotary dials increasingly gave way to buttons and phones began to integrate digital technologies, but also the speed at which our young visitors were able to re-assemble them—no mean feat when the pieces are designed to fit together snugly and there are no instructions.

Your memories

The memories shared with us during the day showcased the many different ways that phones are integrated into our daily lives—and how important they were to us when growing up.

There were many memories of shared telephones—whether these were with family, friends, or neighbours in the form of a party line.

I lived with a family’s friend flat and she had a phone that was located very near her TV. Whenever the phone rang (dring dring dring) would she be upstairs, she will run down the stairs at speed and lift up the handset as quick as she could so she didn’t miss the caller.
(Barking, London, 2004)

Phone calls were expensive—especially for young people who didn’t always have change for a pay phone.

I remember using telephone boxes, these were used to tell my parents what time I’d be home. You could to do a return call where you would be connected to the other line. Just before you were connected, the operator would say to your parent, you have a call from ….. would you like me to connect you. The parent would be charged, but I’d say, “mum call me back”, and put the phone down. My mum would call back and it would not cost me or my mum anything. I had no money so it was only method I had to contact my mum if I was out and about.
(Lewisham, London, 1994)

As a team of historians, we’re interested in hearing your stories about growing up, using the phone, and what these can tell us about the histories of childhood and youth culture in late twentieth-century Britain. But another one of the memories shared with us also highlights the importance of technology as a means of staying in touch with loved ones—even under the most difficult of circumstances.

Over the pandemic our reliance on phones and telecommunications sky rocketed as they became our only bridge to our friends, family and outside world while being isolated. Before the lockdown I never really used my phone or appreciated how much smaller it makes the world and the ability to talk with different people no matter their world locations or the time.
(Highcliffe, Dorset, 2020)

There are many more stories which you can explore on our digital map—and don’t forget to add your own!

Here at Telephonic Youth, we’re looking to collect as many memories as we can about young people’s telephone use in 1980s and 90s Britain. We’re now collecting memories on our Twitter and Instagram accounts, and we’d love it if you shared your story with us.

If you post a memory on one of our social media sites, we’ll get in touch to ask if you’re happy for us to use your memory and save it as part of our research. We would also like to be able to quote your memory in our research outcomes, but we would only do this if you give us your permission.

We want to be clear about what data we would collect: as well as your memory, we’ll collect your username (but only if that is required by the social media platform) and the date and time of your message. We’ll also keep a record of your permission to use this data. All of your data will be held in accordance with data protection legislation and saved securely by the University of Southampton, and it will be accessed only by the research team and responsible members of the University of Southampton or individuals from regulatory authorities who may be given access to the data for monitoring purposes.

If you’d prefer us not to save your memory or quote from it, then we would only record the theme of your memory for our research, and we would not save your post or any of your details.

Taking part in this research is voluntary. If you do take part we hope you won’t experience any anxieties or concerns. However, if participating in this study raises any issues for you, we recommend that you contact one of the following resources: Childline (free phone number 0800 1111) or MIND (MIND Infoline is 0300 123 3393).

If you have contributed a memory to our research project on Twitter or Instagram, you can contact the research team on our social media platforms to ask to see the research outcomes. If you change your mind later and decide that you want to withdraw your post/memory from our research, you can also contact us on our social media platforms to let us know, and we will delete the data we had saved about your post from our research.

The Telephonic Youth Project is led by Dr Eve Colpus and based at the University of Southampton. The project has ethics approvals from the University of Southampton ERGO numbers 56966 and 67005. If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in this research, or if you feel that you have been placed at risk, you may contact the Head of Research Integrity and Governance at the University of Southampton: rgoinfo@soton.ac.uk.

Data Protection Privacy Notice
The University of Southampton conducts research to the highest standards of research integrity. As a publicly-funded organisation, the University has to ensure that it is in the public interest when we use personally-identifiable information about people who have agreed to take part in research. This means that when you agree to take part in a research study, we will use information about you in the ways needed, and for the purposes specified, to conduct and complete the research project. Under data protection law, ‘Personal data’ means any information that relates to and is capable of identifying a living individual. The University’s data protection policy governing the use of personal data by the University can be found on its website (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/legalservices/what-we-do/data-protection-and-foi.page).

Our privacy notice for research participants provides more information on how the University of Southampton collects and uses your personal data when you take part in one of our research projects and can be found at http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/sharepoint/intranet/ls/Public/Research%20and%20Integrity%20Privacy%20Notice/Privacy%20Notice%20for%20Research%20Participants.pdf

If you have any questions about how your personal data is used, or wish to exercise any of your rights, please consult the University’s data protection webpage (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/legalservices/what-we-do/data-protection-and-foi.page) where you can make a request using our online form. If you need further assistance, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer (data.protection@soton.ac.uk).

If you’ve been following the project, you’ll know that we’re creating a map of people’s memories of using phones as children and teenagers from the 1980s onwards. So far, we’ve been sent some wonderful memories from across England which we’ll be uploading soon, but we’re especially interested in collecting stories from people who grew up in Southampton.

Why Southampton? The obvious answer is that it’s the city where we’re based, so we’re always eager to learn and share more about its history. I’m especially excited to learn about the city, having only joined the History Department at the University of Southampton as a Research Fellow in the Summer. But we also think that mapping Southampton’s phone spaces can tell us a lot about the history of other places.

Southampton is a provincial city. Though some may claim otherwise, Britain has no archetypal town or city which can be held up as representative of the entire country. But Southampton makes for a fascinating local case study—not too big, not too small, and not a capital city—through which we can examine the spatial history of young people’s telephone use in the home and in other places. How did growing up in the inner city compare to the suburbs? Or, taking the area surrounding the city into consideration, how did growing up in the city compare to nearby villages or towns? While each story shared with us will be individualised and special in its own right, mapping Southampton’s phone spaces can help us to better understand some similarities in people’s experiences, and how they might have changed over time.

Southampton is a diverse city. As a port city, Southampton has a long history of migration. We hope that the diversity of the city will be reflected in the diversity of the stories we are able to collect and therefore tell. And though Southampton ‘does not automatically evoke an association with the LGBT community’, as historian Sebastian Buckle argues, focusing on the local history allows us to explore in more depth the ways in which telephones could provide a means of connecting with communities beyond the city limits—potentially becoming a lifeline for gay men in the 1980s.

Southampton is a city with a lot going on. True, this can be said of many cities, but Southampton really does: exciting historical research into the history and heritage of hip hop; arts venues and galleries (including one in a re-purposed K6 Telephone Box!) which are helping us to reach out to communities; and a City of Culture bid. It truly is an exciting time to be working on and in Southampton. We have a lot of plans for the coming year—so watch this space (and follow us on Twitter and Instagram) to find out more.

In the meantime, you can help us to research this important and over-looked history of a bustling city by sharing your stories. If you live in or grew up in Southampton and the surrounding area from the 1980s onwards, please do share your memories with us. Become part of this previously untold history.