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80s Nostalgia Countdown

Twelve Things That Lived in an Ordinary 1980s Bedroom

The poster, the radio-cassette, the pencil case with a combination lock: twelve objects that were in almost every 1980s bedroom and are now in almost none.

Editorial Team
A branded card in warm retro colours introducing a list of twelve objects from a 1980s bedroom.

Bedrooms are the most honest rooms in a house. Nobody tidies them for visitors, and nobody decorates them to impress anyone except themselves, which makes them an unusually accurate record of what a decade actually felt like.

The 1980s bedroom had a specific set of contents, and most of them were about two things: music you had recorded yourself, and privacy you did not really have.

Here are twelve of them, counting up to the one that has never gone away.

  1. The radio-cassette on the windowsill

    Ghetto blaster boombox
    Sharpoff — Public domain — Wikimedia Commons

    One box, two functions, and the only piece of audio equipment most teenagers owned. The record button worked off the radio, which is how half a generation built a music collection.

  2. The poster held up by four bits of tape

    Card artwork for entry number 11: The poster held up by four bits of tape.
    Illustration: World of Curious

    Free with a magazine, folded in four, and permanently creased across the middle. Blu-tack left grease marks, tape took the paint off, and neither problem stopped anybody.

  3. The pencil case with a combination lock

    Pencil case
    Daderot — CC0 — Wikimedia Commons

    A small plastic case with a three-digit dial, containing nothing worth locking up. The lock was the entire point, and the combination was almost always someone's birthday.

  4. The duvet cover in a geometric print

    Duvet cover pattern
    Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK — CC BY-SA 2.0 — Wikimedia Commons

    Triangles, squiggles and a colour scheme of teal, pink and grey. It matched the curtains, because bedding was sold in sets, and it dated the room to within about eighteen months.

  5. The alarm clock with flipping number cards

    Flip clock
    Tokumeigakarinoaoshima — CC0 — Wikimedia Commons

    A mechanical clock where each minute turned a small printed card with a soft click. Later models were digital with red LED numerals bright enough to read a book by.

  6. The shoebox of cassettes with handwritten labels

    Compact cassette tapes collection
    zanny — Public domain — Wikimedia Commons

    Track listings written in biro, crossed out and rewritten as tapes were recorded over. A pencil lived nearby for the specific job of winding spilled tape back in.

  7. The bedside lamp with a dimmer that buzzed

    Bedside lamp
    Rhema Kallianpur rhemakallianpur — CC0 — Wikimedia Commons

    A rotary dimmer switch that hummed faintly at anything below full brightness, and made the bulb sing if you found exactly the wrong setting.

  8. The sticker album, half finished

    Card artwork for entry number 5: The sticker album, half finished.
    Illustration: World of Curious

    Bought with real intent, filled to about seventy per cent, then abandoned when the last few stickers refused to turn up. Swaps were a playground currency with its own exchange rates.

  9. The wall chart of something

    Vintage school wall chart
    Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel — CC BY 2.0 — Wikimedia Commons

    Dinosaurs, football teams, the solar system, flags of the world. Free with a comic or a cereal packet, and studied far more closely than anything set as homework.

  10. The home computer plugged into a portable television

    ZX Spectrum home computer
    Prolete — CC0 — Wikimedia Commons

    A machine with a rubbery keyboard, loaded from cassette, with a loading time measured in minutes and a failure rate that taught a generation patience. It shared a screen with the television, which caused arguments.

  11. The diary with a tiny brass lock

    Diary with lock
    Creator unknown — CC BY 4.0 — Wikimedia Commons

    A padded cover, a strap, and a lock that could be opened with a paperclip by anyone who tried. The threat was symbolic, and mostly it worked.

  12. And the strangest one of the lot

    The chair with clothes on it

    Card artwork for entry number 1: The chair with clothes on it.
    Illustration: World of Curious

    Not a 1980s invention and not gone anywhere since, but this is the one object on the list that every single bedroom had and nobody ever photographed. It was never used for sitting. It held the clothes that were neither clean enough to put away nor dirty enough to wash, in a pile with its own internal archaeology, and it is still there in bedrooms today under a different chair.

Most of these were replaced by one device. The chair, notably, survived.

Where this came from

  • Sound and vision collections — National Science and Media Museum
  • History of the compact cassette — Science Museum Group

Fifteen very specific objects. How many do you actually remember?

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