Your 30 ways the UK has changed

How has Britain changed in the last 10 years? Last week, the Magazine challenged readers to tell us.

Our inspiration was a letter from reader Rachel Hurley (right), of Perth, Australia, who is moving back to these shores with her husband John and their young daughter.

"Has anything changed?" Rachel asked, innocently enough. On the one hand, there have been seismic, and obvious, political changes, on the other, some rather predictable and prosaic ones.

But the Magazine Monitor, our weblog, asked readers to tune into the more nuanced differences ; the subtle, but significant, changes to have crept up on us in the past decade.

Here are 30 of the best.

1. Coffee is served by the pint and it will cost more than a pint of beer.

2. Once you received your gas from British Gas, your electricity from your local electricity board and your phone service from BT. Now, you will get your gas from your bank, your electricity from British Gas, and your phone service from Tesco.

3. The DFS sale which started just before Rachel left will be ending soon.

4. I remember arranging to meet friends at a given location/time many days in advance. If they were late you had to scratch around for 10p to ring from a phone box (and their mum would always tell you they had set off). They would never stand you up, as the cowardly way of cancelling without warning by text just didn't exist then.

5. It's OK to take photos at concerts, so long as you use your phone.

6. Marmite now comes in a squeezy jar.

7. Elaborate descriptions adorn food packaging: "freshly made", "perfectly ripe", "deliciously creamy" or (a recent favourite) a "hand-stretched" pizza.

8. Beach huts used to be for nannas and grandads rather than property speculators.

9. A "C" in the middle of a circle meant "copyright".

10. The M62 and M25 were still motorways rather than car parks.

11. "I was following my Sat Nav" is now the excuse for driving where you shouldn't.

12. Helen Mirren was occasionally called "Ma'am" by junior officers in Prime Suspect, but not by anybody else.

13. "Decking" now refers to something you do to your garden, rather than what one boxer does to another.

14. Swear words are no longer asterisked in a newspaper.

15. Headline puns are no longer the sole property of the tabloids.

16. A wag was something a dog did with its tail.

17. If children carried guns, they squirted water.

18. Policeman are still nominally unarmed but wander around in body armour - even in the Lake District - that makes them look like battle scene extras from Starship Troopers.

19. You can no longer wear a hat or a hooded top inside a shopping centre.

21. Northern Ireland is one of the UK's top tourist destinations.

22. The customer is no longer wrong all the time.

23. The phrase "Big Brother is watching you" should actually be the other way round for many people.

24. Naked bottoms in TV ads!

25. Noel Edmonds is still on telly, but at least his Crinkly Bottom has been banished to oblivion.

26. Daleks were reduced to scraping a living in Kit-Kat adverts 10 years ago. Today they're appearing on a lunchbox, annual, poster, t-shirt, DVD, sticker collection and life-size cardboard cut-out near you.

27. Passwords were for international spies and entry to gang huts a decade ago. Now you can barely buy milk without the need for some secretive alpha-numeric code.

28. People go to hospital to become ill.

29. The UK will be just like Australia except the weather is worse and the coffee isn't as good.

30. And everyone wants to move to Australia.

10 years ago, it cost me a fortune to upgrade my music collection to CD. Now i dont even use CDs, just a computer and a USB cable!!!

10 years ago I was single and clueless.

Now I am married with a kid and clueless.

10 years ago the Tory party was divided, corrupt and bogged down by sleaze, and the Labour party had a young, fresh-faced new leader.

Now, the Labour party is divided, corrupt and bogged by sleaze, and the Tory party have a young, fresh-faced new leader.

:blink:

Yeah, and the Tory Leader is sensibly not banging on about being whiter than white like dear TB was in 1997.

10 years ago we were looking at the prospect of limited military spending and a 'peace dividend'

Since then we have been to war in Kosovo, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan.....

really, I didn't know that? :blink:

Wow that is so true to life when I think back. Not turning up for a night out just wasn't done back then and you couldn't just change the venue if people hadn't turned up and the pub turned out to be rubbish......

Thinking back, it's odd how mobile phone change how we live and how we prioritise things differently.

A mobile phone is one of those things that has so many advantages and so many disadvantages.

It has changed life so much...for the better?

Well.. there's always that person on the bus or train having to phone someone to tell them that 'they're on the bus/ train' and 'can they put the chip pan on'.. or something to that effect..

Am ok with texts in terms of being almost like portable e-mailing, but I know people who would rather communicate by text than speaking, partly out of cowardice as mentioned..

On balance they are probably a good thing, but there are definitely negatives. The mobile phone is defintely one of the biggest differences in the uk compared to 1997, and that fact alone is a negative imo.. they seem to have taken over!!

And maybe another difference is far more people posting on messageboards on their pcs?

Mobiles must have been more good than bad, but they have had a detrimental effect on manners. I was in Boots today and this oaf entirely ignored the serving lady (a real sweetie), chucked the goods at her, and then the money, and all the time was on his telephone. :angry:

it's odd - whenever i go out anywhere now it's "have I got my mobile?" i always wonder what i would have done 15 years ago? Well, i'd have found a phone box, or been a bit late and apologised at the time, or phoned the person i wanted to talk to rather than texting them.

Mobiles are great inventions for keeping in touch etc etc, but i'm one of these people who has the cheapest mobile possible, which does the least amount of stuff necessary. I've had the same phone for 2 years now, and before that i had the same phone for 5 years. not a big convert to this hi-tek stuff (apart from message boards of course :P )

roflmao roflmao roflmao You never mentioned you own Noels crinkly bottom before Bliv :yikes: roflmao

wait, i get it now...... roflmao

10 years ago, I left the UK to live in Germany

Diana was still alive

I didn't have an internet connection

It was dirt cheap to live here because the € hadn't been invented

we sold our 3-bed pre war semi in North London for 130K :yikes:

I was in my 30's :(

10 years ago i could go out in town, get bladdered, get a KFC and a taxi home and still have change from 50 quid. Nowadays i can go through £100 :(

10 years ago I was at a Suede concert where someone asked if they borrow my mobile phone, without realising that I was actually holding a glasses case, and not a mobile phone.. :)

(It was another 6 years before I finally got one)

10 years ago I was 9 so wasn't really aware of what was going on in the wider world :P

10 years ago, nostalgia wasn't what it used to be

10 years ago, I was saying '10 years ago I still had a mobile phone' :o it just needed a car to carry it that's all

:unsure: Does it mean something different now?

yeah - sorry, i should have copied the photo with it.

It is what is painted on the roads in London where the congestion charge is in effect.

10 years ago, bird poop on your head was a sign of good luck, nowadays its likely to give you killer flu :yikes:

10 years ago I did not need to show my passport to an NHS dentist in order to obtain treatment. Now I have to show such ID to almost every bloody one to prove that I am not an illegal immigrant!

:D I like the DFS one best. They should have included MFI has well...

10 years ago the internet was in its infancy

Find out what your fave sites looked like 10 years ago

cool site

*Note for wary clickers - this is the 'Wayback Machine' it's an archive of the internet and allows you to enter the URL of your favourite site and then you can access the site at any time since it was first created. If you enter www.bbc.co.uk, you can chart it back to late 1996*

;) :hug:

10 years ago I could have bought a mansion where I am looking to buy, now I might just scrape a modest detached property. :( Or a terraced five bed cottage! :D

10 years ago I was still in nursery........

My now almost ten year old cats hadn't been born.....

Henman was Britains new slam hope that was going to win Wimbledon one day.

The word Posh referred to Snobby folk rather than a size zero ex spice girl.

Videos were still the norm and DVDs were another hight tech thing that nobody knew about.

When I left the UK more than 20 years ago there were far fewer huge people around and certainly no 99 kilo 8-year-olds...

10 years ago everyone was building up a load of hype about the millenium, Y2k, as if it was going to be the fabulous dawn of a ne era and one huge party. Now we know nothing has really changed for the better and that it was a flop cos no one coudl afford the inflated prices to go out. roflmao

Also there were all these people workign to defeat the millenium bug which never happened. roflmao

10 years ago we were being told how fantastic the Dome would be - sceptics were wondering how much the Dome would cost and whether it would be a white elephant.

Now we are are being told how fantastic the Olympics will be - sceptics are wondering how much the Olympics will cost and whether the stadia etc. will be white elephants.

Good one :clap: The sceptics were right last time, and I reckon they will be this time. even if the Olympics and stuff is a sucess it will be a very costly one. And those of us who dont; live in London will stay have to pay for the damned thing :angry: