1990s
The 1990s saw the rise of the Internet, heralding the age of mass communication, shopping from home and online gaming. The decade began with hope having seen the end of the Cold War but also there was much anger on the streets of the UK as riots were sparked by the introduction of the Poll Tax. We also gazed at the skies with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope at the beginning of the decade, and in 1999 we witnessed the awe of a total solar eclipse, something we won’t see again in the UK until 2090! Hollywood had it’s fair share of serial killer movies, but in the UK we went for light hearted comedies like The Full Monty and Four Weddings and a Funeral. On the 1st December 1990 the French and English sides of the Channel Tunnel connected when engineers broke through the service tunnel and shook hands after digging towards each other for two years, as well as this and other major projects RECo also worked on the 5km long Second Severn Crossing over the Severn Estuary connecting Bristol with South Wales. We were concerned by scientific advances such as the first cloning of a mammal with Dolly the sheep, and there was much worry over the ‘millennium bug’ when we thought all our computer systems would crash because of their apparent inability to distinguish dates correctly.
But it didn’t stop us from partying like it was 1999.
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