Things We Had In Our Bedrooms That Would Look Strange Today

Bedrooms have changed enormously over the years.

Today, a bedroom can be surprisingly minimalist. There might be a bed, a wardrobe, a bedside table, perhaps a television and, almost certainly, a phone charger. Everything has a place, everything is relatively streamlined and there is usually some attempt to make the room look as though it belongs in a home interiors magazine.

For many Gen Xers, however, the bedroom was a very different sort of place.

It was part sleeping area, part entertainment centre, part storage cupboard and part shrine to whatever music, television programme, football team or hobby happened to dominate your life at the time. Walls were covered in things. Shelves were full. Drawers contained objects that hadn’t been used for years but were far too important to throw away.

And some of the things that seemed completely normal back then would look decidedly strange in a modern bedroom.

The cassette player or hi-fi

A bedroom wasn’t complete without some form of music system.

Depending on your age and circumstances, this might have been a portable cassette player, a small stereo system or eventually a proper hi-fi with separate components. It occupied valuable space and often had a collection of cassette tapes piled beside it.

The really serious music fans might have had speakers positioned carefully around the room, although “carefully” sometimes meant balancing one on a shelf and putting the other somewhere completely different because there wasn’t enough room.

Then came the cassette tapes.

There would be shop-bought albums, blank tapes recorded from the radio, mixtapes made for friends and tapes with handwritten labels that became increasingly difficult to decipher. Some had been recorded so many times that the sound quality was barely recognisable.

Today, millions of songs fit inside a phone. Back then, a bedroom could contain an entire music library without anybody thinking it looked unusual.

A television with knobs

Having a television in your bedroom once felt like an enormous luxury.

It wasn’t necessarily a sleek, wall-mounted screen. It might have been a small portable television with chunky buttons or knobs on the front and an aerial that needed positioning just right.

Getting a decent picture could sometimes involve moving the aerial, adjusting the controls or simply accepting that BBC Two looked slightly snowy.

There were no streaming services. No apps. No voice control. No endless choice.

You watched what was on.

And if you were lucky enough to have a remote control, it was often attached to a long cable that seemed to stretch about three feet.

The idea of watching television in bed now is hardly strange. The strange part is remembering just how basic the equipment was.

Posters covering the walls

The modern minimalist bedroom might have a carefully chosen piece of artwork above the bed.

The Gen X bedroom was more likely to have an entire wall covered in posters.

Bands, footballers, films, cars, motorbikes, celebrities and television programmes were all fair game. Teenagers didn’t necessarily care whether the posters matched the colour scheme because there wasn’t really a colour scheme.

There was simply stuff you liked.

The walls became a visual record of your interests at the time. If you loved a particular band, everyone knew about it. If you supported a football team, there was probably some evidence of it somewhere.

And if your parents objected to the amount of Blu Tack being used, that was simply part of the process.

A stack of magazines

Bedrooms used to contain magazines in quantities that would probably confuse younger people today.

There were music magazines, football magazines, computer magazines, car magazines, film magazines, teenage magazines and whatever else matched your interests.

They would pile up on shelves, beside the bed and underneath the bed. You might read the same issue repeatedly because buying another one meant waiting until you had enough pocket money.

Magazines also served another purpose. They contained photographs and information that you couldn’t simply search for whenever you wanted.

If you wanted a picture of your favourite band, footballer or car, you found it in a magazine and quite possibly cut it out.

Today, the same information is available instantly. Back then, finding the right picture could be an achievement.

The alarm clock that sounded like it was trying to kill you

A bedside alarm clock was an essential piece of equipment.

There were no gentle smartphone alarms with soothing sounds and gradually increasing volume. There was usually a clock with a small face, glowing or illuminated numbers and an alarm that appeared to be designed specifically to make sure you woke up in a bad mood.

Some had bells on top.

Those bells were not interested in your wellbeing.

They were interested in making sure the entire household knew that it was time to get up.

And unlike a phone, the alarm clock didn’t have an internet connection, a weather forecast or a backup plan. If the power went off, there was every chance your morning was about to become complicated.

A telephone extension

Depending on the household, you might even have had a telephone in or near your bedroom.

For teenagers, having a phone extension could feel like gaining access to the outside world.

Of course, parents were still able to hear you.

The walls were thinner than you thought, and the telephone cord seemed to have a maximum length of about four metres. If you wanted any privacy, you had to stretch the cable around a corner and hope nobody picked up another handset downstairs.

There was also the fear of someone listening in.

The idea that the whole family could potentially hear your conversation was enough to make a teenage phone call an exercise in diplomacy.

A huge collection of soft toys

Soft toys weren’t restricted to small children.

Bedrooms could contain enormous collections of them, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. Some had been bought on holidays, some had been given as presents and some had simply appeared over the years.

They would sit on beds, shelves and windowsills, gradually taking up more space.

Eventually, you reached the point where you had to move them to sit down.

And yet throwing them away was almost unthinkable.

Many of them carried memories, which meant that something that looked like an ordinary stuffed animal to somebody else was actually connected to a particular holiday, birthday or person.

The bedside radio

Before smartphones, a bedside radio could be an important part of your morning and evening routine.

You might wake up to the radio, listen to music while getting ready or fall asleep with a late-night programme quietly playing in the background.

There was something comforting about hearing familiar presenters and knowing that other people were awake and listening too.

You didn’t choose every song. You didn’t skip the bits you didn’t like. You simply listened.

That sense of shared experience is harder to find now, when everyone can have completely different entertainment playing through their headphones.

The diary

Teenagers once had diaries that were actual books.

Some were simple notebooks. Others were elaborate, brightly coloured affairs with locks that offered approximately three seconds of security to anybody determined to get inside.

The diary could contain appointments, birthdays, phone numbers, school details, thoughts, secrets and plans for the weekend.

It was private in a way that our modern digital lives rarely are.

There were no notifications. No cloud backup. No automatic reminders. Just a pen and a page.

And if somebody found it, there was no password recovery procedure. There was only panic.

The record collection

For some bedrooms, the ultimate statement of personality was a record collection.

Vinyl albums took up considerably more space than a digital music library, but that was part of their appeal. You could see what somebody listened to simply by looking at their shelves.

Album covers became decoration in their own right.

There was something satisfying about choosing a record, putting it on, lowering the needle and sitting back while the music played.

You didn’t shuffle an entire catalogue. You didn’t skip songs without getting up.

If you didn’t like the track that was playing, you either waited for it to finish or physically got out of your chair.

That was commitment.

The mysterious drawer of everything

Every bedroom seemed to have one.

A drawer containing absolutely no logical organisation whatsoever.

Old batteries. Pens. Receipts. Keys. Coins. Bus tickets. Hairbrushes. Cables that belonged to devices nobody owned anymore. A small screwdriver. A birthday card from three years earlier. Perhaps a cassette tape with no label.

Nobody knew why any of it was there.

Nobody knew what half of it was for.

But you couldn’t throw it away because there was always the possibility that you would need one of those things at some point.

Modern storage solutions may have improved, but the mysterious drawer has survived remarkably well.

The things that made the room yours

Perhaps what makes these objects seem strange now is that bedrooms used to be much more personal.

There wasn’t necessarily a carefully coordinated aesthetic. Your room reflected your life at that moment.

The posters told people what music you liked. The magazines revealed your interests. The books showed what you were reading. The records and cassettes revealed your taste. The football scarf or model car told its own story.

The room wasn’t designed for photographs. It was designed for you.

And because the objects were physical, they accumulated over time. You could look around years later and find things you had completely forgotten about.

We’ve replaced a lot of things with one device

The biggest difference is perhaps that so many of these objects have effectively been replaced by the smartphone.

Music player? Phone.

Radio? Phone.

Camera? Phone.

Diary? Phone.

Alarm clock? Phone.

Television? Phone.

Calendar? Phone.

Torch? Phone.

Maps? Phone.

Telephone? Well, technically the phone still does that too.

It is incredibly convenient, but it has also changed the character of our bedrooms. Instead of dozens of objects reflecting different parts of our lives, one small device can perform almost all of those functions.

There is something wonderfully nostalgic about remembering when you needed an entire room full of things to do what a modern phone can accomplish in seconds.

A bedroom was once a little time capsule

Perhaps that is why these old bedroom objects are so memorable.

They weren’t just possessions. They were evidence of who we were.

A cassette with a handwritten label could take you straight back to a particular summer. A poster could remind you of a band you haven’t listened to for years. An old magazine might bring back memories of where you bought it. Even a battered alarm clock could remind you of school mornings and early starts.

Modern bedrooms might be tidier, more connected and considerably better at hiding cables.

But the old Gen X bedroom had something that is harder to recreate.

It told a story.

You could walk into someone’s room and learn an enormous amount about them without asking a single question.

And perhaps that is why, when we come across one of those old objects today, it can trigger a memory almost instantly.

What was the strangest, most memorable or most proudly displayed thing you had in your bedroom growing up?