Coal cellars
Once every household aspired to own one. Now they’re just ghosts beneath our feet.
Police boxes
In some ways, they started as refreshment kiosks and returned to their fate as refreshment kiosks.
IBA Engineering Announcements
Always a ghost programme to begin with, the IBA Engineering Announcements are now truly a ghost.
Napster
Disruptive? Napster was certainly that. For a whole two years, it turned the record industry upside down. And made lost songs listenable again.
The hitchhiker
They were once ubiquitous, normal, and accepted. Now, however, the hitchhiker really has vanished.
The Giro
It survives in letters on your paying-in slips. But the Giro as shorthand for a bleak life on benefits is fading from memory. Perhaps for the best.
BOAC
The BOAC logo is back. The airline that vanished in the 1970s recently touched down again at Heathrow.
Untangling the spiral phone cord
It was the activity that kept you from murder and mayhem as you waited on hold, waited for your caller to dry up, or listened to Greensleeves for the 96th time.
The Y2K problem
In the popular memory, the millennium bug was something that failed to come to pass. However, that is only because an army of coders made sure it didn’t.
Carol singers
Strangers standing on your doorstep singing about Good King Wenceslas? A vanishing rarity.
