Princess Diana 90s time capsule is revealed at Great Ormond Street Hospital
LONDON — Diana, Princess of Wales, is for many a symbol of life in the 1990s. And now a time capsule she buried nearly 35 years ago has been opened, revealing a treasure trove of memorabilia.
The capsule was placed inside a wall at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London in 1991 with the help of two children who won a TV competition.
It contained relics of a pre-internet-enabled age including an early pocket TV, a Kylie Minogue CD, a solar-powered calculator and a copy of The Times newspaper.
The items were decided via a competition run by long-running British children’s TV show “Blue Peter” — viewers were asked to decide eight things that represented life in the 1990s. Despite some moisture damage the items were still recognizable.
The box was not due to be opened until centuries had passed, but that timeline had to be drastically cut short because the hospital is demolishing existing buildings to build a new children’s cancer center.
The CD was the choice of David Watson, then aged 11, from Devon in western England, as well as a sheet of recycled paper and a European passport.
A collection of British coins, a container with five tree seeds and a snowflake hologram was the choice of Sylvia Foulkes, then aged 9, from Norwich in eastern England.
It’s unclear what the children, who would both now be in their 40s, thought of the opening. The hospital told NBC News that it was no longer in touch with them.
The hospital asked staff either born in 1991 or already working there in 1991 to help remove the capsule.
One of the latter, senior health play specialist Janet Holmes, said: “It brought back so many memories seeing the pocket TV in there — I had bought one for my husband back in the day, for when he had a break whilst driving his coach around the country. They were very expensive then!”
Anyone born in or after the 1990s may struggle to understand that this coveted gadget — the Casio TV430 — had a 2 inch screen and a battery life of just a few hours.
Australian singer Minogue, then famous in Britain for a string of pop hits as well as her role in the TV soap opera “Neighbours,” is still a major international star.
CDs, however, were then relatively new: they only surpassed cassettes and LPs as the leading music format in the U.S. in 1991.
Great Ormond Street, known as GOSH, is the U.K.’s leading children’s hospital and a major center for pediatric research in Europe. Diana became its president in 1989 and visited multiple times.
Diana was part of the ceremony to lay the foundation stone of the Variety Club Building in 1991 — to mark this she sealed a time capsule in the hospital’s main entrance.
She was following royal tradition: a former Princess of Wales, Alexandria, laid the foundation stone for an older GOSH building in 1872 and also sealed a time capsule. Curiously, however, the hospital said that capsule has still never been found.
GOSH said the new cancer center “will make it easier for clinical teams to develop kinder, more effective treatments, all delivered in a child-focused environment where children can play, learn and be with their family while at hospital.”
While the hospital is run by the taxpayer-funded National Health Service, it still has to raise funds for big projects and the 300 million pound ($403 million) fundraising drive to build the new center is the biggest in its history.
