For anyone fortunate enough to secure tickets to last year’s Oasis reunion tour, the sight of middle-aged fans weeping into their pints during the chorus of Champagne Supernova was difficult to miss. Perhaps they were remembering how much the tickets cost. Or perhaps no price was too high for three hours in a time machine back to an age when hangovers were less consequential, mortgages were somebody else’s problem, and the only thing tracking your location was your mum.
Nostalgia, of course, is an asset that appreciates over time. Hollywood has bet the house on it, churning out increasingly derivative additions to the worlds of Top Gun, Spinal Tap and Star Wars without ever capturing the spark that made the original films worth watching in the first place.
As an audience, we arrive with decades of accumulated goodwill. We are happy to overlook the recycled jokes, glaring product placement, and ever-widening age gap between Tom Cruise and his love interests provided we’re wrapped in the comfort blanket of a familiar universe. Nobody buys a ticket to a sequel expecting to be surprised.
The journey from out of date to vintage can take decades. The journey from vintage to expensive can be remarkably quick. Once the past comes back into fashion, clever marketers find ways to charge us for the newly desirable qualities of distinctiveness and authenticity that, in truth, never went away. Adidas has built a business around re-releasing trainers first sold decades ago. Coca-Cola trades on vintage packaging. The Nokia 3310, a phone whose main feature is Snake, is now “iconic“.
Sometimes, nostalgia defies technological progress. Vinyl has survived and prospered despite successive digital advances that made music cheaper and more accessible. With apologies to vinyl enthusiasts, this can’t simply be about the crackle. It’s about the ritual: choosing a record, sliding it from its sleeve, lowering the needle and actively listening, rather than treating music as background noise while watching a stranger renovate their kitchen on Instagram.
The more technology promises to do for us, the more we value things that ask us to do something for ourselves. Mechanical watches have survived the arrival of quartz and the smartwatch, and some are now worth more than ever. Books, board games, manual razors and fountain pens retain their appeal in a world where their functions could be performed more conveniently by a digital cousin.
These things offer a connection to an earlier time, even if we never experienced that time ourselves. We tell ourselves that convenience isn’t the only measure of value, that some things are worth preserving because they offer us continuity, familiarity and belonging. They connect us to stories that existed before we arrived, to places that have evolved but retain traces of what came before, and to a shared sense of identity that isn’t replicated online.
Our places are more than collections of amenities and services. They carry memories, character and meaning, and what makes somewhere special is the fact that it hasn’t changed quite as much as everything around it.
Nostalgia takes us back to the version of history we choose to remember: what we imagine happened, and how we felt about it. A highlights reel of the past. A Now That’s What I Call Memories, rather than the original albums.
In this heavily edited version of history, the decades of our youth become all neon lights, arcades and synthesiser soundtracks, with mass unemployment and industrial decline left on the cutting room floor. The pre-internet world becomes a place where people were supposedly more connected and less distracted, rather than one where keeping in touch meant buying stamps and settling a pub argument required an encyclopaedia.
Whether any of this is historically accurate is beside the point. The imagined past is answering a need in the present.
As the golfer Lee Trevino put it: “The older I get, the better I used to be.” And the older we get, the rosier our glasses. The streets of our youth get friendlier, the community spirit gets stronger and the town centres become busier. Judging by the stories, the entire country once ran on borrowed sugar.
Ask people what they miss about where they grew up and they talk about playing outside until dark, turning up at a friend’s house unannounced, and being shooed out of the house with the sole instruction to be home in time for dinner. Their nostalgia is for the feeling of being part of a community rather than simply living alongside other people.
That helps explain why nostalgia has become such a powerful force in debates about our towns, cities and neighbourhoods. When people say they want to return to a time when places were better, they are expressing dissatisfaction with the present, where housing feels unaffordable, high streets feel quieter, and social connections feel more fragile. The past becomes a convenient benchmark against which today’s shortcomings are judged.
The close-knit communities we celebrate were often built around economic structures that no longer exist. The bustling town centres we remember were sustained by shopping habits that the internet has since dismantled. We miss the corner shop, just not enough to stop using Amazon.
The challenge for the current generation of placemakers is to understand what people valued about the past, so that we can create communities that offer the same sense of belonging, identity and human connection in a different age. Places that ask us to take part rather than just pass through.
Back in the 1990s, when my parents first heard Oasis on the radio, they insisted the Beatles were better. These days, when Harry Styles or BTS come on in the car, I tell my kids they’re no match for Oasis. “Things were better in my day” will be passed down from generation to generation for evermore. Our job is to make sure today’s kids have a “my day” worth misremembering.