When Presence Was Physical: A Return to Print

20th August 2025

The early 2000’s. Remember those personality quizzes we couldn’t resist? You’d grab the latest Top of the Pops magazine drawn in by a front cover promise to reveal which lip gloss shade truly matched your soul, or which celebrity was destined to be your BFF. Sprawled on your bed, legs flicking behind you in the air, you’d carefully circle answers with a chunky glitter pen while imagining life as Gabriella Montez, dating heart-throb Zac Efron and roaming the halls of East High. Your walls were likely plastered with Groovy Chick or Bratz pull-out posters, and your evenings were spent flicking through pages not grown yet but somehow feeling so much older than last year.

Then came the BlackBerry our first real phone, where all you could really do was ping your pals, screen-munch anything mildly dramatic, and (if you were bored enough) play a game of Snake. Suddenly, you didn’t have to wait until school or swap house phones to make plans you could just message, anytime, anywhere.

Social media evolved fast becoming smarter, louder and suddenly essential to our lives. By eleven I wasn’t begging for the latest magazine with a tacky free gift anymore… I was begging for Facebook. For more time on my BlackBerry. For a life lived on-screen rather than playing out on bikes till dark.

I was part of that in-between generation raised on print but interrupted by pixels. We still got a childhood, but it was one eventually lit by the glow of screens smuggled under the duvet until midnight.

We had a taste of life before it and then grew up with it as we entered our teen years. Some might say it was the perfect happy medium and, in some ways, I’d agree but it could also be confusing, distracting and pressurising. It made us grow up too fast.

But while the glow of screens quickly took over, there’s a reason so many of us now find ourselves gravitating back to print. Maybe it’s that nothing hits quite like the smell of fresh pages, the weight of a magazine in your hands, or the ritual of turning each page without a notification popping up. In a world of constant scrolling, print feels almost rebellious slower, more intentional, something to savour. It’s no wonder magazines are having a moment again; they remind us of a time when joy wasn’t instant but felt all the more magical because of it.

Print is timeless. It’s nostalgic. It’s distraction-free. It’s a space to breathe. It’s stepping out of a hectic workday, taking half an hour for lunch and getting lost in a good book as you reset. It’s picking up a magazine for a train journey while your phone sits untouched after a work call. It’s reading a bedtime story that sends both you and your child drifting off into another world.

And the best part is, it’s coming back, children getting excited over a new magazine. I saw it first-hand in our store when my two nephews, who have grown up in an era of technology, came in with smiles beaming ear to ear, picking up kids’ magazines and using number blocks to count (without being asked). I felt it again recently when I took them to a field on a sunny day and all they wanted to do was look for fish in the stream, play football and silly made-up games, or pick flowers. No distractions, just time for them to be children and enjoy the pure joy and freedom of it all.