Observations on scrapbooking

I was disappointed. I thought it was going to be an underground boxing league full of gangsters and molls, but www.ukscrappers.co.uk turned out to be an online community of 7,000 people who build collections of tickets, wrappers, photographs and other mementoes of everyday life into books for the benefit of future generations.

Scrapbooking in Britain has grown phenomenally in the past three years and is becoming big business, with serious practitioners spending £50 a month on their hobby. Inspired by programmes such as the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, in which well-known figures traced their family histories, people have developed a new interest in their backgrounds. And once the family tree is drawn, the next stage is to compile a record for future generations. This might consist of scrapbooks of particular holidays or special places, or in my case a short-lived scrapbook circa 1992 of the pop group East 17, who come, like me, from Walthamstow, and who once caused Smash Hits to say that Walthamstow was "hot" and Seattle "not".

Scrapbooks were popular in Victorian times, though ScrapBook Inspirations magazine, a new launch from Future Publishing with an initial print run of 74,000, dates the origins further back, citing John Locke's "New Method of a Common-Place-Book" (1686). Another spark was an innovation by James William Grange, vicar of Shiplake, who added blank pages to books for readers to add their own thoughts. It seems, however, that the arrival of photography helped to prompt a decline as people found a different way of recording the world around them.

The resurgence in recent years, particularly in America, has been attributed to the Mormons, with their interest in genealogy and keeping diaries. This prompted the opening of the first scrapbooking shop, in Arizona in 1994, and today there are about a hundred such shops in the US. Now, they have come to Britain: so, if you are a scrapbooker living near Surbiton, Scrap Magic will have all you need.

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