When Princess Diana buried a time capsule at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1991, the idea was that it would remain hidden for centuries. Instead, just over three decades later, the lead-encased wooden box has been unearthed—not for ceremony, but to make way for a new children’s cancer center.
The capsule was originally buried beneath the hospital’s Variety Club Building, which opened in 1994. Diana, then president of the hospital, worked with two children to select items that would reflect life in the early 1990s. What they chose now feels like a snapshot of a world at once familiar and distant: a Kylie Minogue CD, a solar-powered calculator, a passport, and even a pocket-sized television.
The children, David Watson of Devon and Sylvia Foulkes of Norwich, had been winners of a Blue Peter competition. Watson, then 11, picked Kylie Minogue’s Rhythm of Love—an album that gave the world “Better the Devil You Know”—along with recycled paper and a passport. Foulkes, age 9, added a collection of coins, a snowflake hologram, and five tree seeds. Together with a photo of Diana herself and a copy of The Times from the day of burial, the capsule held ten objects in total.
The newspaper headlines found inside the box reflected a world in transition: Soviet voters lining up for meat during the last days of Gorbachev’s leadership and U.S. officials turning away Iraqi pleas for support in the aftermath of war.
Archivists who opened the capsule this week found that while some items showed wear, most had survived intact. Images released by the hospital show the CD case and hologram still recognizable, artifacts from a pop culture era that Diana herself seemed to embody—both grounded in her role as a princess and modern in her embrace of the world her children were growing up in.
The new children’s cancer center that will take the capsule’s place is billed as a national hub for treatment and research. In a way, the opening of the capsule and the construction of the new building are linked: one marking the optimism of the early ’90s, the other carrying forward Diana’s legacy of using her platform to draw attention to the needs of children.
For a hospital that has seen more than its share of history, the rediscovery of Diana’s capsule feels both like a disruption and a gift—reminding staff, patients, and families of the hospital’s long continuity, and of a princess who made it her mission to put children at the center of her public life.
