A special gift from Princess Diana has been unearthed after 34 years and it’s bringing back powerful memories

A time capsule buried by Diana, Princess of Wales in 1991 has been unearthed as the Great Ormond Street Hospital begins construction on a new children’s cancer centre.

Thirty four years after the late royal helped two children choose the items that would be sealed for “hundreds of years”, the time capsule at the Variety Club Building has been dug up as the original building undergoes construction to become a new facility.

In 1991, Princess Diana sought the help of David Watson and Sylvia Foulkes, two children who had won a Blue Peter competition in order to select the items that would be buried at the GOSH facility.

The time capsule was meant to represent the lives of children in the 1990s.

The items chosen by the trio included a Kylie Minogue album (‘Rhythm of Love’), a collection of British coins, a snowflake hologram, a container of tree seeds, recycled paper, that day’s newspaper, a British passport, a pocket-sized colour television, and a photo of Princess Diana.

Diana would lay the foundation stone and seal the time capsule in March 1991 and three years later officially opened the Variety Club Building in 1994.

GOSH shared the news on their official website this week, with their executive in charge of the new children’s cancer centre, Jason Dawson, saying that they decided to open the time capsule a few hundred years early to take “the hopes and inspirations of 1991” into the new build.

“It was really quite moving, almost like connecting with memories of things that have been planted by a generation gone by.”

To further add to the mystique of the event, the time capsule was opened by staff members who were either working at the hospital in 1991 or who were born in 1991.

GOSH drew parallels to another Princess of Wales with the time capsule news, noting that when Queen Alexandra—at that time still Princess of Wales, in 1872—laid a foundation stone in an older part of the hospital and sealed a time capsule that has yet to be found.

Princess Diana served as president of GOSH from 1989 onward and was involved with the hospital until her death on 31 August 1997.

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