This paper investigates the different readings and meanings of never in the speech of London adults and teenagers, with particular attention to cases in which this negative is equivalent to a sentential negator in the past. The analysis of a sample of over 2,000 tokens extracted from three main corpora serves to provide not only a qualitative perspective on this issue but also a quantitative one that presents new empirical evidence. The universal negative quantificational use of never is seen to be the most frequent while punctual never comes second. The data analysed also indicate that in the last few years there has been an increase in such uses of this negative compared to the early 1990s. However, no notable differences are attested in this respect when contrasting adult and teen speech.