Memories of mid 80's for my short story?

[onesmalldog]

What can you remember of the mid 80s living in the UK as regards house decor, colours, house style, furniture, knick knacks, wallpaper, doors, flooring, light fittings etc?

Also what did you eat and drink?

I'm writing a story need this sort of detail to make it realistic.

Would be so grateful to hear your suggestions - and fun!

@onesmall dog. Yes really cool, as we would say in the 80s. All the way back to 1973 here
retromash.com/argos/

Everyone seemed to have one of these, or in our case, both somewhere in the house.

Decor:
Chintz.
Floral Pelmets and tie backs.
Burgandy velour sofa with fringing
Artex everywhere
Those bullseye windows
Tall ashtrays
Burgandy wallpaper with velour stripes (felt v posh)
Video cassette cases that were meant to look like books
A walnut TV cabinet

Food (Kwiksave)
Vienetta
Frey Bentos
Vesta
Gino Ginelli

Dining out was rare: Berni Inn, mock Italian place. MCDonald's was amazing! Prior to that it was Wimpy.

My mother disliked cooking, so we got a microwave early on, which she saved up for. We had a microwave cook book!

The kitchen was red and white. Mom liked to be quite trendy, despite not having much money.

I had DS2 in the early 80s and my major memory was listening to the update of the Falklands War every afternoon (like our covid updates) whilst i sat feeding him.
Just remembering has given me a shiver up my spine. It was thankfully a long way away but our troops (as was the other side) were dying daily.

Another forgotten crisis.

We didn't get a shower until the 90s either.

No central heating in our first house (we moved in 85 and the new house did).

One phone in the hallway (dad installed a phone lock)

Forgot about fringed standard lamps mentioned upthread.

Wallpaper everywhere, inc the red and white kitchen.

Fab music though

Living room - wallpaper two different types - floral shiny shimmer on top with a pink grey border then grey blue shimmer on bottom

Grey textured carpet

Big stereo in the corner withLPs stacked beside

Electric fire with fake glass brick flame type things

Kitchen - grey cabinets , wallpaper was black grey yellow little triangle pattern
Also had microwave and microwave cook book
Black ash flat pack build type dining table with red and black metal chairs

Bathroom pale mushroom colour suite

Yes Woodhill

Music was everything to me.
Taping the charts off radio, my beloved record player and later TOTP on video.

I was 11/12 in 1985 and into pop (a couple of years later my love of Indie/alternative emerged through The Cure, Depeche Mode, Echo etc.) so the double 'Now' albums were my favourite at that time.

CARpets in bathrooms. DIshwashers not common, people washed things up by hand. Pine furniture was quite popular, but so was dark wood old antique look Toasted sandwich makers. MIcrowaves just starting to come in. People would get a set of china for best when they got married.

Details will depend on class, income, aspirations and to some degree region though.

Have you checked out the thread about growing up in the 80s in Classics?

Brightly coloured bathroom suites - ours was a kind of marine blue but lots of avocado green and dusky pink about too. Patterned tiles

Wood panelling effect over plastered walls, painted woodchip, polystyrene tiles

Velour and/ or chintz soft furnishings

Fleece dressing gowns/sleepsuits for children

Kids parties with jelly and ice cream. Mum used to dip wine glasses in egg white and salt(!) to create a kind of frosted rim for the children’s glasses of punch which consisted of orange squash, lemonade and food colouring

Somebody on the supermarket thread has just asked "what's salad cream?"

Clearly not a child of the 80s!

@middleoftheroad

Yes used to tape from 1979 onwards.

Not so keen on the later 80s stuff but loved New Romantics and Haircut 100, Madness etc

Typical 80s decor: striped wallpaper to dado height. Border. Patterned wallpaper above.

Hair: big perms and crimping.

Clothes: rara skirts, batwing jumpers, pedal pushers, mismatched neon coloured socks.

Wogan on the telly every night at 7pm. Blind date,

Velour three piece suites, dark red or dark green. Tufted swirly carpet, swags and tails. Teak furniture.

Formica. Wardrobes from MFI, pine bedroom furniture, ghetto blasters or midi systems (I had an Amstrad one). Pictures on the wall with red wooden frames. Huge microwaves, eternal beau China.

To echo a pp - showers were not commonplace in homes in the UK until the 80s. I can clearly remember going to buy continental quilts, or duvets as we now call them, in the early to mid 80s to replace sheets, blankets and bedspreads. I had one friend with a microwave. Dishwashers were rarely found in normal homes. TVs in rooms other than the living room were portable tellies with no remote and you had to twiddle the knob to change channels.

We had a shower fitted in 1989, on the day I left school.

I felt very posh having a shower in the house. It was only over the bath, but still!

The diary of an edwardian lady.
Lots of pastels. Laura Ashley.
I remember the new houses had white pvc doors and sometimes stained glass windows.
And yy to pot pourri.
Spiderplants. Everyone had spiderplants.

Swags, stencils, l and pastel colours.
I think it depends tho which income bracket you're talking.

Posters from Athena
Lots of pastel coloured walls
Bernie’s Inn was a really special treat (we would put on nice clothes to go there)
Pizza Hut
Miss Selfridge
Lots of neon lights in shops
Shoulder pads
Wet look hair gel
Later in the decade Levi jeans - I paid £30 for second hand jeans 😮 from American Classics
Thatcherism
We didn’t have central heating had a shower put in around 1989 it was very expensive
Midi systems had double tape so I could make mix tapes
Next it seemed like a designer shop. I remember going in and everything was very minimalist compared to shops were were used to. We thought we were very sophisticated getting something from there (I got penny loafers had them for years)

I loved the ballet pumps/loafer type shops that I wore in the late 80’s wish I could fine a pair now

Microwave cooking courses

Fashion

Electric blue - clothes, eyeliner and mascara. Also jade green and cerise.
Fishnet tights. Jumper dresses. Leg warmers, berets. Ankle boots, ra-ra skirts, fingerless gloves.

Homes.
Red and white kitchens. Beanbags. Living flame gas fires with a glass front. Swirly carpets. Matching three piece suites with a fringe around the bottom. Dado rails. Polystyrene ceiling tiles. Anaglypta. Net curtains. Austrian blinds. Duvet sets featuring Garfield, Marilyn Monroe and Pierrot. Black and red bedrooms with Athena-style prints of red cars, women wearing red lipstick and stilettos, palm trees etc, all in graphic style. Eternal Beau. Displays of Wedgwood - people would pick their design and get some for birthdays and Christmas to build up their collection.

Food.
Frozen food was the way forward - mini pizzas, frozen mousses, dalesteaks, crispy pancakes, oven chips. People shoe-horned massive chest freezers into their homes to house it all. My mum had one in her bedroom!
Packet mixes to make different meals - spag bol, chicken chasseur, casseroles, cow au vin, etc.
Soda stream. Hellas chocolate bars with different flavoured creams inside. Hedgehog crisps. Spicy tomato Snaps and Pickled Onion Monster Munch. Pacers. Hubba Bubba. Pot noodles. Lean Cuisine and One-Cal.

A lot of pps were children so will have a different perspective from those of us who were adults. Depends which year specifically, because things changed big time between one year and the next in that period. Some of what pp are remembering from childhood was either late 70s or late 80s-90s. Plus of course it would be different in different regions of the country.

We bought a house in 1983 and 1985 and neither had central heating or double glazing, which was pretty normal for the time. Both were on the same new-build estate (SE) and you could have CH fitted in 1985 but it cost so much more that we just couldn't afford it. DP's didn't have CH until the 1990s.(SW)

As someone else said, white with a hint of paints were just coming in. I painted most of our first house and went for apricot and pink kinds of colours, mainly because DM loves green and my whole childhood was green! Our first house had an avocado bathroom suite. I think the second one was champagne. We didn't get a choice.

We bought our first microwave in 1986 to warm our baby's jars; no-one else in the family had one. We had a VCR at the same time, but DH worked in a video shop! Our TV came from Radio Rentals until the 1990s.

In 1986 we briefly had a Granada with a car-phone, a massive brick that plugged in somehow, and a huge aerial (DH's boss didn't pay him very much - no NMW - and topped up his wages with perks like a company car - not a taxable benefit then). Speaking of tax, I found an old payslip (1983) and although tax was at something like 30% only a really small proportion of DH's wages were taxable because he had a married man's allowance which covered most of it. He was paid weekly, in cash, as most manual workers were, whereas I have always been paid monthly into the bank as a Civil Servant.

Most of our furniture came from MFI or Courts, because they both did interest free credit. Our kitchen table was glass, as was the coffee table. We couldn't afford a freezer, so only had the top part of the fridge for peas and ice cream. Our bed was pine.

We liked to eat out but mainly at American-style diners. I am vegetarian and it was really difficult to find anywhere English that would cater. It tended to be cheese salad, omelette or lasagne.

We shopped at Tesco and you could only pay by cash or cheque - no cards. Tesco shut relatively early - can't remember but I'm thinking 5-6? - except Late Night shopping on a Thursday.

I remember trying pizza for the first time aged 10 in 1986 - I loved it!!

For much of the 80s we still had old 70s furniture in our home as we were fairly poor.
We rented a tv & a telephone & didn't have a video player or computer.

Just remembered hatchbacks and hot hatchbacks. Young people had hot hatches and their mums the 1.1 version.

The Golf and rise of BMW
Concorde
Ski-ing became accessible
Big bang in the City
1987 crash "black Monday"
Bob Geldorf and Live Aid

Although houses were much cheaper relatively, furniture and white goods were much more expensive. Hence things lasted longer and were better looked after.

I watched White House Farm and it was like stepping back into my grandparents' farmhouse in the early 80s - same wallpaper.

Stencilling! I’d forgotten that. I made my own and stencilled all round the walls of our kitchen. And rag rolling and other paint effects. Jocasta Innes was to blame paint effects

And yes to dried flowers and pot pouring.