Loving this thread. Thank you @Ozgirl75
It depends quite a bit on your definition of wealth. I grew up on a farm and we weren't very wealthy but due to the way the social scene worked in the countryside then we moved in wealthy countryside circles. My mother also came from a very wealthy family.
My observations would be that for all that my mother grew up in what was in the 1930s and 40s a very wealthy household, it doesn't look like wealth does nowadays. No central heating, the house riddled with damp, relatively sparse food, very few new clothes, very few toys, a bath once a week. Obviously no TV but they had a wireless but that was strictly controlled by her father. Hot water bottles were hot bricks wrapped in a towel. She didn't leave the country she was born in until she was in her 20s. She didn't even travel outside of the county she was born in until her late teens. But she grew up in a huge house with staff. She never had to tidy her room, never saw her mother do any cooking or learnt how to cook herself, but she said she remembers being hungry for most of her childhood.
Observations of wealth in the countryside in my own childhood from the 1970s and into the 80s was that it became far more conspicuous. In the 70s we would bundle around to massive piles to play as kids and they would be shabby, dilapidated and we had the run of the places. No one cared what mischief we got up to or that we tore about the place in our muddy shoes and boots. We all wore shabby hand me down clothes that did the country family circuit in huge bin liners. You'd be at someone's house playing and an older brother or sister would come in and say that they remembered that shirt. Going into the 80s that slowly changed and wealth seemed to become more obvious and people started getting much more precious about their houses and their children. My younger siblings did much less rampaging around the place freely than I did. People started to acquire stuff in a way that I hadn't noticed before too. In the 1970s even the wealthy people, had a Radio Rentals TV and the same BT telephone. That was all there was, or at least in the circles I moved in. I imagine in London it was probably more advanced. We'd bundle around to all the kids houses, so that would be the people in the small cottages and normal houses and everyone had the same kind of stuff, just with less rooms. No one had fancy tech, apart from maybe a very rudimentary 'hifi' which was a large record player and speaker. No one had particularly smart furniture or carpets or any fancy gadgets in their kitchens. In the big houses there was usually a drawing room that we were forbidden entry to and in the small houses the front room was usually out of bounds. I'm sure in the massive piles there was expensive art on the walls, rather than prints or china plates, but weirdly there was a sameness about all our lives. I didn't know anyone who had a chopper bike, any kind of electronic toy or anything that was remotely a 70s trendy type of thing at all. Expensive things for children were perceived as a bit of an indulgence by everyone, regardless of wealth, or at least that is my memory. I remember going to play at someone's house, who my mother considered to be 'nouveau', and the girl had a bedroom filled with toys and my mother was outraged all the way home at how 'spoilt' the child was.
There was definitely a distinction in hobbies or pastimes. So the truly wealthy did things in the 1970s that set them apart. They went skiing, went abroad for a summer holiday, rode ponies/horses, played croquet, had a tennis court and possibly a swimming pool. They also had properties elsewhere, so a flat in London or a 'place' somewhere in Scotland or abroad. However, as kids we didn't really know much about that.
Where you went to school was a differentiator as well, although where I was in the 70s pretty much everyone started at the village school and then as you progressed through the classes it changed as those with more money went to prep and boarding school.
To me the 80s brought about a massive change and it suddenly became infinitely more apparent to me at least who had money and who didn't. Cars suddenly became way more exotic and exciting and the kind of car you drove started to matter. The tech you had started to matter a lot. New things became important in a way I don't remember them being so important. Distinctions in wealth became both more nuanced and obvious too.