What were the 80s like?

[flowerwild]

I’m nostalgic for a time I never experienced.

Loads of great clothes shops and shoe shops.Also used to get fantastic 1950s clothes from jumble sales and charity shops. In the early 80s everyone had their own sense of style. I loved the whole New Romantic look, and so many men wore make-up and looked great ( and didn't think they were women...).

Chelsea Girl!

There is a rule of thumb that the best decade was when you were in your 20s.

I turned 20 in 1980, so I guess that answers your question! I went to university in 1980, then went back to London and lived and worked there, it was affordable and It wasn't incredibly overcrowded and heaving with people (as it always seems to be now).

I loved it, was very happy and wouldn't swap my 20s with being young now for anything, although DS(25) seems to be having a pretty good time.

There are things about the Internet that I do love and which make a lot of things easier, but taking everything into consideration I do think it's been a bad thing and wouldn't care if it disappeared forever.

Early 1990s was pretty good too.

Terrible music mostly - anyone with an eyeshadow pallet and their mother's blouse could do 'pop'.

Awful politics - think Thatcher and her unscrupulous policies. Extreme poverty and hardship for many working people. Despite food mountains and excesses for the well off.

Miners strikes, Falklands war. Threat of nuclear war was constant as were public information films even at school. People built bunkers in their gardens.

Very few people went to university (8-19%) because what was the point (today it's around 50%).

You had to wait a book on a topic to come into the local library. There was no access to information other than through the press or news reporting - which is problematic.

Extreme unemployment for the first half of the decade.

80's poverty was no carpets or appliances. One pair of shoes each. A cold winter coat. No central heating or duvets.

Movies were good and children's TV was taxidermy on an acid trip.

On the plus side no student debt and housing was cheap.

Also there was widespread fear mongering of quicksand.

'And we used to go drinking with our teachers.'

90s too... Some would end up sitting on a wall with SoCo (!) Some also played, along with mates in the sixth form, in pub gigs and those are some >>really<< happy, sweaty memories. I can really see my DD's music teachers being exactly that type, though just not the same kind of laid backness now.

I was in my early to mid childhood during the 80s. It was pretty good times for us (things went very downhill in the 90s) - my dad was running a successful business and had a large income, though we still only really went on holiday once a year (plus one UK long weekend with family friends), I think even for fairly well off people one holiday was normal. Holidays were booked via phonecalls and holiday brochures that we looked forwards to getting in January, in our case always big lists of villas as we almost always did self catering in Europe.

Pubs were still very much seen as working class places, and very much for men when I was a kid, no gastropubs or any food beyond crisps and sandwiches. My parents never took me to one (or took me to sit outside one with some crisps as was the case with some friends) because 'people like us' didn't go to pubs in the 80s.

My siblings and I (I was youngest of 3) used to go for walks in our wellies 'the stream' a brook that ran through some parks near us from when I was about 6, so my sibs would have been 9 and 11. I walked 10 mins to my best mates' house and to the shops regularly from when I was about 7.

You learned to answer the phone and take messages at a young age - I realised my kids had no idea how to do that or really how to call friend's parents to ask them to come over when I got them doing that when they were junior school age!

My mum was a bit of a style rebel, with bright pink hair and weird punky clothes - I loved it. She used to go out clubbing sometimes with her hairdresser in the days when London clubs were basically in Soho only, closed at 2am and if you didn't look outrageous or super trendy you were not getting in. She said gay clubs were much more fun that regular ones!

I left home at age 18 in 83, rented a place with two friends and the rent was only £12 a week! It was only a little terraced house but we had so much freedom and fun!

We also had the boutiques locally where you could get nice clothes but they weren’t as trendy or were just cheaper.

One was called Charisma, a best friend of mine whose friend in their street, her mum, used to buy clothes and give them to my best friend if her own daughter didn’t want them. The daughter was a year or two older than my friend. There was another boutique where my best friend’s mum bought her eg a special outfit for a wedding.

Buying broad horizontal bright fuschia pink and whites stripes t shirts at a boutique with my best friend Elisa in Croydon.

I think the only 80s fashion I wouldn’t wear nowadays is the petticoat skirts/pinafore dresses and velvet knickerbockers, and pink eyeshadow with electric blue mascara

I still love everything else I wore in the 80s.

'Charlie says.....'

@rainsofcastamere 🤣

I was 6-16 years old in the 80s. I grew up with a single mum in a working class area. We didn't have loads, but that was fine, nobody did, but we always had enough. As a child I had the freedom to be out and about and knew all the kids in the neighbourhood. School was a lot less pressured. If you worked hard and did well you could go into higher education, if you didn't you left and got a job. I very much saw education as my way out, and it was.
There was so much less interference from parents, if we had a problem with friends, we had to figure it out. I don't ever remember being helped with homework.
American culture also seemed so glamorous, whether tv, film music or fashion. As Thatcherism, right to buy and easier credit took hold, there was a sense that you could do well if you worked hard, it felt much more achievable then.

O levels or CSEs
A levels
VHS video players and going to Blockbusters to get a video to watch.
Heather Shimmer lipstick.
Sun In to lighten your hair.
Using loads of hairspray for big hair.
Anais Anais or Poison perfume.
The introduction of the pound coin.
Space Invaders
Space Dust.
Cars without onboard computers and but a manual choke.

Adam and the Ants.

Disproportionate, as houses were a fifth of their current day value.

Great music, ghastly clothes! You could buy a small 2 bedroom house for around 20 grand in 1982 😱. Great comedies on TV - The Young Ones,Not the 9 o'clock News, Spitting Image.Not everything was great though. There was an awful lot of casual,every day sexism, racism and homophobia. And people smoking EVERYWHERE.

Along with the nineties, the 80's were the best decades of my life, it all went downhill from there on. I'd go back in a heartbeat.

Yes, people smoked in offices, on planes, trains, buses, in cinemas, I was in hospital in the mid eighties for 3 weeks on traction as I'd slipped a disc and I could smoke in my hospital bed!

C&A

Great days - I don’t remember my friends having anxiety or depression like nowadays. Great music but awful fashion.

I left school, went to college, graduated from university and started work in the 80s. First generation of my family to go to university so it was a big deal, but it was only possible because university was free. I was from a single parent family so I got a grant for accommodation and living expenses too. It wasn't much but enough to get by.

Lived in a shared house. We didn't have much. We made our own clothes and had spikey hair. We shared clothes. No mobile phones in those days but we all managed to meet up and go out! 4 channels on the telly but we barely watched it. If we did, you could guarantee that whoever you spoke to the next day had watched it too. Couldn't afford to have the heating on, the house was damp and really cold in the winter.

I was in the north and the anger at how Margaret Thatcher was trashing it made for an energetic, political landscape. People cared. Stood up for what they believed in. Fought back. The Poll Tax failed. Great music. Great night clubs. Adverts about AIDS scared the shit out of us... but didn't seem to stop the amount of sex that went on in our house! There were also public information films, I remember the one about '1 in 5 would get cancer'. Scary that it's changed to 1 in 2 in such a short time.

It was tough being a woman in the workplace. Sexist language and behaviour was rampant. It was acceptable for stripper grams to come into the office! People smoked at their desks and drank in the pub at lunchtime. There were no computers. Lots of fax machines. Pace of work was slower as everything was done via internal mail and the postman. The only people who had mobile phones were the salesmen. They used to take a brief case sized battery complete with an aerial everywhere they went.

Housing was much, much cheaper. Something I didn't take advantage of at the time!

Life was tougher but more simple at the same time too. No social media, no internet. There was no pressure 'to keep up' with anything. Young people didn't dress like their mums! These days there's so much makeup and glamour... we don't have dreamed of having boob jobs, Botox or plumped up lips. We walked everywhere so wore Dr Martens and our makeup was lots of black eyeliner and red lipstick.

I'd love to go back...

different for everyone I guess.
AIDS, thatchers Britain, high unemployment, YO schemes
post punk scene for some
Greed, big hair and shoulder pads, pop music, cocaine, Princess Di etc for others

Awful music and awful clothes. Dreadful hairstyles. Thatcher as PM. Miner's striikes. Unemployment. Princess Diana.
But we woz 'appy.