What were the 80s like?

[flowerwild]

I’m nostalgic for a time I never experienced.

3-12…it was a cosy time of great music, films like E.T and Ghostbusters, not great clothes, but fun for a kid..Madonna, Michael Jackson, early Kylie. Bike rides and knocking on friends houses, water fights in the street, proper kids parties…no car for years, walking to the shops everyday, mum at home. Lots or freedom and adventures, 10 p mixes at the local shop…walking to school with friends from a young age, conker fights, Singing in assembly every morning. Huge family gatherings, lots of smoking, coke with a slice of lemon in the pub as a treat, staying up late on a Saturday night and watching James Bond-falling asleep and dad carrying me up to bed. Being allowed Babycham at Christmas.
Happy times.
Then teen years in the 90’s…amazing v v lucky

Itchy chin bull on were they.

Great music, questionable fashion - pedal pushers, ra-ra skirts, t shirts that said Frankie says relax. Thought I was the bees knees in these, the pictures say otherwise.

Not as good as the 70s

Teens to 20s. Some of the best and worst times personally and culturally.

The music and fashion of the new wave 78-82 were fabulous and edgy. As things turned softer I wore coloured tights, flat court shoes in red, blue etc., mens shirts, bow and Windsor knot ties, pinstriped and cricket trousers. The uni years were more Brideshead Revisited than Saltburn. I definitely had a piecrust blouse before Diana made them ubiquitous. Uni friends with good connections sailed into Hooray Henry jobs and invited me to restaurant openings and weddings with huge meringue dresses. I went to see a lot of non classical music - everything from Tom Robinson to Bruce Springsteen via Tina Turner, Dire Straits et al.

But … the politics were grim, I couldn’t stand Thatcher and the Tories. The Miners Strike had a big effect on many of my extended family along with a lot of other bad political stuff.

The end of the decade was the beginning of big personal changes. I was jilted, bought a flat (later it had negative equity), I found love again with DH. In the wedding photos I have a perm and he has glasses like Trevor Horn on Video Killed the Radio Star. The politics were still crap, but some of the clothes were still good. On Channel 4 I dressed head to toe in green, I wore bright red stretch jeans (before they called them skinny) with a khaki combat jacket that I eventually gave back to the ex fiancé. It became the 90s and head to toe black with sparser use of shoulder pads although I do still remember a stylist trying to persuade me to use removable shoulder pads in a cable knit jumper 😂

I was 14 - 23 and it was just such an extraordinary decade.

I have nostalgia for the 80s because I grew up then but it was a tough time. My mum was on her own with us and on benefits under the thatcher regime. Single mums were vilified and there was very seldom enough money for her to say yes to things like an ice cream from the van or sweets during the weekly shop. Clothes were hand me downs and food was basic. There was also a lot of casual and accepted racism. Some good music and memorable times though.

I’m not so sure about that.

The ‘60s were still very polarised class-wise. Some middle class young adults pushed for change but it left the working class out. It was a small white middle class club that was progressive. The working class was excluded.

That’s why the ‘70s were just as racist, misogynistic, intolerant and generally socially unpleasant as the ‘50s: nothing had changed very much for most in the interim.

The ‘80s gave young working class men and women a great deal more freedom and voice, including economically. Change really began.

We were very skint for the first half of the 80s.
The high business and interest rates meant we had to fold our rural business and leave our home, to spend a year in a town.
Then we got educated, built careers and went back to village life.

There was so much worry about nuclear war, particularly once American cruise missiles were brought on to UK soil. I worried about how to protect the DC and became active in anti nuke protests and spent time at Greenham Common.

The miner's strike was brutal and I remember the police preventing free movement of some people, in case they were going to picket. We used to go to the nearest docks, overlooked by watchful police, to give the pickets a minuscule amount, all that we could afford, when they were preventing the import of foreign coal.

The DC were tweens and teens during this period and beginning to explore who they were and what music, clothes, friends, etc they liked. It was fascinating, and looking back on it, really enjoyable, despite the spectacular rows and rebellions that seemed never ending at times.
There was a period when they both discovered Oxfam, and bought terrible old long coats, worn with silk scarfs, and carried it off, because they were young and gorgeous. Girls appeared and proved to be a civilising factor.
DS1 started a rock band, grew his hair down to his bum and began gigging all over, while DS2 started skateboarding and went all over to different skater places. With no mobile phones, I always provided emergency numbers and phone money and worried like hell all the time.

If you want to know the school life of a typical teen in the 80s, watch Grange Hill. Seriously, i did not go to school in London but that is exactly what it was like at the comprehensive school i went to.

I think we must have copied some stuff that went on there. Try the early series up to where zammo goes on the drugs. We all watched GH in the 80s!

Bloody fantastic

Loved the '80s. Aged 12 to 22. The music most of all, the fashion ( I know some of it was awful). The glamour of going out and no-one bailing because you just couldn't in those days. I even like the buildings (some of which were older I know, but I actually prefer the "it is fit for it's purpose but it isn't pretty" thing) No internet. The politics were difficult. Adversity was a thing. Life was simpler. You took your pleasures in a small way and were happy for them. today everything is too much on tap all of the time.

I remember everyone's house being freezing. My dad was a plumber so we were toasty but lots of friends (middle class) had no central heating at all or none upstairs. People were very tidy though, stuff put away, driveways always swept - less stuff i guess.

These were my childhood years 4-14.

I remember every year there was the 'main' in thing Christmas toy that everyone wanted and it being advertised on TV loads. As there were only four channels everyone watched the same thing after school so you always had something to talk about with your friends. No binge watching had to wait for the next episode and if you were out sending the video recorder with something everyone remembered to do.

My mum was always there for school drop off and pick up, until I was in the last couple years and I would walk me and my brother to my nans after school until mum finished work. My nan was close to the school.

We went to my nans every Saturday and did the shopping in the local town. I always helped pull the shopping trolley my nan had, we never drove there. It was part of my childhood routine that only changed when I was big enough to stay home alone. There were many more shops then though such as Woolworths.

When I was little we didn't have central heating and had a gas fire down stairs and a calor gas heater upstairs in the winter. It was always freezing when you first got up or first got in. First thing you did was put the fire on and only took coats off ten mins later! Living room was too hot, rest of the house too cold! It was a novelty when we first got central heating put in. We didn't have a phone in the house until I was about 10.

Mum used sheets and blankets on the bed for my early childhood, not sure when I got my first duvet instead but I still remember slipping into cold sheets and snuggling up under blankets. I had Sarah Kay bedspread and curtains.

A fantastic decade for me. Although politically and economically the country experienced difficult times, including the Falklands War, for me it was a time of excitement and hope. Started 6th form in 1980, loved my a level subjects, started going out to clubs and pubs, having boyfriends. Cut my long hair off to have a short Princess Diana/ Nolans style.
Had a brilliant time at university where I met my future husband, we married in 1989. Started work in the City in 1985, loved the work, the atmosphere and the socialising. Worked hard, played hard. Plenty of lunchtime drinking on work days, champagne flowing, just money everywhere, seeing the LIFFE boys in bars in their coloured jackets.
I wore coloured tights to match my coloured blouses, pussy bows, skirt suits( no trousers allowed, secretarial female staff could wear them, but professional women staff couldn't), huge shoulder pads in all clothes including jumpers and blouses, huge curly permed hair, smoking absolutely everywhere including at desks in the office. Felt like anything was possible. Bought first house in 1988 on a 100% mortgage on a 12 or 13% interest rate. By mid 90s we had 16k negative equity which fortunately a bonus paid off so we could move.

I was 12 in 1980 so my whole teens were 80s. Fab time.

I can't believe we've got to page 8 and no one has mentioned AIDS .

15% mortgage rates were the early nineties

Quite a few have mentioned AIDS.

Oh dear I must be going senile.I was sure I'd read the whole thread😂
I've been having doublt about my stement about interest rates too.

Shit. We were poor. Widespread deprivation in my area due to the mining industry being shut down. The “90’s brought a lot more opportunity for economic improvement. Any decade is shit when you’re living in poverty.

I mentioned Aids on page 2 and several other people have as well.

I'm just amazed at how different memories are. For me the 80s was about workplace bullying (it didn't even have a name until Andrea Adam's pioneering work from 1991 on), massively high taxes on low salaries, Northern Ireland horrors from the hunger strike deaths to the admission the Guildford 4 had been wrongfully convicted, via a decade of bombings and shootings and torture, all only slightly lightened by the start of a talks process (fair play to Thatcher for that).

No contraception except the pill (dependent on having the right GP and pharmacist), no divorce, the insane debates about abortion setting the pattern for decades of cruelty, horrors like the Joanne Hayes 'Kerry babies' case, 14 year old Ann Lovett dying in childbirth beside Granard church.

Massive, constant, discussion of child abuse and incest and 'Satanic abuse' while Savile was there in plain sight and 47 year old Bill Wyman's relationship with 13 years old Mandy Smith was seen as just fine.

Foul air pollution from the Polish coal we burned during the British miners' strike.

And all the deaths and disasters. And the serial killers - Robert Black and Dennis Nilsen and Peter Sutcliffe and the Wests.

A horrible decade in these islands, where life, particularity female life, was cheap.

Still a lot better than the ‘70s though.

(Sutcliffe was the ‘70s and the satanic abuse was a pile of shite.)

Teens during the 80s.

One major difference is that music is much more accessible today. You didn’t have all the festivals, concerts tours etc. so seeing a band live was huge. You’d buy the latest single to hear the music, and maybe the album of your favourite band. In fact, Christmas and birthdays were great, because you usually got albums for presents.

Sutcliffe killed two women and attacked at least four others in 1980, so he counts and of course if we'd been young adult women in the late 70s (I graduated in 1980) we were very aware of what was happening. I remember the relief when he was arrested - there was a fear/folk myth that he was a lorry driver whose work brought him to Dublin.

The satanic panic was shite and many people thought that was abundantly obvious, but that didn't stop the media (and far too many social workers) taking it terribly seriously. Could mention a present-day parallel, but maybe this isn't the thread for it.

It doesn’t much matter time-wise, though of course it couldn’t matter more in human terms, but Sutcliffe’s first known attack was in 1969 and most of his wickedness was carried out in the ‘70s.