If you grew up in the 80s/90s, what was life like for you?

[Grabacoffeeandcake]

What things do you miss? What was worse?

I miss how simple life seemed back then. I’d get up, go to school, then after school watch TV until the o'clock news came on. I loved reading, a habit I’ve lost since bloomin smartphones.

There were far less supermarkets where I lived so a fortnightly trip to the big supermarket felt quite exciting. My mum shopped locally mainly and went to the butchers, greengrocers, bakery, those shops have long gone and been replaced by a massive Select and Save.

Going to the cinema or renting a video on a Saturday night was peak weekend.

As a teenager I’d walk for miles with friends just chatting and being silly.

Sundays were always really boring, absolutely hated when the antiques roadshow came on, but we did have a lovely roast.

I can remember shops closing half day on a Wednesday, anyone remember that?

I was born in 1976 in rural Essex. I still live there. The main difference I have noticed is the sheer number of people. What used to be sleepy villages now look more like overcrowded towns. And the country lanes, which I would fly down on my bike, now have the sort of traffic you’d expect on a motorway at rush hour. It’s awful. Whenever I go back to some meadow or village I remember as a kid, I tense up with dread. Nine times out of ten it has been covered in hideous new housing estates.

Buses all the time
Reading and going to the local library
Childrens hour on tv
Hanging out
Sneaking fags

I love reading about how other people grew up. Although I think most are fairly similar unless you grew up rurally.

I can remember as a teenager just walking up the high street to get a part time job.

I remember a couple of pounds could buy you quite a lot, a magazine, a bag of chips and some pop and probably some penny sweets too.

We weren’t well off in fact quite the opposite. I can remember my dad once came into a bit of money and he gave us all £50 each and took us to toys r us to spend it. It felt amazing, I got a dolls house, a magic set and I think a few other things too.

We played a lot of board games, visited the library a lot.

I remember the hype of the Spice Girls and how promising the future felt back then. Saturdays spent shopping in a bustling town centre with friends buying hair mascara and Body Shop bath pearls! You could go on a night out with a tenner and come home with change. The summers felt long, it snowed more in winter. Saturday night TV was amazing, we’d watch TV as a family and enjoy it. Everyone seemed happier back then. The world has changed so much.

Poor, hungry and cold was the gist of my 80s childhood.

Parents too proud to ask for help and going without meals so me and DB could eat

No hot water or heating for a few winters

The 90s were better

Does anyone remember a 10p mix?

I miss riding bikes - I'd love to have a job where I can cycle to work, I've achieved it once in my life.

Loved getting home, watching Neighbours and eating toast. Loved reading. Selecting a movie at Blockbusters. Music was exciting.

There was quite a lot of war on the news in the 90s and limited female figures in the public eye in the 80s.

My parents’ friends owned the local chippy so both me and my sister had part time jobs there. We got paid 90p an hour when we started. It went up to £1.20 an hour after a few months. I remember a bag of chips was 35p, fish was 65p and a battered sausage was 37p.

None of our parents were afraid to let us get the bus into the local bigger town, or catch the train into the city. We didn’t have anyway of contacting them other than a public phone box, but they just waved us off and told us to have a good day.

In our village, more like a small town, we had a proper police station that was manned 24/7. The police walked the streets, that would never happen now. We had decent shops, butchers, greengrocers, a fishmonger, haberdashers, one supermarket, a couple of newsagents and banks and building societies. That’s all changed now. It’s so sad.

Given when I was born, my childhood was in the 80s, teens/youth in the 90s pretty exactly!

I grew up in suburban London - we were pretty well off in the 80s, though I guess I couldn't appreciate it at the time (my mum, who grew up very poor behind the Iron Curtain was always at pains to point out we were very lucky and shouldn't take anything for granted, though). I always like to point out to people who think that diversity or immigration is something new, that I think most kids at my primary school, like me, had at least one parent who wasn't born in the UK.

I remember everything being shut on a Sunday and it generally being a very tedious day when the telly was rubbish too.

90s was a great time to be young and in London, but maybe that's just because I was young and in London! Britpop wasn't an earth-shatteringly original scene and didn't change society or anything unlike punk or rave, but it was a lot of fun.

You could have a night out for £15-20 if you went to an indie gig or club and didn't drink much, which I didn't.

No night tube, and night buses were less frequent, with no smartphone to tell you when the next one was due, so 90-minute waits after you left a club were not unusual.

The great thing about not having mobiles was people couldn't bloody cancel on you at the last minute on the whole, because they couldn't be sure of catching you at home. Once you made an arrangement you had to stick with it, pal.

Yes I remember 10p mix ups.

It definitely wasn’t all perfect. We were on an electric meter and I can remember it going off a few times, we also rented a TV.

But we got by, I was definitely aware that we were poor but also aware that some children had it a lot worse.

We probably ate quite cheaply, a massive sack of potatoes from the market, meat and veg. We’d have roasts or chips or mash, everything was with potatoes. My mum did get quite adventurous making chilli con carni and curry.

My mum worked in the chip shop and so did my older sister so we got free food at the end of her shift.

Im not sure if it was just because I was a child but it felt as though there was a lot of hope and optimism.

Absolutely loved it but maybe looking at it through rose tinted glasses. I had such a freedom that could never give my kids now.

We spent morning until night outdoors (mostly playing with friends living on our street) and our parents didn't check on us. My mum also used to drop me off in the library, go shopping, and pick me up later - I was really young! Same abroad. We used to wander around with our young cousins all the time. No one seemed to bother where we were. It seems really neglectful, but everyone we knew did the same.

I miss being able to apply for 3 jobs and pretty much guaranteed to get one of them.
Also I remember a terrace up the road being advertised as needing miles of wallpaper & oceans of paint but basically okay otherwise £16,000
That's the price of a 2nd hand car 😂
Having energy, having friends, and not having a bad back or weight problems.

Yes! £15,000k two, possibly 3 (tiny 3rd) bedroom mid terrace in the Midlands.

I don't miss the racism and bullying and expectation you should have had sex by 18 and only socialise by getting totally drunk.

But they were simpler times. Unlimited access to Internet and tv.

My childhood was in the 80s and my late teens/early 20s in the 90s.

Id love for my kids to experience some of the freedom we had in the 80s. Being unsupervised for long periods as a rule. Weekends and holidays I spent most of the 80s out on the street/woods/fields, or we’d pile round one of my friends bedrooms. Sleepovers, dens, go karts, pea shooters. Walkmans, BMXs. Leg warmers and kids tv from the end of school time till 6 o’clock news. No social media and no mobile phones. Calling friends on the family phone line. Play equipment in the pub beer garden while parents drank inside. Compared to family life now, kids had so much more time without supervision and so I think we were more resilient.

I miss the depth of living, not shallow as it is today. Things made a lot more sense.
There was far, far less involvement of the government too in people's lives, now it seems people are completely reliant on the state to live. You had more control of your life and the decisions you made back then. A happier less complicated time

I was 12 in 1980 and yes life was simpler . After school you would call for a friend and just hang out in each others bedrooms. In the summer holidays we'd cycle to other friends house a few miles away .Birthdays were just gathering at the birthday persons home and their mum would lay on a tea and we'd sit around and chat- no pamper parties or chocolate workshops or whatever kids do today ! Weekends we would visit grandparents every Saturday. Highlight of the week was top of the pops. We were the first family ( out of my friends)to get a VHS video player mid eighties so friends would come to my house to watch the duran duran video. I remember it being a big thing when my dad got hold of a pirate video of ET ! First gig was Duran Duran probably around 1984 at a smallish venue just before they got big. We never had foreign holidays always UK ones somewhere by the coast.

It was a mix of better and worse. I was born mid 1970s and I definitely have rose tinted glasses and miss those days.

Better

• All my loved ones were still alive and healthy.
• No mobile phones so we read, watched TV together, looked out of the window on public transport.
• Unbelievable freedom as young children. Out on bikes with only the instruction to be home by a certain time and 10p in our pocket for an emergency phone call (which always got spent on sweets - we would have reversed the charges if there was an emergency). Parents hadn't a clue where we were or what we were doing.
• Roads had far less traffic. It was safe to walk and cross the street and you could always walk two abreast on the pavement as nobody was parked there.
• Towns and cities were better maintained. Less litter and vandalism, streets didn't flood as a result of blocked gullies, local parks had crazy golf and a cafe even if these weren't profitable.
• You could walk into the local town and ask around and find a part time job just like that. Working was character building.

Worse

• Sexual harassment was the norm. My aunt had a creepy old neighbour who used to spank me every time he saw me. Even age 4 I hated it and felt uncomfortable and no adult ever put a stop to it because it was just what Mr Gordon did, the old scamp. It was equally as bad when older and in the workplace. In one job I had in the early 90s, women weren't allowed to wear trousers.
• Before the internet you had to conform because there was no way of knowing what a big wide world was out there. It could be lonely if you didn't have your social group just perfect.
• Dog shit on every pavement (although this is making a comeback).
• When your car or home insurance expired you had to set aside an evening with the Yellow Pages, calling each individual company for quotes to get the best deal, or at least the best you could find in the time you had.
• No satnav with live traffic or rerouting. If you got stuck in a traffic jam you put the radio on and waited for a road report, even if you had to wait several hours. You didn't know when you would get to work and had no way to let your boss know you would be late.
• Another car one - if you went through a car wash and forgot to put your telescopic arial down there would be no radio in the car until you got it repaired. Speaking of radios, if you had one you either slid it out and hid it, or it had a removable face you could take off to make it not worth stealing.

Overall I think the best times were the very late 90s and early 2000s when we had internet and mobiles but not smartphones.

And I managed to forget the biggest one for me. Things that should be expensive were. We talk about cost of living now as a problem, and it is of course, but back then things like a TV or washing machine were comparatively much more expensive. But they weren't replaced every few years (either because they died or you wanted a fancier model) so you saved up for one and kept it. A box of chocolates was expensive but you wouldn't dream of picking one up as a treat to yourself; they were for gifting only. Because they weren't trying to be cheap they were good quality but that didn't drive consumerism enough so it had to change. Also these things were expensive but housing was affordable and you could heat your home on an average salary.

I grew up in a working class area of Dublin, so my experience is probably coloured by my background.

Our parents all left school in their mid-teens. They were expected to get jobs to contribute to the family income. They married young and there was no contraception available to them. So there were a lot of big families.

I played out with my friends as a kid. There were very few afterschool activities. The boys played football and some girls went to Irish dancing lessons. That was about the height of it.

If it was a hot summer's day, we'd all take off to the swimming pool. Without any parents, obviously. We'd run home just long enough to change into our costumes and beg for money for the pool.

I used to love skating at the roller rink with my BFF. I remember going roller skating one Saturday morning. Then we went to the shop to buy magazines and goodies (sweets and crisps). We went back to her house and read our magazines and munched away contentedly. It really was the perfect Saturday.

The women in my neighbourhood were all stay at home mothers, although many of them went back to work (mostly retail or cleaning jobs) when their children were older. Most families had only one car (we didn't have one at all) and only the husbands could drive. The mothers all walked their kids to school and they'd have a chat with their friends (the other mothers) on the way to and from school.

There was a ladies' club. It gave the women an opportunity to get way from their husbands and kids for a few hours.

On Saturdays, we'd get the bus into town (Dublin city centre). We'd go around the shops and maybe pop into a cafe for a tea and cake. Then take the bus home, tired and contented.

When I got to secondary school, music became a really big aspect of my life. I spent a lot of time in record shops, flicking through the albums and singles and posters, but rarely buying anything. 'Top of the Pops' was essential viewing - everyone would be talking about who was No. 1 at school the next day.

Live Aid took place when I was 13. It was a huge, huge event in our lives.

We got a video player when I was 14. We didn't rent videos much, but we recorded a lot of programmes and films from the TV. My Mam never mastered recording, even though it involved pressing two buttons at the same time - play + record. She'd always ask me or my brother to record stuff for her. There would be World War III if you sat down to watch something you'd recorded and then discovered that a family member had recorded over your recording.

Even though there was no internet, things (TV programmes and toys) still went viral. At various stages there was Fame (legwarmers), Dallas (Who Shot JR?), ET, Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, the Rubix cube etc.

I think what I miss most is the people I remember from that time, many of whom have now passed on - relatives, friends' parents, neighbours, family friends etc. We weren't wealthy in terms of money or big houses or fancy cars or luxury holidays. But those people were absolute gems. Such lovely, lovely people.

I was 11 and saw Duran Duran in Shepton Mallet! I also saw The Smiths when I was 15! Saw a different band every week. No concerns from our parents as we got the bus into the city centre for gigs. No trackers, no phones, you just got home when you did! It wasn’t all brilliant but it was a far better time for kids than today- social media has ruined young people’s experience of life.
My teen years was gigs and comedy (Ben Elton, Rick Mayall etc) and my 20s was Britpop and Shoegaze plus a bit of rave culture! Bloody marvellous…

Party's at home. just cake, jelly ice cream and sausage rolls and sandwiches and games about 12 kids So simple but happy times.

i miss organizing myself using pen and paper I hate the distractions of the digital world

I could have written this, exactly the same. Playing out with friends in the streets for hours. We’d all shout “car!” if one happened to drive round and we’d jump to the pavements. Those same streets are now full with cars parking on the kerbs.

Gosh you've brought back memories there! Totally forgot about the 1/2 day Wednesdays! I was telling my DD about Blockbuster the other night when I was having a tantrum about too much flipping choice on Netflix, Disney, Amazon and every other channel! Choice overwhelm.

So strange you should say that about Antiques Roadshow - I still get a weird stomach flip, sicky feeling when I hear the theme tune and I know it's because I used to get sad when it was on. Was it a Sunday evening? Wonder if it was an 'almost bed and then back to school' thing?