What was life like in the 80s?

[Strangerthanadeadting]

As a recent fan of Stranger Things and having only been four years old at the end of the eighties, I'm fascinated to know what life was like for teens & adults back then.

It's depicted as being so much fun on TV. So colourful, the music is brilliant, the fashion so vivid. It was a time before the Internet, social media, plastic surgery, the Kardashians.

I'm fascinated. I'd love to hear what life was like. What people did for fun, what they ate, how different a working day was, if it really was as glamorous as it looks, if the hairstyles took forever, what people thought the future would be like? Was it a better life? A better time?

Fun for me, as a work hard, play hard teen durany, even with my various awkwardnesses.

Less fun for DH a little younger and son of a miner striking whether he wanted to or not.

I was born in the late 70s so was a child in the 80s. My father was made redundant twice and it took more than a year each time to find new jobs. Read the early Adrian Mole diaries - I find them very nostalgic for that time!

Playing out. Going gout for hours as a teen without parents having contact. Unimaginable now with mobiles. We were just trusted.

Scouser. Skint, bailiffs, my dad often not being paid.

But they were my parents worries, I enjoyed my childhood. A lot of freedom. Liverpool is SO different now to how it was then.

The idea that we'd die after a nuclear bomb attack was perceived as a real risk - see Ultravox Dancing With Tears In Our Eyes.

I was aged 3 in 1980 so I remember my primary and early secondary schooldays in the 80's. I was too young to really be part of any teen culture but looking back the music and fashion was cool. I am also glad that I grew up pre mobile phones and social media. I think having the privacy that being uncontactable could afford you was great and possibly important for mental wellbeing. However I remember lots of negatives too - poverty with kids smelling, in dirty clothes and raiding the discarded food after school dinner, corporal punishment being allowed at school, money being very tight at home due to my dad having died and Thatcher's disgusting attitude to lone parents. We were "selected" every year for school medicals (thank heavens they seem to have disappeared now) and my mum was sure it was to check if we were being cared for. Which leads on to prejudice. Racism was widely accepted, I remember being asked by another child if my mum was going out with a "wog" when my mum briefly dated a black man (they split because he had seemingly forgotten to tell her about his wife and because he was a wanker not because of his colour). No one said anything. Single parents were still gossiped about, being gay was at best a subject for crude jokes (usually much worse) and disability awareness was poor. And the treatment of women - marital rape was legal and sexual harassment widespread and accepted. It was assumed you'd done something to invite attention if you tried to complain. So, a mixed review from me. I''m sure in middle class enclaves away from grim reality it was paradise. I still miss some of it. But would I like to be an adult then? No.

Wham! Culture Club. Poodle perms, bright blue eyeliner, bright pink lips. Anais Anais or Poison. Puffball skirts. Pedal Pushers. Relax tee shirts. Plastic shopper bags which popped together and plastic shoes. Huge glasses, huge earrings. Great, amazing music, but it was the time that fashion and taste didn't get on that well.

Berni inn, wimpy, slush puppy. Saturday job earning 85p an hour. Which went up to £1 an hour once I was 15. My first office job paid £50 a week.

I was a child the whole decade. Life felt normal. Hairstyles were permed. The future was going to be like on Back to the Future. We watched playschool, Grange Hill, pigeon street, superted, Thundercats, he-man. Played with My Little Pony, Star Wars figures, Care Bears. We ate rice crispies, ham sandwiches, cottage pie. We drank vimto and soda stream. When ET and Ghostbusters came out there were toys in the cereal packets. We had dial phones on the wall or went to the phone box. Top of the Pops meant we knew every chart song, and Smash Hits magazine had the words or we taped from the radio and wrote them down. We wore ra ra skirts, did Hula hooping, roller skating, played on bikes, played on the street with kids on our road. Played monopoly, cluedo, game of life, guess who, murder in the dark. Went camping.

I have no real memory of eighties world affairs apart from vaguely hearing about miners strikes, the IRA bombs, Nelson Mandela and the word apartheid. We watched the challenger explode. I was terrified of AIDS, and accidentally climbing up an electric pylon.

Chernobyl meant I couldn't play outdoors

Where did you live?

I was in my mid teens in the late 80s. We could go down the pub and never got ID’d, even in our school uniforms. Music gigs and festivals were less corporate and felt freer. There was less sex stereotyping than today. I think the 80s were more exciting.

AIDS! Jesus fuck. Those leaflets and the scary ad with the tombstone and the flowers! Terrified the shite out of me, despite being at zero risk!

A huge black cloud came over the U.K. after Chernobyl.

Oh and Princess Di was everywhere. People in power seemed to be women. Plus, discos with pick and mix.

@MrsMiggins37 Me too!!

My first job in 1985 - earned 50p an hour

Princess Di was everywhere

Yes! I was talking about this only yesterday

I was an 80's child from a working class family in England. I remember lots of hardship and a distinct lack of glamour. My abiding memories are; lots of unemployment, power cuts, watching the police beat the shit out of striking miners on the News, mohair jumpers, Roland Rat, clothes from the catalogue or market stalls, mum perming all the aunties hair in the kitchen, rubber shower attachments on bath taps, transit vans with kids piled in the back (no seats, let alone seatbelts), people hissing "that bitch!" at Maggie Thatcher on TV, walking to the phone box at the top of the road, hunting for 50p coins to put in the electricity meter, huddling round the Calor Gas fire in Winter, having a Sunday bath (sharing the water) and strip down wash at the kitchen sink every morning, the provvy man knocking on Friday evening and trying to be the first to make it to the doorstep for the milk delivery to get the cream at the top of the bottle (unless the birds beat you to it).

We went to lots of pubs and nightclubs. Eating out was a special few times a year treat. We spent hours on the phone. Food was very English. It was the 90s before I ate pizza, pasta, rice etc. There were 3 channels (then 4). No tv was on until lunchtime except school programs. It went off about 11pm. Couples got engaged after about two years together and then got married. I don't know anyone who lived together first. All girls I knew were engaged by age 20. You left school at 16 and got a job. You didn't do a levels unless you wanted to be a doctor , Solisitor etc. I don't know anyone who did. Most girls were nursery nurses, hairdressers, nurses, secretaries or worked in a bank.

You were allowed to smoke everywhere.
At work, - in view of customers and in the staff room. Walking into the staffroom in my first job at the start of the 80s was like walking into a smog.
When you went out at night you'd get home stinking of smoke - your hair, your clothes etc. No avoiding it.

You could smoke on planes.... you used to get asked 'smoking or non smoking' but you were in the row behind and in a big box in the sky with nowhere for it to go.

However, people were a LOT less flakey about arrangements. We didn't have mobile phones, let alone internet / group chats so you made your arrangements where you were meeting someone and at what time, and then you turned up.

Sundays were days when few people worked. A 'day of rest' even if you didn't attend Church (but a lot more people did than do now).

If you went to a night club, the bouncers could / would refuse to let you in if you weren't dressed according to their dresscode (am still amazed how casually my dc are dressed when they go "up town" ) - but then I remember my Dad being horrified at the concept of us wearing jeans for a night at the pub / cinema etc when for him, denim was 'working mans' work wear' .
OTOH, it was much easier to get in to a pub / get served under age. Though of course wine was only about 9% alcohol and a 'glass' was only 125ml.

I'm sure you got a whole lot more crisps in a bag than you do now

I was born late 70s so was a child through the 80s. I look at my own children and think there isn't that much difference between my childhood and theirs, with the rather large and obvious exception of technology. They play with similar toys, take similar holidays, wear similar clothes (although fewer ra-ra skirts!), do the same extra-curricular activities, even the food wasn't that dissimilar (my family were early adopters of the avocado pear). Primary school uniform is exactly the same. There is a lot more structure and work in school now though. I pretty much spent my whole primary school years making things out of cardboard boxes.

Some of my most distinct memories were of hairstyles - teenagers with bright green mohicans or old ladies with blue or pink rinses. The music was fun - I've just been watching Top of the Pops from 1988 on BBC4 with Tiffany and Debbie Gibson!

Oh yes, smoking in public was a big difference. I didn't go out drinking etc until the mid-90s but the public smoking then was still awful. I swear hangovers were made far worse by the stench of smoke in your hair.

There was also loads of dog poo everywhere, but that seems to be making a comeback.

Lots of kids still left school at 16. The big push at the time from the government was to encourage kids to stay on at school till 18. There was an education maintenance grant introduced for the poorer families to encourage kids to stay on.
In the main only well off people went to university. At my school in a poor area the sixth form was tiny as most left school at 16. About mid to late 80s they abolished the right for kids to be able to leave school in the term you turned 16. Before that you did not have to wait till the end of the school year.

Corporal punishment was made illegal in schools in mid 80s. Before that it was used in some schools a lot.
There was lots of gender bending by pop stars such as Boy George and Marilyn. But apart from Fred Perry boys, there was little branded clothing amongst teenagers. There would be fashions but you could buy the equivalent in a posh shop or the local market stall.

The 80s is when vegetarians were becoming more common, but it was still seen as a bit way out. Stories abounded of people visiting older relatives, telling them they were vegetarian and being served chicken, because some had the idea that being vegetarian meant simply that people did not eat red meat. Mung beans were the chai seeds of the 80s. I remember a popular vegetarian restaurant in Covent Garden, wholemeal pastry quiche and lots of salads, and the seating was long pine tables and benches. Nouvelle cuisine took off in very expensive restaurants. But this is also when pizzas and hamburgers became common food.

Timmy Mallett, Mallet's Mallet

I was born at the start of the decade and remember most of the 80s.

I think if I went back now, things would seem very dimly lit and dark. Lots of 70s brown still hanging around and 60s/70s brutalism concrete architecture was still around and getting tired looking. There was a better calibre of graffitti, and more litter.

My family started the decade struggling with the recession, but things boomed for us as it went on. The corporate world was more fun, my dad got things like work days at the races. Liquid lunches and smoking in most places were the done thing still. Non-smoking was the minority for places like restaurants.

I remember seeing a mobile phone about the size of a toddler's shoe box with its long aerial. We had a car phone wired in!

Sundays were boring. A trip to the tip was an exciting outing!

Generally and with exceptions (such as inner cities and pit towns where industrial decline occured) I think it was a progressive decade and we entered the 90s in a better place than we left the 70s in. It wasn't a PC decade and lots of terminology such as "The Spastics Society" changed into the 90s, but there was much more opportunity for social progression with student finance if you had the academic potential.

I worked in Primark (Pree-mark, folks, Pree-mark) in Belfast city centre as a Saturday job in the eighties. This funded my bulk purchases of L'Oréal Studio fixing spray, which kept my hair suitably rock hard for a night of dancing. I suppose I would have been described as Goth in appearance. Black clothes, white makeup. Hair dyed black.

Arrangements were made in advance, then you stood outside the chosen meeting place just hoping the other person would turn up. No mobiles, so if the person was late, you had to find a phone box and ring their house to see if they'd left. But then, that was true of all decades before the nineties.

I loved the fact that loads of male singers happily wore makeup and that it was no big deal.

@nevernotstruggling I was around more in the 90s/00s and I still got most of my clothes from pool market or Woolworths. and remember the excited novelty when an escalator was installed in Truro.