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?

Absolute freedom, because there were no cell phones. Seriously-could go out with my boyfriend for HOURS and no one could text or call. Lived in Florida then (and now) and went off to sail around the state, gone for almost a week without any TV or phone calls. Rent was cheap, didn't have to pay cable, cell or internet, so more disposable income for young people. We could actually afford to live on our own! Jeans worn so tight, I'd lie down on the bed, thread a shoestring through the zipper and pull it up. Permed hair, shoulder pads, Miami Vice, Hair bands (meaning men in rock bands with loads of hair, not hair bands we wore in our hair!), awesome music, MTV, music videos, dresses with puffed sleeves and puffy bottoms, and always the feeling that we were the coolest generation that ever walked the earth.

70s and 80s is when much more liberal ideas hit schools about teaching kids. Lots around about how kids had to be ready to learn. Some of it was good, but some of it meant that some kids pretty much drifted.

Kids with disabilities were still being institutionalised. Friend left school and worked in local place and said it was horrific. Staff sitting in the office, only feeding and changing kids but rest of the time leaving them to their own devices.

OFSTED did not exist. There were no DBS to work with kids and no oversight of childcare. Although paid childcare was still more likely to be a woman who was a neighbour or that you knew locally.

Lesbians were still being committed to institutions just for being lesbian. And police targeted gay men for arrest through enticing gay men to try and pick them up in toilets. Perfectly legal to sack people and deny them housing for being lesbian and gay.

If you were disabled and living at home and wanted help, someone would come to your house and assess you. Then you got a council carer visiting and giving you help. No extra money though.

The institutions that had housed people with mental health problems were all being closed down, it was called care in the community. As you can imagine it did not always translate into much care at all.

80s is when shopping centres became a big thing. Some had glass lifts and mini fountains. This was a big thing and I and my friends thought they were glamorous. Plenty of teenagers hung out at the shopping centres.

Unemployment was high, but that meant a flowering of alternative comedy and music. Plenty of people spent a few years in the dole writing music or comedy or painting, and then made a living out of it. The 80s is the rise of the comedy clubs and comedy gigs, and the decline of traditional working mens clubs.

I was 18 at the end of 1980. I thought much of the music was pretty dreadful to be honest but we did go to a lot of gigs mainly rock bands. There actually wasn't much to do really at all other than cinema, pub and the occasional meal out. I think young people have so much more fun and opportunities now esp with cheap travel and all the festivals.

People still hitchhiked in the 80s.
Wet suits for the sea were rare as they were expensive. I went on a sailing course wearing jeans and t shirt and pretty sure everyone else did too. Jeans were much stiffer with much less give than these days.
YHAs were much more basic than today but cheaper.

Schools tended to have buildings that had been poorly maintained because of a lack of money. Princess Di and the Royal Wedding was a very big thing. Schools trips abroad tended to be to France by ferry. People used travel agents as there was no internet.

Pizza Hut and Garfunkels were popular restaurants, as well as lots of local independent Italian restaurants. There was no minimum wage and local authority pay scales went lower than current minimum wage.

Lots of protests by students as the 80s is when gradually lots of benefits were removed such as housing benefit. Lots of sit ins in student unions.

Every student union had a Nelson Mandela bar. Big march in London calling him for to freed and the song was released - Free Nelosn Mandela. The GLC in London was abolished as it was left wing and the Tories hated it. Overnight the number of voluntary groups plummeted as lots lost their grants. Before the GLC disappeared there were lots of free concerts and events in London paid for by GLC.

I was a child in the 80s my memories are mainly:

Cheap black veneer furniture from MFI, candy and chocolate cigarettes, everybody smoked and pubs (and some houses) had yellow stained walls, 10p mix sweet bags, much more freedom as a child to roam around, the first computer consoles with games cartridges that took ages to load and were very simple games but seemed amazing, school discos, IRA bombings on the news, the man from the 'Pru' and the football coupons man coming round, the Argos catalogue which seemed like the best thing ever.

I was in a mining town so I remember singing a song in the playground at primary school that went something like "2,4,6,8...who do we not appreciate? Maggie Thatcher, put her in the bin..."

I grew up in the States. I loved my 80s childhood. I was ten in 1982 and 14 by 1986, so I was totally immersed in Duran Duran, moving onto New Order and Joy Division by 13. I loved everything to do with 'England' and everything that came out of it: the music, the fashion, the chocolate.
Music was sooo organic back then... the way you'd go to the record store and fish through vinyls, absorbing all of that amazing artwork, finally buying the record you'd been saving for, taking it home and delicately slicing into the plastic with a knife to begin opening it up like a present. The smell of that record. Any record. I loved that smell.
I was always terrified that nuclear war was about to happen at any minute. I had a legitimate fear of nuclear war and couldn't wait for Reagan to crack on with the Star Wars programme (which came to nothing- we're still here, so it all worked out).

I watched a lot of MTV, Bugs Bunny, and our 80s Stranger Things: The Twilight Zone. And Three's Company.

The 1980's were totally fabulous. It was my time.

And yes the music! I was at the opening night at the Hacienda in Manchester. Long before house music and drugs took over I remember them playing Culture Club - do you really want to hurt me echoing round the place with no one there to listen to it. And Boy George clones everywhere. I remember queuing up in my dinner hour with my fake ID to get my membership card. And having to queue up to get tickets for concerts because that was the only way to get the good seats. And sigh … John Taylor such a beautiful man.

No internet and no mobile phones but life was so much more chilled. I think the world is a much more scary place these days. You could go to the airport for the day and sit in the departure lounge. You could be in a crowed space and not once feel afraid of some nutter blowing himself up. You could walk down Downing Street. Sundays were actually really nice - no shops open, hardly any traffic on the roads - the country almost used to grind to a halt and like it or not it gave you chance to wind down and spend a bit of time with your family at home.

Dynasty, Dallas and Miami Vice were on the telly. And after God Save the Queen on the stroke of midnight telly finished for the night. No late night movies or 24 hour news channels and people probably benefited from that. I know I stay up way too late and don't get enough sleep these days. Sleep was kind of enforced because there was nothing else to do.

Last orders was at 11pm and 10pm on Sundays. If you did go out to a club on a Saturday night they closed at 2am and you could get the bus home and not fear for your life.

And chocolate - non of this rubbish fake stuff that is called Cadbury's. The 80's chocolate bar was much bigger than today's pathetic size and fewer chemicals in fizzy drinks either. And crisps were crisps and actually had flavour.

And I had loads of money - I left Grammar School at 16 and walked straight into the job of my dreams and earned a small fortune for doing not a lot. Sadly, Rupert Murdock put an end to it all in the late 80's but never mind it was good while it lasted, I had the time of my life and somehow managed to buy a house by myself at the grand old age of 20.

I feel very lucky to have been a teen/young adult in the 80's. My DC's have so much more pressure to succeed than I ever had and although they have more opportunities - they really have to work so hard to achieve them. They certainly couldn't walk into a job like I had without at least a degree which I think is sad.

Funnily enough....a PP said life doesn't seem that different for their children but it definitely will be for mine.

'Holidays' were spent at the local park or a local lake that had a fake sand beach (which was black if you dug more than an inch down).

The excitement of the year was getting on a coach that took you to Blackpool a couple of hours away and drove through the Blackpool illuminations and then took you back home again.

Food was very different for us - fruit was very basic (apples, pears, oranges), strawberries at pick your own in the summer, rhubarb when seasonal. That would have been it apart from tinned peaches and pineapple.

We would never have tasted anything like mango, passion fruit, etc.

No 'exotic' food at home so nothing like lasagna or curry. They would have been special meals to eat at the pub. At home spag bol with meatballs or ghoulash were the only 'fancy' meals.

Mainly, as we were poor (single mother in a mining city) we ate a lot of beans/egg/mushrooms on toast. Then to Grandparents twice a week for meat!

Trips out were rare...so eating out was occasional and at a cheap pub or a jacket potato at Yates's. Cinema occasionally which would have an interval break for ice cream.

Once a year we might take a trip to somewhere like Southport beach. We would never have gone to a National Trust property or anything like that.

So very different to how my children are likely to grow up in the commuter belt of Hampshire with middle class parents.

...and nobody I knew had ever gone to University, I don't think I would have even known anyone who'd finished college.

I didn't really know many people with a professional job, I knew one person who was a nurse and my uncle became a social worker at a children's home. Everyone else I knew would have been working in factories/labourers/unemployed ex-miners/dinner ladies.

I could buy "exotic food" like okra in London, but outside of London food was basic, I was going with a group of friends to Wales. I had to leave later because of work, and before I left I got a phone call from friends in Wales asking me to bring garlic as they could not find any garlic at all in the nearest town.

I was in my 20s and living in London in the 80s

I could leave one job on the Friday and get another in the Saturday.
Dp and I were working 9am-6am a couple of days per week.

I worked in a factory at 16 and got paid every Friday. Weekly pay in those kind of jobs was the norm. I knew people at 16 working as chambermaids and waiters. We were seen and treated as young adults, not children like so many 16 year olds are today.

You could walk into casual work. There used to be job ads at the back of the Evening Standard for waitressing and labouring. I would come home from travelling abroad, get settled in a quiet phone booth and ring around. I usually had a job or two by the end of the same day.

I remember Chicken Kiev and pasta with pesto being served at really glam dinner parties. And Prosecco was so rare only M&S sold it.

For me it was a time when being openly greedy and self-serving became socially acceptable or even desirable. Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney character was meant to be mocked and derided but he became celebrated. I remember feeling very uncomfortable seeing him on TV and I think I read years later that Enfield felt the character had been a bit of an own goal.
I also remember alternative comedians being new and lots of sexual politics at university. I was also a vegetarian and it's great to see how much easier it is now.
Then there was the Faulklands, Greenham Common and the Miners' Strike.

M&S sold "exotic foods" like proper baked cheesecake and tabbouleh.
Alan Bennett plays were big at the time.

Born in 1969, started secondary school in September 1981.

My school had a shortage of chairs and tables. Text books were shared one to three people and a lot of our lessons were actually the teacher copying from the only text book n onto the revolving blackboard. We then copied it into our books.

Teachers were on a work to rule for a few years, which meant there were no after school clubs, no sports fixtures, and during breaks and lunch hour the school was locked as they refused to supervise us during lunch hours.

This goes a long way to explain why Wimpy Bars, and the cafeterias of woolies, BHS and littlewoods did so amazingly well in the 1980s.

At school we did athletics during summer. Well we weren't trusted with javelin, discus or shotput. So instead we watched the pe teacher do it.

We wore a pe kit that had huge pe knickers, a pe top and a pleated pe skirt. We had to wear this with knee high kicks and white lace up plimsolls from the baskets outside Freeman Hardy Willis. If you forgot your kit you had to take a penny and a shoe to the pe office and they would give you old kit that stunk. Your friends would then call you Linus, as in Charlie Brown, for weeks.

Our school uniform was colours rather than blazer and tie. Teachers were more interested in shagging each other than teaching.

In the second year a lady with a short bubble perm and a dodgy home knit jumper would arrive to give the girls a talk about periods. This would include telling us to use pads rather than tampons, "just like that lovely Suzanne Dando on the Bodyform advert in Jackie magazine".

Which brings me to magazines, we read Jackie, Blue Jean's, Fab 208, My Guy. They had agony aunt columns, Cathy and Claire in Jackie magazine who were the older sisters that we never knew we needed. We read photo stories which featured models pulling odd faces and crying as Barry in the bomber jacket fancied my best friend and not me.

I bought clothes from markets, Chelsea girl, top shop, and perhaps a clothes shop that sold the same stuff as the market but the carrier bags were trendy so I paid more just to get the carrier bag.

I used my pocket money to buy singles, 12 inch singles or albums. We used to play them once to tape them, then the record would never get played again. Partly because I was forbidden from using my parents music centre if they weren't at home. I wasn't allowed to touch any of the dials.

Rest of my pocket money went on the make up stall, rimmel pink shimmer lipstick from superdrug or maybe something from the Avon book. Or bodysprays, musk by impulse was for nice girls. Limara body spray was for trollops apparently.

We went on a five day trips to France, we all bought bangers, flick knives, long packets of sweets that tasted of cola and drank orangina laced with vodka that we had nicked from the duty free shop on the ferry.

We had school discos that were from 7 to 10 on a Friday night once a term.

We took our options in the third year, but really our parents chose them. If you were clever you did o levels, or you did cse exams.

We went to pubs from 16, but drank cinzano in bus stops on the way to to parties from 15. We wore white skirts with knee high canvas boots, had really big mullet hair, wore cricket jumpers and lots of gold Belcher chains.

We would share our clothes with friends and hold swopping evenings to get rid of stuff we no longer wanted.

None of us dressed like madonna on a daily basis, that is a myth.

If you were a boy you were a casual and wore branded golf jumpers. Boys were Farah trousers and had wet look perms . Or wore the Miami vice look.

Yes to Anais Anais but your older sister wore Youth Dew, Paris, Rive Gauche or Opium.

TV was only three channels, you weren't allowed to talk during a programme if your parents were watching.

The telephone would ring, but it was never for you. When you went anywhere you would do the two rings signal when you got there, then again when you left.

Everyone knew someone who had a relative who went to fight in the Falklands. Pubs gave them free pints when they came home.

Police knew your parents, park keepers knew your parents, milkman knew your parents. The only people who didn't know your parents were others peoples parents.

Radio one was popular, they did live roadshows in summer. These were from seaside towns, they had games such as bits and pieces.

My favourite TV shows were totp, the tube, young ones, blackadder, Murphy's mob, that's life, Hale and peace, spitting image, tenko, Dallas, dynasty, the holiday program.

I think what this thread shows is that the 80s were very divided.

If you were in the South East or London, especially in anything to do with services it was fantastic. Economic boom, lots of available work, access to more and more 'exotic' things, etc.

If you were in the Midlands or North you were in a pretty bad way...massive unemployment, miner strikes, poverty, lack of education and social mobility, no holidays, very few trips out.

It was a huge divide- Thatcher was largely loved by the more middle class/Southern areas and absolutely despised in working class/Northern areas.

For me it was a time when being openly greedy and self-serving became socially acceptable or even desirable. Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney character was meant to be mocked and derided but he became celebrated. I remember feeling very uncomfortable seeing him on TV and I think I read years later that Enfield felt the character had been a bit of an own goal.

@NomDeQwerty - that's definitely true. I remember thinking that at the time. There was a sudden obsession with self - songs like The Greatest Love Of All - all celebrating Me! Me! Me! and greed was praised. You were supposed to look out for yourself, put yourself first and the idea was that if everyone did that we'd all be thriving and self sufficient. It was very different from the Seventies.

I loved being a teen in the 1980s.
Make up was Miners in Woolies. That was it - or Rimmel.
Goths were original and cool.
Chelsea Girl - why did that close ?!
No fancy yogurts - my mum brought Ski one day and it was like the Queen had come for tea.
The best music.
Ra ra skirts .

Meant to say wearsmymojo yeah we definitely felt the north south divide up north!

Yes! Ski yoghurts were the absolute paramount of food. We couldn't afford them but my Nan would always have them in.

For very special treats, like Boxing Day, she'd have a Vienetta in

Yes I think the seventies was better.

I was 12 in 1980... the start of my teens and a brilliant decade.
Adam Ant on my bedroom wall, my first concert was Spandau Ballet :)
I fell in love and cried over OMD 'Joan of Arc' when my boyfriend (aged 13) dumped me.
Human League 'Dare ' Album reminds me of the snowy winter of 80/81

My hair got progressively bigger (permed by the mid 80s)
My school was strict.. girls' grammar and teachers could still throw a board rubber at you.
Holidays... come home when the street lights come on... so much freedom. I swam in the canal and smoked fags bought singly from the off license wayyy under age.
Went to university in 1986 with a grant {the joke was 'what's green and takes an hour to drink?.. a grant cheque' ) and life was fun. Went to uni in Wales and everything was shut on Sundays including the pubs (probably a good thing)
Graduated and straight into a job with no struggle.
At home there was an avocado bath suite, a new microwave and hot air heating (which now strikes me as weird) ..parents were both teachers and gently neglected me.. I was expected to go to school and crack on with work and exams with very little supervision...which I did.

I physically called on friends... the phone in the hall had a lock on and no calls before 6pm. I watched the Faulklands conflict on tv, discovered MTV and binged watched Remmington Steele on tv with a very gorgeous young Pierce Brosnan as lead.

Life was good, far more uncomplicated than today!

Christmas decorations are something I really remember.....lots of really gaudy coloured metallic streamers.

They would often come into the centre of a room from each corner. The tree would be covered in tonnes of very kitsch baubles in all sorts of colours and tonnes of those silver and gold bits of metallic strands. You'd still be finding them in March.

Trees always topped with a fairy and lights were the ones with multi-coloured plastic petal type surrounds.

The best cards to give or receive (especially from a school crush) were about a foot tall and padded!