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?

I was 16 in 1980, living in Dublin. It was the beginning of a recession that lasted until the end of the decade.

The city was being demolished and what wasn't demolished was falling to ruin. Temple Bar was a rundown, forgotten section by the river, with a few little shops in Crown Alley near the Ha'penny Bridge. The streets of Temple Bar functioned as the terminus of several bus routes, with a few pubs, many still in existence, and a few restaurants among the seemingly abandoned old buildings. The BadAss Cafe was a nice place to eat, and there was a gorgeous tiny pizza place called the Pizzeria Italia across the street from the Auld Dubliner, where Ugo the chef used to send people to wait until a seat was available. He would send his waiter Eddie to fetch them. Ugo served up the best pizza and a few other fantastic Italian dishes. In a previous life the little restaurant had been a chipper and people waiting for a bus used to stick their faces in the hatch at the side of the kitchen and yell 'Any chips?' It's a very fancy coffee house now. There was a fantastic soup and sandwich place called Phillers where you could get the world's best cheesecake. I remember a lot of live theatre in ramshackle buildings in Temple Bar that probably generate millions every year now, and seeing rats scurrying along in the gutters on my way to the bus. Everyone took the bus or the Dart everywhere. Bikes disappeared and probably reappeared - no lock could stop the thieves.

There were Traveller kids in the streets sniffing glue and walking straight out into traffic. Petty crime was at a high level. Heroin had arrived. Jobs were very scarce. Taxation levels for those employed were very high. After graduating from university in 1985 about half of my classmates emigrated.

Violence in Northern Ireland dominated the news along with the terrible economy and there were radio phone ins about Ireland's divorce laws, abortion, contraception, and domestic abuse. It was all upheaval, all the time. There were marches in Dublin in support of the hunger strikers and long queues outside the American Embassy as would-be emigrants tried to get paperwork and interviews. The US Embassy did not answer the phone.

You might think we were all incredibly depressed, but I recall feeling a sense of great change afoot in Ireland's culture, and of unlimited possibility. I don't remember a lot of the 80s fashion that everyone talks about but the music was great.

U2 used to busk in Dublin - there were many, many fantastic street performers. I will never forget walking up Grafton Street at twilight one evening while someone played Someone to Watch Over Me on a clarinet.

watch Threads and Kes.
socialist worker
Massive unemployment
hIV
The four minute warning
the NHS starting to be turned into a business
No problem with school admissions but also no choice
Child abuse and drink driving being brushed under the carpet

No one owned a TV. Everyone rented and when yours started getting a bit old you could ring them up and they'd send a man round with a new one. You didn't get a choice, you just got the one they gave you.

My family owned a TV. It was second or third hand, B&W. To tune in BBC2 and Channel 4 you had to sit on the floor beside it and hold the tuning knob.

Ra ra skirts
Wham and other icons
No cds or computer other than pac man!
Landline only that your parents used to time you on
We owned a tv and went to private school
Adverts all the time for HIV called gay cancer - initially they didn’t know what caused it just that being gay meant to died to start with - a lot of homophobia as a result
A lot of very racist jokes were considered normal
Very very sexist
Lots of smoking
Very colourful

• princess Diana was followed everywhere and photographed x100 a day Lots of walks on Sunday Baywatch neighbours blue peter home and a way Grange Hill were popular The news depicted Northern Ireland as a war zone and put us off going to Ireland ever As did ‘the north’ And mining towns Free milk in schools and then it got taken away and thatcher was known as ‘the milk snatcher’ many children wanted that milk Time of great poverty Student digs were flee riddled pits although we had grants No internet no emails no mobiles you planned everything by mouth in advance Ahhh the eighties!

You lived with the constant threat of nuclear war.

Fashion was fun, but we thought the 70s was the decade with no taste.

Massive unemployment,the miners' strike and mass redundancy.

There seemed to be a disaster every other week, Lockerbie, King's Cross, Hillsborough, Herald of free enterprise...

Nothing to do on a Sunday unless you went to church. Even the TV was crap.There were only 3 channels, even when channel 4 started not everyone could get it.

Half day = a day in the week when all the shops closed at lunchtime.

Travellers, Gypsies, Irish and New Age, lots of places had 'their' Gypsies who would turn up, live for a month / 6 weeks and disappear again for the rest of the year, and what they were doing was legal.

The first condom ads, only allowed because of the fear of GRIDS that became AIDS.

No childline, there was an 'Incest crisis line' but it was not allowed to be listed in the phone book or the yellow pages so if you wanted to use it you had to a) know it existed and b) phone directory inquiries to get the number.

Things were a lot more sexixt, to the extent that the Yorkshire ripper might have been caught earlier had they listened to the survivors of the attacks instead of classing them as 'immoral'.

My school had 1 computer, it was used to teach computer studies. All school reports were hand written and when you did get a hand out it was purple and smelled because it had been copied using a 'bander' machine.

Smash Hits magazine was hilarious and had all the lyrics!

Tons of great pop and dodgy metal.

Grange Hill
Press Gang
Marmalade Atkins
Dallas
Dynasty
Neighbours with Kylie and Jason

I had some disastrous perms, and between times fried my hair to death with Sun-in.

I was a bit of a dweeb and never really managed to look cool or fashionable. School was ghastly.

Oh God, Kappa ski jackets!

Got my ears pierced at the Oasis in Brum, where they also sold loads of cool goth/metal type clothes. Ice skating at Silver Blades!
Bargain togs at Mark One.
The Bullring was a shithole though.

There was a fab local music scene. Saw Ned’s Atomic Dustbin play down the pub.

Dad worked at ATV/Central studios and later BBC Pebble Mill. Exciting buzzy iconic places, both no longer there, so sad.

Soap and talc. Shampoo for dry or normal or greasy hair.

Old style trains with all the doors.

No seatbelts in the back. In fact our old mini had none in the front either.

Video recorder with the remote attached by a long wire.

Green and yellow eye shadow.

Recession depression, but also times of ostentatious excess, eating out at lovely restaurants, super hols driving on the continent.

I was in my thirties and had two primary age children at the start of the decade. We had moved from the industrial north to a prosperous town on the south coast and DH was away for weeks at a time travelling the world as an IT consultant. I was teaching full-time. We ran two cars, had holidays in the south of France and bought our first Apple computers and Betamax video recorders for home use.
We used to have a lot of dinner parties and it had become much easier to get more unusual ingredients. I loved the Madhur Jaffrey programmes on TV and cooked a lot of Indian food.
I hated the fashion for big shoulder pads and couldn't understand Diana worship at all.
We loathed Thatcher and all her works.

My hair took SO much less time in the 80s. Washed, scrunched with mousse, and good to go.

My hair was made for the 80s - it takes a good half an hour to style now! 😩

It was fantastic. I was a teen and young adult in the 80's.
I worked a 45 hour week for £16.50 when I left school in 1981, which went up to £21.40 adult rate when I was 18, I thought I was loaded 😄
I spent time marching round London waving my ' ban the bomb ' plaquard and camping on greenham common for the same cause.
The fashion was amazing as was the music, basically anything went.
Thatcher came along and smashed the unions and industries, particularly the heavy ones, such as coal mining, anyone remember the ' coal not dole ' stickers?
Sexual harassment was rife, women typically worked in ' women's jobs ' such as hairdressing, secretaries etc. A few did make it big, but not many.
Most cars had a manual choke, which was a pain.
Shops closed for half day on Wednesday and all day on Sunday.
Pubs opened at 11-3, then 7-11, except for Sunday's when they closed at 10.30. nightclubs closed at 2 except for Sunday's when they didn't open at all due to music laws. It was great when the clocks went back and you got an extra hour 😆
Everywhere allowed smoking, including public transport, upstairs on a bus was like a fog. Smokers sat at the back of aircraft and puffed their way to Spain and back. Most smokers smoked in their homes too.
Babies were still parked outside shops in their prams and it wasn't unusual for a local teenager to babysit the neighbours baby. I spent literally every evening as a young teen babysitting for neighbours.
T.V usually closed down at around midnight. The BBC would say goodnight then play the national anthem, followed by a dot and a whining noise. That would be followed by the test card, which I believe was Leslie Ash on it.
We only had 3 t.v channels until 1984 iirc when channel 4 began. Then we were all addicted to Brookside.
Up until around the same time, we had no breakfast t.v, I think the programme's started at around 9 with some boring education programme.
I remember there was an uproar about breakfast t.v starting because everyone was going to be late for work and school. BBC compromised by putting a clock on the screen. Then the war of breakfast t.v began.
Food was usually a meat and two veg affair which was cooked by your mum when she came home from her part time work, most meals were finished up with a pudding.
Sanitary ware was usually a choice of either tampons or bulky pads. Wings hadn't been invented. When they were, they were advertised by an agony aunt called Clair Rayner. She was a large jolly lady who had a penchant for calling everyone ' lovey'
The first advertisment for sanitary ware was aired in 1986. I can remember me, my sister's and my mum staring at the t.v in a stunned silence, while my dad cleared his throat and buried himself in his daily mirror. 😂
When I got married I moved to Germany with my husband who was in the forces so I did the 80's from different countries 😄
I bloody loved my 80's.😁

Also, then the AIDS scare hit. Everyone was terrified. Durex advertised condoms for a very short time, but moral outrage at the ads caused the ads to be dropped.
Cos obviously it's far less outrageous to die of aids instead!!

I was only 8 when the 80s ended but I do remember our local cinema had a smoking side!

Oh and also remember my parents being over protective with me and my sister's due to the Yorkshire Ripper being around as we lived in Yorkshire.
If it was dark when I was coming or going to work, either my dad or brother would walk me to the bus stop and see me on the bus and wait for me getting off.
When I met my husband, he had a car and my dad demanded that he got out of the car and walked me through the front door before he left again

I turned 13 in 1980, did my A Levels in 1985 and graduated in 1989.

I mainly have fairly negative memories TBH. Margaret Thatcher being elected, the miner's strike, high unemployment, being short of cash.

On the plus side, I did not have much difficulty in getting a good job at the end of 1989.

I remember watching Ken Hom on the TV and being utterly fascinated by Chinese food. It was so different to what we ate which was meat and two veg, occasionally fish and chips.

TV was sparse, so very powerful. One appearance on Top Of The Pops could launch your career, like Wham with Wham Rap. It was outside the top 40 so wasn't eligible to be shown but another act had to be replaced last minute and it launched their career.

I worked in retail and look back and loved that we didn't work Sundays.

80' s weddings were mostly family affairs. Everyone invited from the babies to great aunt Gerti.
Wedding dresses were big flouncy crinoline style things.
The usual mode of wedding transport was a vintage rolls Royce or similar.
With a buffet at a pub for reception, unless you were posh and had a sit down meal.
Paid for by the bride's parents and the groom.
Looking back at my 80' s wedding pics, I can see the resemblance between me and my grannies loo roll cover in my flouncy crinoline dress 🤣

Censorship of music.
Relax by Frankie goes to Hollywood. Banned.
Which was counterproductive as we all dashed out to buy it, sending it straight to number 1.
Any song which contained swearing or reference to sex got the BBC's knickers in a twist and was banned.😂

The 80s were awesome. I turned 18 in 1980 and went off to uni. Met DH and got married in 1985. All our growing up to adulthood and shared memories were created in the 80s. The 1990s were all about having children but the 80s to us was a decade of pure hedonistic fun! We adored the music and the clothes. What a time!

We watched the challenger explode. I was terrified of AIDS, and accidentally climbing up an electric pylon.
Yes! I spent a lot of the 80s bring terrified of stuff ...nuclear war (remember the instructions on what to do in the phone book?)...the IRA...ferries (after ferry disaster)...and of course just about everything in the horrifying public information films (drinking bleach, crossing railways etc). On the other hand, my parents obviously weren't worried as I used to spend the whole day in the woods with friends (aged 8 - 10) with no adult to supervise.

Music and TV was much more of a communal experience as nobody had a personal screen or stereo. Always had to negotiate what to watch with parents (and mum wouldn't let us watch ITV so only 2 channels!) Same in the car - each person was allowed to choose a tape to take on long journeys (which in incidentally had been recorded off library records or radio, not bought!) which meant we listened to a lot of Wagner or Beatles (dad), Cleo Lane (mum), A-ha (me), Novelty summer singles (little brother - Hold a deck chair in the air...Star trekking across the universe ) on the way to our French camp site or gite . If we were in northern France we also used to listen to fuzzy Radio 4, my brother and I particularly liked the a announcements calling for people to come home from their holidays because a relative was dangerously ill (remember those??). Same holidays were regularly punctuated by dad saying he'd lost the traveller's cheques and we'd all have to go home before finding he'd just put them in a safe place.

It was a period of great change - the UK of 1980 was very different from that of 1989, as well as the regional variations people have noted.

Smoking was everywhere - legal in public buildings and most workplaces unless there was a risk of fire. Trains had smoking carriages, often more than the non-smoking ones. If you commuted you often had to pick between a seat in a smoking carriage and being asphyxiated, and standing in an ultra-crowded non-smoking carriage. You could smoke on the Tube too, and on buses. This was despite the fact that the medical risks were widely known and there were advertising campaigns against it.

Also trains had corridors and the carriages had small compartments with (8?) seats. You could open the windows manually. Public transport was cheaper than today, but often disrupted by strikes and bomb alerts (usually false alarms).

Planes were expensive - no bargain airlines, so most people either holidayed in the UK, or drove over on a ferry, mainly to France. (No Channel Tunnel either.) Holidays abroad were mostly booked in travel agents, UK ones you would get a list of accommodation from the tourist information centre. Camping lacked mod cons. Hotel and especially B&B rooms often had no ensuite, you shared a bathroom down the hall. Usually just one family holiday a year, no weekends away except to visit friends and family.

You could get a cheaper passport for a year if you couldn't afford a ten year one and didn't plan on going abroad more than once.

I was 20 in 1980 and just in London.
The City was taking off and there were plenty of highly paid jobs
Privatisation of the old nationalised industries meant lots of share buying
The Falklands war
Lots of positivity and a nearly bankrupt economy being turned around.
There were plenty of jobs in the South if people had the gumption to move
Preferred 70s fashion but had some good quality clothes
I could fill my supermini for £5
First McDonalds in 1979 and quickly they were everywhere
Pie crust collars and velvet headbands
Barbours
No social media
Telex tapes and carbon paper
Nice invitations for things planned ahead
Sexism, racism, homophobia
Sale of council houses which was very wrong
Diana mania
Sundays
Lots of balls and lots if fun but far fewer good restaurants
High interest rates
Furniture, white goods, clothes were much more expensive; holidays too. I remember in 84ish going to Greece with friends (not school holidays) and paying nearly £400 each for a flight and basic accommodation. Paid £550 just last week for a week in the sun in accommodation that was first rate.
BandAid and concerts in the park
Brilliant decade for me.

The Falklands War
4 minute warning
When the Wind Blows
AIDS
IRA bombs

Men dressed like pirates, pixies or women.

Naval engagements.

Space invaders played from small tables in pubs.

Filofaxes to improve our lives.

The state was dismantled in USA, UK and the Soviet Union.

Every job started to have the title ‘executive’ appended.

Cheese salads were a regular menu item.

T-shirts printed with “My house is worth £40,000!” replaced three months later with “....£50,000!”

BMW 3 Series were the car.

Decline of butchers and bakers.

Gateway, Finefare and Cullens.

Pay rises were 5% or more - high inflation.

In 1981 £5 would pay for a night out, by 1989 it would be at least £30.

British pop music was diverse, entrepreneurial and very new.

People carried cheque books most of the time and paid for goods, meals and even exchanged them for cash at bars.

Cities would shut down for the same three weeks every August and families would often go to the same resorts every year. If you were different, you went to Goa.

Women were expected to be on the pill in 1980 but by 1985 condoms were worn.

More women gave up work to stay home with young children, and there were far fewer nurseries. No nurseries at primary schools and I think no reception year either - children rarely started before having achieved their 5th birthday. Lots of playgroups where mum went with DC.

No SATs or National Curriculum in schools until the late 80s. Lots left at 16, some with no qualifications at all, but jobs were available for school leavers at 16 or 18. At 16, you took either O levels or CSE - the former for the more academic, pass grades were A-C, D and E were fails. CSEs included more vocational type subjects, and were graded by number. A grade 1 (the top grade) was supposed to be equivalent to a C grade O level (the lowest pass). If you only had CSEs you would definitely leave at 16. GCSEs were introduced late in the decade to combine elements of both, and were regarded as a dumbing down of O levels. Grades were harder to achieve than today - all As were very unusual.

Only a minority went on to university. The tertiary sector was divided into universities, polytechnics and colleges. You applied separately for each sector. You could apply to five unis on UCCA, four polys on PCAS, don't know about colleges. Most applied to both UCCA and PCAS. Oxford and Cambridge made unconditional offers to some students if they had taken their own exam (this was later for Oxford than Cambridge), but otherwise were the only places which expected AAA from candidates except for medicine or vet sci. Russell Group unis usually gave BBC offers.

University tuition was free for a first degree and there was a means-tested maintenance grant. Not many students worked in term time, but few had cars, none had phone contracts etc, or PCs etc to pay for. Some halls of residence had shared rooms, and definitely no en suites.

Computers were just coming in, and most people handwrote essays and assessments. Theses/dissertations had to be typed; I paid a typist to type up mine from my handwritten draft.

Nuclear war seemed like a real possibility. The Iron Curtain was a tangible thing; Yugoslavia was the only really accessible part of the Eastern bloc.

The IRA was also a major threat to daily life.

Islamic terrorism, and suicide bombers, had not been conceived of.