What was life like in the UK in 1982

[Its5656]

Of the back of a 90s thread I saw earlier I was wondering What was life like in the UK in 1982, the year I was born.
I lived in council housing in London. Mum was 17 and dad a 23 year old bricklayer.
I'm not in contact with them so can't ask but I remember it being pretty bleak for the most part but also some good.. fruit and veg markets and stalls in Woolwich, pie & mash shops with my Nan. I also remember seeing punks and football violence. And the storm in 1987.
Just wondering.. What would life have been like from an adults perspective in 1982?

You could smoke almost anywhere, trains, tubes, buses and even on flights!

Re BR, BT, British Gas etc. Service was better before privatisation.

You could smoke on flights into the late 1990s

I think gas and BT were much the same before and after privatisation.

BR used to be pretty dreadful (reliability was awful, strikes were very frequent). Things improved, but the privatisation (network rail plus various regional companies) always seemed cumbersome. And the ticketing structures and vast numbers of different deals/prices (that worsened with privatisation) was and remains a nightmare to navigate

@Wolvesart I disagree. In the early 80s it was impossible to arrange stuff like telephones being installed, and dealing with admin generally. There were no standards of customer service at all.

Smoking on the back of the bus. Life admin took almost no time- no choice! Benefits provided a safety net for people including the young so you could be largely independent from 18, even as a student. Clothes also simpler- no returning, no online obviously- just so much less choice.

Benefits provided a safety net for people including the young so you could be largely independent from 18, even as a student This is true there were next to no young street sleepers until Thatcher took away certain benefits for young people. Until then homeless tended to be 'tramps' usually alcoholic and survivors of two World Wars with undiagnosed PTSD.

Clothes also simpler- no returning, no online obviously- just so much less choice. You could return clothes to shops like M&S. Also the equivalent of online shopping was catalogues like Kays, Grattan, Littlewoods etc.

Safari Parks where lions roamed by cars driving through and the only safety notice was to keep your car windows closed 🤣 Baboons actually ON the car bonnet trying to take the windscreen wipers off.
First McDonald’s in Central London. Thought it was heaven ( and my parents were good cooks!!)
Everyone being skinny…( probably because you only ate school meals if you were starving!! ) but other than that, having different fashion styles to each other and not being obsessed with looks.
The MUSIC!!!

Safari Parks where lions roamed by cars driving through and the only safety notice was to keep your car windows closed 🤣 Baboons actually ON the car bonnet trying to take the windscreen wipers off. What! Don't they have those any more? What a shame. There was always someone who did open their car window.

I agree about different styles and not the ubiquitous dead straight long hair nowadays.

I have focussed on the good things but there were plenty of bad things too. 'Date rape' started to be talked about but most people thought it was your own fault for getting into that situation including the victims because it was so ingrained. Domestic violence wasn't really anyone else's business. Caning was banned in London where I was but but still legal in other Education Authorities.
Homophobia and racism were rife. Football hooligans ran through the streets creating havoc (I lived near Millwall). I could probably think of a lot more.

Knowsley safari park is still exactly like that

So many responses overnight.
Obviously can't remember 1982 as a baby but I do remember bits of the 80s.
Clearly remember seeing punks with massive points of pink and green hair.
I remember going to Millwall with my dad and being terrified of the fights I witnessed (god knows why he took a five year old!)
Charmaine and Scott's wedding on neighbours.
I was obsessed with kylie minouge.
I remember getting a Tiny tears and a Teddy Rupskjn.
Someone mentioned how school productions were such a big deal and agreed.. My school did Oliver/joseph/wizard of oz and we practiced for months, they were brilliant! I also remember sports days being a much bigger and funnier experience than my kids ever got.
Someone mentioned about mental health being a non subject and that being a better thing and I disagree. I don't talk to my parents now because of all of the neglect I experienced and although not an excuse it clear looking back they probably both could have done with support, maybe it would have been a better childhood.
Someone else mentioned that it wasn't easy being an undiagnosed girl at school with Autism and I agree. I went to school with a boy who was really struggling and he was treated dreadfully by the teachers.
I also find it shocking that my teachers didn't notice how neglected I was (it was pretty obvious) and I hope today things are picked up quickly and dealt with.
I do think that it was better that we were all aloud to play outside as children, gangs of us all summer roaming the parks.. good times. It's a shame that's today's children don't get this.
Also the holidays.. 6 kids jammed into a car with no regard for safety to all sleep top and tail in a chalet in Leysdown. I loved it and had a great time.
My kids (embarrassingly) don't get half as excited when I take them for a fortnight in Greece!

Totally agree.
Having a phone installed could take many weeks and a repair was rarely much quicker. The cost was much more and you really watched the minutes as they ticked by. The average cost was based on a 3-minute call.

As for the trains.
Slow, dirty, unreliable and the best BR could do was have Jimmy Savile telling you that "we're getting there!".

We had Ska from Coventry ( the late great Terry Hall)

The country was on the up and everyone had spare cash.

@Angrymum22

Quoting two of your sentences here - listen to the lyrics of 'ghost town' and your second sentence doesn't quite follow .

This thread is showing that then, as now, there were marked differences in people's lived experiences.

Disagreeing with a pp, I don't think there was less choice regarding clothes, I think there was more and natural fabrics were far more prolific.

Yes people were thin! Jogging and going to the gym was odd.

Smoking and drinking common.

People were more relaxed, but my parents were agitated about politics. Lots of anger about how the miners were treated and turning the lights off in solidarity and cooking on the fire to not use the electric.

We sent donations to the strikers. Used to drive up to Yorkshire and see the cooling towers for coal powered stations.

Advent calandars that just had a picture behind the door but were smothered in glitter which went everywhere the minute you touched it

Disagree about the jogging!

1981 was the first London marathon (televised from the start, not as large as now but still a major event and brought running - including charity dress-up jogging versions) into the sitting room

Also the era of Jim Fixx - the guru who published books such as The Complete Guide to Running (and who died of an untimely heart attack in his early 50s in 1984)

People wore grey cotton sweatpants and lurid headbands when they went out jogging. Very few tech fabric options then!

Around 1988 the London marathon used to run past the entrance to my block of flats. Me and my friends used to hand out water bottles to the runners. It was a huge event and the streets were packed with supporters.

Not in the UK you couldn't.

BA banned smoking on all flights from March 1998. From the late 80s it was banned on flights less than 2 hours within/from the UK. Other than that they were only required to separate smokers & non smokers.
We went skiing in early 1997 & flew to Geneva. DH had a row with the check in staff & they say us in the tow in front of the smokers with DD aged 8 months. That's the last time I remember travelling on a flight with smoking but it was definitely happening in the 80s & 90s.

Until 1997, when inflight smoking was banned on all EU member state flights, it depended on the individual airlines. Many charter flight airlines were banning smoking towards the end of the 1980's.
BA was one of the few exceptions that smoking remained permissible until 1998. I do recall that now as my then DH and I were planning a weekend away to Paris (mid 1990s) and we didn't fly with BA as they still allowed smoking which wasn't acceptable to us. By the mid 1990s most European airlines were non-smoking.

There were lots of GLC-run (thank you, Red Ken) mum and baby groups in London before Maggie T shut them down. I remember being taken to them.

You must have lived near me. We used to hand out water on Creek Road Deptford.

Lots of school holiday activities in the parks too.

So was I. I remember it as being an easier time financially as a mature student than I would have now. I was doing a 4 year BEd so spent time in schools in deprived areas like Deptford, Peckham and other places that are more gentrified now.

There were certainly problems and I knew someone who was a soldier in the Falklands. People thought another war would go nuclear and be over in 4 minutes but the conditions there were more like WW1 trench warfare. A couple of years later there really was a serious nuclear threat - watch the film Threads for an idea of this.

How 'good" any era was depends a lot on how old you were and how much responsibility you had.