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?

There was a free or 10p wooden adventure playground in a few London parks. I spent hours there in the summer with DB and friends.

I was same age and it was brilliant! Beginning of New Romantic Era

Was the reason people were more thin down to less snacks? We had a biscuit tin and the odd bakery treat and Trio etc if we had packed lunches and of course sweets, but we weren’t encouraged to snack, eat loads etc.

At school sports were proper sports, shimmying up and down ropes, on equipment, running. I was always out on my bike, playing in streets or parks and we were encouraged to walk to places rather than get a lift from parents. DM once famously took us out in deep snow to somewhere about half an hour away and we ended up getting the bus home, we did have a car. We were exhausted!

There were quite a lot of fat, or at least plump people then. Not as many as now but by no means rare.

But that’s the thing, there was only 1 or 2 fat children in my school, 1 girl was fat because her parents were.

It wasn’t that common, to see that many fatter people around, maybe as they got older?

I remember it being rare compared to today! One child, maybe one or two parents. Most people were slim.

I don't think there were as many really obese people as there are now.

There were takeaways like fish and chips, Indian, Chinese, kebabs, KFC. Pizza but you couldn't get it delivered you had to go out and fetch it yourself. It would be quicker to cook something yourself unless it was a treat.

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

@CaptainMyCaptain

Trafalger Road Greenwich.

I remember the play in the park events that people have mentioned.By the time I had kids (mid 2000s) there were play in the park events but you had to stay with your kids rather then just drop them off.

@GonnaGetGoingReturns - yes no snacks. If you wanted food it was fruit or nothing.

My mother had biscuits under tight control. We were not allowed to eat them between meals but only with tea. So guests were very welcome as the biscuits came out.

I still have good eating habits thanks to my mother and father.

I was four. I vaguely remember the Charles and Diana wedding hoo-ha the year before, and William being born. Coming home from school and pressing 1 on my TV to put Playschool on at 4pm. Starting school, no school uniform just what you fancied wearing. My siblings watching Grange Hill and Newsround. Having a duffle coat and red boots like Paddington Bear.

I remember seeing people queue at the job centre, punks with blue hair, and people not having much money. The decor still being very 70s, looking back. Putting up a school sock for Santa.

Snacks didnt exist and I cannot remember having anything to eat between meals.
I was a student nurse in Brighton and had my first pizza at Pie in the Sky which I think was the first pizza restaurant in UK .
Can also remember vividly looking after young men and they had a mysterious virus which caused pneumonia and a certain type of skin cancer. Many died and AIDS was discovered. Can remember the fear ,particularly in Brighton because it seemed to be confined to gay men ,men I was friends with and worked with.

We used to buy loads of snacks from school tuck shop though.

We used to buy loads of snacks from school tuck shop though.

Yes, and a quarter of sweets or some chocolate from the corner shop after school, though not every day. I'd have said there was more biscuit and cake eating then than now tbh.

No ready meals, very few takeaways.

I was 17 in 1982, it was a great era and I loved it.
The music was fab, night clubs and pubs were buzzing.
Fashion was unbelievable.
I started 6th form and I can remember 1982 very clearly .

Would someone like my mum have stood out then.. 17, married with a baby? My parents definitely didn't marry for love, I think my Nan insisted because of the pregnancy. Was a baby out of wedlock frowned upon on in the 80s?

I was in year 10 and I remember skiving school to see the Mary Rose being lifted up and the consternation on the seafront when it slipped in the cradle. Health and safety wasn't much of a thing - old men flashed us as we played lacrosse on Southsea Common - without a mouth guard. School PE kit was basic - a pleated skirt and an aertex shirt and a sweatshirt if it was cold. We used to compare the colour of our knees in winter as it was so freezing they'd go white, orange, blue, purple and back to white again. We were allowed to leave school at lunchtime without signing out. If you wanted to go to a friend's after school you had to queue for the one payphone to call your mother to let her know.

I don't remember food being that healthy - toast for breakfast, something with chips and a stodgy pudding for lunch at school/sandwiches at home and then a big dinner with a pudding of some sort plus cheese and biscuits at just before 9pm when the whole family gathered to watch the BBC news. No one exercised and yet no one was fat.

There were smoking carriages on the trains and the top deck of the buses and most of us had managed to try cigarettes by age 13.

My parents wouldn't let me go to the cinema to watch Monty Python's Life of Brian as it mocked religion.

I was one of the biggest girls in my year at university ( late 80s) weighing 9 stone at 5 ft 6

My SIl had dn when she wasn’t married to db in 1981.

My family never gave it a second thought.

In London not too much. I had my baby out of wedlock, people might have been judgemental privately but it didn't affect me. There were plenty of others. In a village in the deaths of the countryside maybe it was different. .

I was a student in Manchester in 82 - no tech, big hair, New Romantics - used to spend my time in Affleck’s Palace checking out the vintage clothes shops! It was a good time to be young - was in student halls but the following year moved into a student house in Longsight for £22 a week. Went out to the Hacienda (now a block of flats around Canal street). Can’t remember how we listened to music - tapes???

I was 15, did my O grades that year. Lived on a council estate. My parents both worked.

Had a Saturday job in a supermarket, we had so much freedom. All of my friends had part time jobs.

The music was ace, different genres. You could go to clubs that did different types of nights. We could travel to go and see bands, as long as we got the last train home.

We were all thin, walked everywhere when we could. No families I knew had 2 cars. Most mums worked part time.

You could smoke anywhere, even after going to the cinema, your clothes would still smell of smoke.

To answer your question, being 17 and married with a baby would have been unusual for people I knew. But I understand the pressure to have a shotgun wedding, even if that's not what you wanted to happen.

I look back with very rose tinted glasses.

It was before AIDS. I started a Drama & Theatre Studies course in London in 1981 so Russell T. Davie's drama It's A Sin was especially evocative for me. All the music, the characters, everything. I met him a few times as I have a mutual friend (still) who was on the same course as him in Cardiff. By 1984 I'd known a few people who died 😢. But that horror was still to come in 1982. It was also before Ecstasy came on the scene. Still feels kinda easy and relatively innocent in retrospect.

I went to primary school with a little girl who died of AIDS. She was about 7 and this would have been around 1988. I think she got it from a blood transfusion as a baby, we had a big assembly about it.

I was born in the UK in 1982.

My mum talks about the time I was a baby and I can tell it was a hard time for her.

They lived in a block of flats, one female neighbour had a black husband and my mum and dad were the only neighbours that spoke to this couple!! (Our town didn't get a lot of windrush era families, it was still a very very white town). My nana still used the N word. I remember my mum telling her not to use it in front of me.

My mum talks about buying the meat and veg for the month in one go and making it stretch to all the meals she'd need to feed everyone. She didn't have much of a food budget.

Rape within marriage wasn't illegal.

My dad wrote poems about strikes. I remember finding them when I was a bit older and asking about them.

No central heating. No double glazing.
Our town still had a LOT of prefabs as housing.

My uncle was fighting in the Falklands war.

My parents hated Maggie Thatcher. And "yuppies".

I was 12, and lived rurally. We had a very old council house with a woodburner in the living room (that my uncle had illegally put in!) and the rest of the house had night storage heaters that Mum couldn't afford to run. We regularly woke up with ice inside the windows (single glazing) and the cast iron bath took all the heat out of the water when you ran a bath! But we were happy - we had so much freedom, we regularly would ride our bikes/stay out until 9pm/10pm with friends, and I was already going into the local city on the bus meeting friends on Saturdays. There was no social media, school bullies were barely existent and the GP used to run a local surgery from their extension and did home visits.

Life was definately "calmer". And the music from the 80s is still the best to this day