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?

I remember an American girl visiting us in the early 80s and she asked where our shower was. My parents being helpful said that they would get one. She looked perplexed ( thinking of expensive plumbing etc), but her face was even more of a picture when we produced a blue rubber hose attachment for the bath which we’d bought from the hardware store down the road!

I was at school and was heavily into the new romantic scene.
The music and fashion was fantastic. Human League, Heaven 17, Def Leppard, Bowie, Japan, Gary Numan. I could go on and on.
I had short hair. Permed on top at one stage and shaped into the nape of my neck. I had a ‘rats tail’ too at one stage. Then I spent an absolute age backcombing, tonging and gelling my hair. I remember putting green and blue gel onto my hair plus tonnes or Insett hairspray. I also used to crimp it for good measure!
I wore a white frilly blouse, and had some baby blue knickerbocker trousers plus a pair of patterned shoes which were the same style as a regency Prince would wear. I wore blue eyeshadow and blue eyeliner with green mascara, lipgloss plus lashings of blusher.
I must have looked like the is to mine Prince. We all did though. We all looked like either a member of Adam and the Ants, Bananarama, Tge Human League or Duran Duran.
The school I went to did not make you wear a uniform and all the seriously cool kids looked amazing. I begged my mum to let me have an asymmetrical haircut like Phil Oakley but she drew the live at that.
We had a fortnightly school disco and when certain songs came on everyone sat down and let the cool kids dance. They all formed a circle and swayed in time into the middle all doing the same dance. With their asymmetrical haircuts!
Actually I don’t remember anything bad about 1982 at all. It was absolutely the best time to be young and carefree.
We were allowed to flourish and the school I went to was big on the arts.
Coincidentally, I saw someone who was a few years older than me at the weekend who went to the same school. He is a well known actor now.
Lots of my peers became actors and musicians. The time lent itself to that and nobody was afraid to express themselves, anything went.
My best friend practised hairstyles on me, colouring my hair! she went on to own several hair salons although I can’t say she was great at doing my hair.

I was 17 and having a fab time.

Re fat people, clearing out my Mum’s house, I found a Liberty’s skirt from the 1980s, size 16. My size 10 daughter can’t even get it over her thighs.

As for sports we did proper sports lots of times a week.
The cross country really was cross country. You had to run several miles through the fields which surrounded the school and out into the open countryside. It was harsh.
Our school was very competitive and you played to win. It was a privilege to represent your school. Everyone was fit and everyone did sports, no excuses.

I was 19 and just bought a house with my boyfriend with no help from my parents, we both worked from aged 16. My friend worked in a hosiery factory, on a Friday or Saturday night a 52 seater coach would take us and her work mates to a Birmingham nightclub. We danced all night, no drugs, no fear of drinks being spiked, I just remember laughing and enjoying myself. Employment wise it was office work, hairdressing or hosiery factories only the very clever went to university, when getting a degree was an achievement. I just remember being happy, everything was affordable, good times and certainly not as stressful as today.

The thing is, it was great if you had decent parents and a non-abusive home life, but Childline only started in 1986 believe it or not. Before that, a child had nowhere to go for help at all. Teachers weren't the approachable people they are now, and even if they were, they had no safeguarding training, and might just as easily have reported you to your parents for lying about them! If you ran away from home because it was too awful, the police might just return you directly to your violent parent(s) for being a naughty 'runaway'. That's what I always think - I was 20 in 1986 and Childline started up 10 years too late for me.

Yes - our telly (one of those with wooden casing) conked out and was away for weeks being repaired. We had a tiny black and white portable which we watched as a spare - you had turn a dial to tune into a different channel.

Being an unmarried mother did have a lot of stigma still in 1982. And Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet encouraged that view. And the right wing press. (Hypocrite Cecil Parkinson).

I knew quite a lot about this because my dm was a social worker in a south London borough at this very time specialising in helping unmarried mothers. These were predominantly teenage girls who were often kicked out of their homes by their families. They were often forced/heavily encouraged to have their babies adopted. My dm was a counsellor to these young girls and helped them find out what benefits they were entitled to. There was also a specialist mother and baby home charity she worked alongside.

My dm was very aware that the government of the days policies were contributing to this. There was a big backlash by the Thatcher administration and large parts of society to not have sex education in schools. There argument was that parents should teach children about sex and if schools did it would only encourage sex. But plenty of parents did not teach about puberty or sex. As is evidenced by many threads on here where poster's reminisce. Contraception was not anywhere as widely available now and was not often discussed.

Girls were also to blame if they got pregnant generally and if she got chucked out it was the right comeuppance.

My dm made big efforts to try to take sex education in to schools and encourage pastoral care. She was often criticised by some for being nosey or a "do gooder".

@tobee my DM was a single mother (divorced) in 1982 and there was even stigma here. Yes, my stepdad was around but it was still fairly rare for women to divorce.

There was the mother of a friend of mine who was also unmarried yet she lived with the father of her children and she still got stigma and comments.

@Charlingspont - I had no idea about when Childline started. My best friend from when I was 5 was neglected, dirty, smelling of urine and broke her arm twice, maybe calcium
deficiency. Her DM was hardly ever around and she was a latchkey kid and looked after by much older siblings. My DM wanted to adopt her but couldn’t really.

I was a chubby girl too. Size 14, 5ft 3in and 9 stone.

I'm five or six, maybe eight, years older than most of you who have happy memories from the early 80s. You probably have happy memories of your youth because your parents did the worrying about making ends meet.

In 1982, I was three years married to an American and living in New York, which was only a few years out of bankruptcy. It was probably the beginning of the division of society into those who succeeded and the others who failed; Wall Street called it Big Bang. I don't know what it was like to live in the UK between 1980-85, but I do remember coming back for Christmas in 1984 when a dollar was worth almost as much as a pound (£1 = $1.04), shopping the Next sale and going back to work in NY the best-dressed person. But I viewed the UK as impoverished at the time, and it was. In NY, friends were succumbing to AIDS (newly diagnosed, Karposi's Sarcoma et al, and not well understood) so it was frightening for different reasons.

But to be 25 in NY from 1980 was to see the excitement of Big City Life writ large. In 1980, I went to Max's Kansas City, the Mud Club and CNGB five days a week; they were where I hung out, by 85, it was about dance clubs like Area and Limelight. I managed a band so I learned to collect payment for gigs from some quite threatening people. More importantly for my future, I worked in the world of finance and I learned a lot.

@Charlingspont

I actually phoned childline once, to be honest it wasn't at all useful. Very victim blaming.. At lot like when I went to the police at 18.

@tobee
Your mum sounds great. Last year a therapist asked me " If no one is born evil What do you think made your mum abusive" It sounds like from what people are posting 1982 wouldn't have been an easy time for very young parents but also it seems there was opportunity out there.

TBfair I learned a lot more from financial services work, even when it wasn't relevant to my life at the time, that has been valuable longer term. But the music world taught me how not to be dominated.

People were thin because everyone smoked!

The Adrian mole diaries give good a view of that time. The first one is set in 1982.

Sorry to hear that, really sorry. Childline was supposed to be exactly that, a lifeline for children!

Not everyone smoked. I never did although it was smoky everywhere you went and you csne back stinking of it .

Exactly.
Not one person in our family smoked, not even in the wider family (grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins etc) but at work and out & about it was quite common.
Also pubs, you only had to stick your head in the door and the smell was clinging to you from that moment.

Gosh I didn’t realise sizes had changed that much!!

I worked in an office where one of the male staff regularly set fire to his office wastebin 🙄

Later in the 80s I worked in a school where a lot of people smoked in the staff room. The Head and her secretary smoked in the office with children coming in and out.

Well I didn't say literally everyone smoked but everyone I knew smoked.

The teachers used to send the older kids down to the local shop at lunch to buy cigs, and the staff room was a just a smoky fog and was like stars in their eyes when they opened the door.

I remember a meeting with the headteacher and my parents at school and he had a cigarette going in the ashtray and a glass of whisky on the go 😂

I was born in 82, and my mum was considered on the older side at 31. But I suspect 17 would have been unusual, although not unheard of. It was expected that she would quit her job and become a SAHM. I think she’d have been happier if she’d had the option to put me in childcare and continue working. She went back when I started school, but only ever part time, and not to her previous job. We were probably lower middle class. They could afford a house in the southeast on one wage, but thinking about it, the high interest rates must have affected them. I know they were very anti Thatcher.

Yes smoking teachers! The staff room was a fug. Adverts for cigarettes everywhere. Smoking on trains, buses... passive smoking for children wasn't a thing

My DM says there was a lot of fear of nuclear annihilation.

It was easy enough for a working class couple to buy a 3 bed semi in the suburbs.

No foreign holiday though. No cafes or coffees other than Nescafé instant!

No eating out.

Lots of people rented their tvs and no one had videos.

Parents read a daily broadsheet.

Everywhere was Smokey.

Cars broke down a lot and didn't have seatbelts in the back unless they were Volvos.

There were a lot of burglaries and car/bike thefts.

Kids walked to school without parents.

Kids clothes & toys were gender neutral.

Kids didn't get toys/ presents except birthdays and Xmas.

Everyone watched Dallas and the snooker.

People assumed we'd be living on Mars by 2023!