by Luisa Rini

Punks deep in conversation 

The Rolling Stones were to the 70s and 80s what The Beatles were to the 60s

David Jones, aka David Bowie, in one of his many identities – here Aladdin Sane

When I think about the 70s and 80s, I immediately think about the fashion of that era, such as the notorious punk style, and the music of those years, such as the Rolling Stones or David Bowie. These decades evoke in me a sense of dangerous glamour, a time when young people dared to experiment and flaunt convention. What I don’t immediately think about is a whole list of less glamorous events that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the United Kingdom, which are also an intrinsic part of the story of this period. In this article, I will try to share a few of those moments with you, to try to give you a better understanding of these bygone years.

The ‘Dark Ages’

The 1970s in the United Kingdom were commonly known as the “dark ages” due to the fact that it was Britain’s most depressing period since the Second World War. The 70s were a decade of strikes, social conflict in industry, the decline of the economy, the polarization of politics – in short, a tumultuous period of violence and ethnic tensions. Things got so bad that in 1976 the United Kingdom found itself having to borrow $3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which at the time was the largest loan ever requested from the IMF. 

And then, in 1979, as the decade was drawing to a close, and just when people thought things couldn’t get any worse, the country was hit, along with most of the developed world, by a global recession. This led to even greater social unrest and an even more dismal and depressing atmosphere. The UK went through a ‘winter of discontent’ during which many public sector workers went on strike. The strikes and industrial disputes continued into the 80s, the most noteworthy of them being the Miners’ strike of 1984. 

In the words of Kenneth O. Morgan:

Everything was going wrong. There was turmoil in industry and a collapse of public services from schools to cemeteries, a growing mood of very un-British violence from the IRA to football fans on the rampage to battered wives, there was ethnic tension, the population was ageing and the birth-rate falling, English football had slumped since the World cup victory of 1966. Its male tennis players were near-useless, and its cricketers humiliated by the Australians and the West Indians.

For fascinating footage of this period, check out the following

The Iron Lady

Selling off the country

In the 80s, Thatcher was intent on privatising the country. She privatised a number of state-run companies, including British Telecom. In 1986, the government introduced a massive deregulation of banks, financial services and the City of London. This proved successful in establishing London as a global centre for financial services, although is blamed by some for the malpractice in banking that would ultimately result in the banking crisis of 2008. In the same period, many people struggled to find work and survive. In the summer of 1984, for instance, the number of unemployed reached a new record of 3.3 million. 

Thatcher’s legacy is therefore a very mixed one. When she died on 8 April 2013, many mourned her death while many others celebrated. 

So what was life really like? 

Elswick kids (1978)ⓒ Ella Murtha

It’s always hard to imagine how life was in the past. Questions such as ‘was it better or worse than now? seem beside the point. Life was a series of events, good and bad. Life was what it was. The background of people’s lives may have been different (more poverty, more strikes, higher unemployment, no Internet), but I believe that people back then were fundamentally the same as today. That’s why I included this photograph of Ella Murtha’s which captures two poor British kids from the 70s who are oblivious to their surroundings. What is important in every age is human interaction. We should not forget that, especially today.

I found out so many ‘trivial’ and yet revealing things, such as the Pan Am Boeing 747 jet that landed at Heathrow in the early 1970s, or the world’s fastest passenger aircraft called Concorde in 1976 as the era of world travel began in 1970, and air travel became cheaper and easier. So many events caught my attention as I travelled back in time, too many to recount here. For instance, I discovered that it was in those years that McDonald’s made its entrance into the UK market by opening hundreds of shops in Britain. I couldn’t find how many McDonalds there were in 1980 in the UK but today there are about 1300 McDonalds. 

One other event that struck me was the Pan Am flight 103 that exploded over the village of Lockerbie, Scotland, on its way from London Heathrow Airport. This remains the worst terrorist attack on British soil in history. 

The Lockerbie disaster resulted tragically in 270 deaths

So that’s a brief overview of the UK in the 70s to the 80s. I hope that you learnt something interesting, and that you are inspired to conduct some research of your own!

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