The 80s: Photographing Britain – a 'vivid' exhibition
Tate Britain's new show presents a picture of the country as an 'apocalyptic inner-city slag heap'

We tend to see the 1980s as "a combustible era of economic growth and social unrest", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. On the one hand, there was "Thatcher, yuppies, boom and bust"; on the other, mass unemployment, along with "epic strikes" and inner-city riots.
This new exhibition of 350 or so photos offers an "exciting – but very partial – view of the time". It glosses over the "aspirational" side to focus on the period's "gritty, oppositional" character. The first room "positively explodes with vivid images of the great street battles of the time: the miners' strike of 1984/85, the Anti-Nazi League, Brixton riots, Grunwick picket, the HIV and Section 28 protests". The room imparts a sense of "a society being thrown into an unknown technocratic future while harking back to the social polarisation of the interwar depression years". And all in all, "The 80s" is an "exuberant" and "highly atmospheric" event.
"The vision on offer is of Britain as an apocalyptic inner-city slag heap, blighted by burned-out buildings and upturned cars," said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It's very clear whose side we are supposed to take in the struggles of the period – and it is emphatically not that of Margaret Thatcher, at one point here glimpsed as a cut-out target from a paintballing range, "covered with marmalade-like gunk".
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
There's some "first-rate work": Chris Killip's monochrome pictures of Northumberland sea-coalers, for instance, are "intimate yet epic"; similarly "brilliant" is Melanie Friend's shot of "two bemused Japanese tourists" caught in the middle of a poll- tax riot, and David Hoffman's photo of two "punkish lads snogging" in front of "riot police and a burning block of flats". Yet overall, the tone of the curation is hectoring and didactic, informed by humourless identity politics.
The show is "baggy, meandering and in need of a tight edit", said Hettie Judah in The Guardian. It covers what it calls the "long 1980s", from 1976 to 1993, and sometimes the selection is just downright bizarre. A section on the era's subcultures, for example, "bypasses those usually associated with the 1980s" – punks, goths, rude boys – in favour of a wall of Wolfgang Tillmans' photographs mostly taken in Greece and Germany in the decade that followed.
The era's "punky irreverence" is in short supply, though it's very refreshing when you do come across it in, say, Grace Lau's shot of a "cross- dresser stifling a giggle posing beside a guardsman in full regalia"; or in the "sea of improbable hairspray-stiffened barnets" on a nightclub dancefloor illuminated by Tom Wood's flash. If you look closely, there are classics aplenty, from John Harris's picture of a mounted policeman wielding a truncheon during the Battle of Orgreave to Martin Parr's "snarky snaps of garden parties". There are, though, a lot of long-winded detours along the way. "There's some great stuff here – but you have to work for it."
Tate Britain, London SW1. Until 5 May
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
6 peaceful homes near small towns
Feature Featuring doors with local topographical maps in Oregon and a 1850s homestead-turned-house in Vermont
-
The best TV shows based on movies
The Week Recommends A handful of shows avoid derivative storytelling and craft bold narrative expansions
-
Too Much: London-set romantic comedy from Lena Dunham
The Week Recommends Megan Stalter stars as a 'neurotic' New Yorker who falls in love with a Brit
-
Apocalypse in the Tropics: a 'troubling' portrait of modern Brazil
The Week Recommends Petra Costa's sobering documentary examines the rise of right-wing evangelical Christianity in Brazilian politics
-
Murderland: a 'hauntingly compulsive' book
The Week Recommends Caroline Fraser sets out a 'compelling theory' that toxins were to blame for the 1970s serial killer epidemic
-
The 2025 James Beard Award winners
Feature Featuring a casually elegant restaurant, recipes nearly lost to war, and more
-
Film reviews: Superman and Sorry, Baby
Feature A hero returns, in surprising earnest, and a woman navigates life after a tragedy
-
Music reviews: Lorde, Barbra Streisand, and Karol G
Feature "Virgin," "The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume Two," and "Tropicoqueta"