The Middle Classes in the 80s

Anti-glamour

The middle-class Upwards loved the 80s. Socialism and feminism were a club they could join. Everyone else was a Sloane Ranger, a Yuppie or on the dole. Thatcher was in power, destroying industry and starting wars. The world had got to change. The Upwards thought they were spearheading a revolution, and soon everybody in the world would copy their earnestness, drab clothes and woolly thinking. They had a lovely time bossing everybody about and telling them off for being ideologically unsound. Like any cult, they were keen to recruit you, and then persuade you to give up your personal life and spend all your spare time working for the cause.

Unfortunately they were the last group you’d want running the world – they couldn’t even run a women’s centre. They got funding for enterprises that did nothing but hold meetings (probably about “this group’s attitude to Nicaragua”).

Some time in the 80s a working-class woman wrote an article in the Guardian urging us to “go for what’s winnable”. Upwards were puzzled. It was a totally new idea. Their plan was to go for nothing less than complete equality, worldwide. This excused them from actually achieving anything, like deciding where to keep the stapler. More silly ideas: they thought science was “hubristic”, logic a male conspiracy, and knitting anti-feminist. Show them a party line and they toed it. Instead of science, they believed in magic – they loved Freud and Jung.

They couldn’t say someone was pretty – it was “conventionally good-looking”. They chose plain girl/boyfriends as a political statement. Female pop stars wore long baggy overcoats and danced clumsily to prevent women being seen as “sex objects”.

We couldn’t be girly. Upwards always like being puritanical and ascetic: they enjoyed banning hairstyles, fashion, makeup – and sex with men. They wore cheap, practical, hardwearing dungarees and parrot earrings, and cut each other’s hair. They didn’t read chicklit but Virago reissues of women novelists, or books of boring essays. We couldn’t go to the movies but had to go to political cabaret, pretentious French “cirques” and miners’ benefits. We listened to U2 and Mary Black (PC messages), not Duran Duran or Gary Numan (tunes).

Stoke Newington used to be a hangout for girls with white legs and short hair who wore summer dresses made out of 50s curtains (and were accompanied by stooping, weedy boyfriends). Stokeys have become much more normal, but maybe that’s because many of their obsessions have become mainstream and commercialised (health food, modern antiques, vintage clothes, cappuccino, sitting in cafes, baby slings, massage, yoga, visiting the third world). Also bus services improved and we're no longer so cut off from the rest of the city.

They gave sons dolls and daughters plumbing sets. A writer in The Independent (May 12, 2004) calls the idea that gender is a product of nurture, not nature, “an idea that was briefly fashionable in the 60s and 70s”. It was all a fashion? Unthinkable!

Being Upwards, they worked the system like mad, getting a grant to do up a five-bedroom house in Hackney, or blagging a council flat in Westminster, living on the dole and getting their mortgage paid but still making money at a creative skill that they didn't “declare” (ie you lied or kept quiet about it). They then boasted about their cleverness and creativity in a quiet way. And their friends flourished them in front of their other friends to make them feel small.

The wider world paid them little attention, and 20 years on, high streets are full of tanning salons, nail bars and waxing parlours. Female pop stars went back to being sexy and glamorous in a few years. (OK, some important laws were passed, and society became less authoritarian and unfair. The liberal project is still going – we've got women bishops at last!)

When the party was over, people who had wasted years of their lives in a travelling circus with a political message dusted themselves down, got a teaching qualification and ended up running something, buying a house and joining a pension scheme. They were never much bothered by contradictions.

I even wrote a novel about it all called The Fourth Door.

Decor Crimes

“Total modernising, but trying to keep the character of the property back to the cottage style.” “60s is Victorian, isn’t it?” “All the doors have been dipped when they moved in 10 years ago.” “This is our Victorian-inspired room”.  “Artex – it’s a bit old-school.” “Corridor rooms.” “The Wow Factor - finished to a very high standard.”
(All from makeover shows and property programmes)

“The copying on show in Milan proves that not only do most designers not read history books, they also don't read magazines they are not in.” (Kieran Long)

“Cheltenham: Staying in the most incredibly middlebrow hotel. I've seen no colour but taupe in days. This is Britain's default genius loci.” (@tomdyckhoff)

“Glade plug-ins, square plates.” (@itsbadtaste)

In American sitcoms, a vivid crocheted Afghan over the back of the sofa is a sign we’re in a blue-collar home.

More here.

And some from lovemoney.com:

Worst interior design fads: Artex walls, avocado bathroom, woodchip walls, removal of original features, fake laminate wood flooring, exposed brickwork on interior walls, brightly coloured Formica kitchens, lino, spiral staircases, wood panelling

Worst furniture fads: built-in bar, mock fireplaces, animal print rugs, net curtains, MDF built-in cupboards, black ash furniture, futons, reproduction "antique" furniture, teak sideboards, multi-functional furniture

(Don’t they know that teak sideboards and lino are really hip?)

If you have a terrace house, please don’t install:
granite worktops
marble bathrooms
downlighters
ranch-style stone chimney
rustic white-painted door with black iron knocker, horseshoe, nail heads, letter slot
stone cladding, especially multi-coloured

(Of course, it’s your terrace house – do what you like.)

Looks to avoid:
3D plates hung on the wall
60s psychedelia (Instead of opening the doors of perception and ushering in the Age of Aquarius, it immediately became just another décor style or dress fabric.)

an island, with a tiny overhang, and bar stools for eating in the kitchen (So you can’t relax and there’s nowhere to put your knees.)

boutique hotel style
bright overhead lights
bunting made out of remnants
carpet in the bathroom (Especially pink. Especially when it goes up the side of the bath.)
carpets in pubs
chandeliers
converted mill with the machinery in the living room
copying your parents’ décor (your clothes and lifestyle won’t match)
corner bath
cosies for dining chairs
cottagey feel: same old bland interior, with one “rustic” detail
country house hotel style (gilt mirrors, lots of chintz)
country kitchen: science lab with rustic doors

diagonal wood cladding or wall tiles (80s)
divan beds (except they’re comfortable and can double as sofas)
Dralon (velvet-look material for sofas)
exposed stone wall – in your bathroom
exposed stone wall in an old cottage – especially not lacquered (The original inhabitants would have plastered and painted.)
extensions that create a long, narrow room and make the original rooms too dark

faux granite worktops
feature wall with very dark wallpaper
fitted carpet in churches
front and back rooms knocked through to make one long, thin room
furniture blocking a window

Georgian door with fanlight on a 60s council flat or 30s semi (architects call them “embellishments”)
gold Roman blinds

gravel everywhere: on your sitting out area, on a “membrane” with weeds poking through, as parking for 20 cars in front of your McMansion (It’s all over Prince Charles’s faux-old village of Poundbury, I hear.)

huge three-piece suite crammed into a small room
leather sofas or suites
matching curtains and wallpaper

modernist interiors in a Victorian/Edwardian/30s shell. Gutting a 30s house with small rooms, turning it all into one “space”, and filling it with lime-green sub-Eames furniture.

nested tables

new houses based on converted old houses (They’re being built with a long thin “open plan living kitchen dining area” with a window front and back modelled on two knocked-through rooms.)
ochre-toned art (if you want to sell a picture, use lots of red)

painting a decent Edwardian pub exterior in orange/cobalt, orange/jade or lilac/violet (Mid-noughties - they’ve all been repainted brown, black or grey. I wonder why.)

pebbledash
prominently placed family portraits
ragrolling, dados and stencils (80s)
removing all internal walls from a tiny cottage
removing all original features later than 1900
removing half-timbering from a 30s semi
reproduction antique furniture, patterned carpets and Chinese rugs in a modernist flat (pensioner style)
room with a nautical theme

shells in the bathroom (80s whimsical)
sofas and chairs jammed against the wall, miles apart
space wasted on hallways and corridors, especially in a studio
stripped-back inglenook containing a small wood-burning stove
tartan wallpaper/carpets/furniture
turning part of a room into a “kitchen area” instead of making the whole room into a kitchen you can live in
TVs in cupboards or covered with a cloth

varnishing floors, furniture and all exposed wood in pale orange
Victorian conservatory on modernist house
Victorian grate, Regency mantelpiece

Victorian lamp standards in 60s shopping malls
walls covered with clocks and decorative plates
whimsical bronze figurative garden statues (and sculptures of lions made out of chicken wire)

More decor here, and links to the rest.