Sonia Long was a Black punk from Nottingham in the 1980s. She remembers having to rope her friends in to help straighten her naturally curly hair to achieve her spiked hairstyle.
“I’d left home and was staying with a friend in her flat in a high-rise. I wasn’t working at the time, so we just used to hang around, meet up with friends and go and see bands,” she said. “[My friend] was like: ‘Let me take your photo.’ I can’t remember where we were going but there was definitely a pub involved and maybe a gig later on.”
A portrait of Long with bright red hair, a studded belt and dark makeup is one of many photographs going on display in a new exhibition curated by the Museum of Youth Culture titled “Grown Up in Britain – 100 Years of Teenage Kicks”, opening at the Herbert art museums in Coventry on 1 July.
The show aims to celebrate youth culture with a display of photographs, objects and stories collected from over the past century. It was important for the curators, Jamie Brett and Jon Swinstead, to have diversity in the collection and to feature people from Black British and south Asian communities in a way that was authentic rather than voyeuristic.
For Long, this particular time of her youth was bittersweet. “I know everybody now has coloured hair, piercings and ripped-up clothes but we’re talking about the early 80s, when it was incredibly shocking. Especially to see a young Black woman looking like that in Nottingham.
“It was difficult being me in many ways. But I am who I am, and that wasn’t going to change just because some people didn’t like it,” she said.
“I had lots of people trying to understand why I chose that youth culture over what was more popular with Black women at the time, such as funk, soul and reggae. For me, it was just about it being very political.”
Through works by 40 artists and 50-60 submissions from the public, the exhibition will chronicle the daily lived experiences of growing up in Britain, from school life to nightlife, and how it has transformed over the decades.
“We’ve got [images by the photographer Ken Russell of] teddy girls in the bombsites of Britain after the war, dressed in Roman sandals and men’s jackets. That for me is really powerful,” said Brett. “We’ve also got a satchel that a girl has dedicated to boyfriend ‘Skinhead Ed’ that’s been drawn all over with a pen. It has managed to withstand the test of time since the 70s and got handed to us from a vintage shop. They felt like there needed to be a place to put this but couldn’t find the right museum.”
The changing nature of young people’s first jobs, apprenticeships and university life will be a focal point too. “We’ve got some beautiful photographs of people working in factories in Coventry,” said Brett. “We’re also [showing] the first roles of women in public positions during the second world war. We’ve got outfits of land army women that are on display.”
This will be the first large exhibition by the Museum of Youth Culture since it was founded in 2015 by Brett and Swinstead. Their goal is to tell a story about teenagers that is different from the one told by traditional press, sociology books and textbooks. That is why they have given the general public the chance to be a part of the exhibition, in order to allow for a more nuanced conversation about what it means to be young today.
“The press will often say: ‘There’s no style any more. There’s no more scenes any more’, but underground nightlife has become absolutely huge since lockdown,” said Brett. “Older generations assume that they’ve experienced youth culture, and that young people today are having a really narrow view of the world because they’re all on their devices. That all the scenes from the past are so much better and we should look at them with rose-tinted spectacles. That’s not what the museum is about. We’re not a nostalgic collection. We’re actually trying to make this timeless.”
During lockdown, the museum received more than 6,000 submissions via the online portal on its website. “Everybody’s got a picture that can go into the museum to help fill this tapestry of British culture growing up,” said Brett.
Some of these submissions have allowed them to fill in the cultural gaps that have been historically under-documented by professional photographers. “We go back to before everyone seems to think youth culture started, to the roaring 20s and that’s purely thanks to submissions that have come in,” he said. “One of the submissions that we’ve had quite recently was someone called Johnny Willard. He had taken Polaroid photos of the southern soul scene in Essex in 1967.”
A big motivation of the curators was to unpick moral panics and old stereotypes from the past. “We have a Daily Mirror front page from 1961, [with the headline] ‘Suicide club!’ about the motorbike racers who started the early biking culture, and who were seen as terrorising society,” said Brett.
“To balance that out, we’ve got some really beautiful photographs that are of friendship and kinship, and real diversity among the riders. Rather than it just being loads of white boys, it’s girls. It’s people from Black British backgrounds having these beautiful experiences. So we’re starting to challenge [the mainstream narrative].”
The curators are keen to redress the tendency of the press to report on young people in negative ways, which they say still continues to this day. “Things like knife crime, and all of the awful situations that kids are in, it’s horrendous, but it’s happened before. We can go back to the 1950s and we can see that it’s not the fault of the youth today – it is the fault of the system,” said Brett.
They are also eager to use it as an opportunity to connect generations by highlighting the similarities between each era. There will be a replica teenage bedroom that visitors can enter, filled with objects from different decades.
Brett said: “People from older generations often think that youth culture doesn’t exist any more because you don’t see people stomping down the street in their skinhead boots, and because people are not necessarily dressed in the same clothing that you’d normally associate with rave culture. But [young] people are now able to pick and choose a song on Spotify, or a certain style from a certain era of fashion.
“That creates this supermarket of style that has really influenced the way that young people can be themselves in a way they haven’t been able to before.”
One thing that has clearly shifted for teenagers over the decades is the photography itself. Since the advent of the cameraphone, more photographs of young people exist now than at anytime before, but the quality is much weaker. “We’ve come from the age of the negative, where everything is huge, and we can scan it to whatever size we like,” said Brett, who adds that they have faced technical issues with submissions from the public that are often too pixelated.
So how do British teenagers of earlier eras and today compare? There are more similarities than differences, visitors to the exhibition will find, but teenagers have become more innovative, according to Brett. “Look at TikTok and people like PinkPantheress, who have turned music that’s come from their own parents and made it into something that’s palatable and got a record deal out of that.
“These things are so exciting, and it often takes 10 years for people to look back and go: ‘That was my scene.’ Things are happening now – we just might not be able to see it.”
