Picture the 1980s in Britain, and what comes to mind? Thatcher? Big hair? Striking miners? Shoulder pads? The poll tax march? Greenham Common? New Romantics? Yuppies? Dole queues?
Whatever you know, or indeed remember, of the country in its Sinclair C5 era, Tate’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain will remind you that there is an abundance of other perspectives. In Tish Murtha’s study of unemployed people in Newcastle, a girl in a trench coat sits in a tipped-up armchair poking rubble with a stick while junked furniture burns behind her. Meanwhile, Savile Row-suited toffs lounge on Chesterfield sofas, safely out of reach of Mrs T in the boys-own world of their members club, in Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen.
