Post-Thatcher, pre-Britpop

September 25, 2009 7:29 AM

London in the early 1990s. (Or, Britain in general). How did it differ from the present day? What were the little, day-to-day differences, the minutiae that was of its time? Any books or resources recommended?

(Oh, and loving the Hallowe'en gifs on the 'Ask a Question' page!)

posted by mippy to Society & Culture (21 answers total)

Hmm...one thing that would be worth investigating around that time specifically is the explosion of club culture and specifically to London the advent of hardcore/jungle/drum and bass music. Although the "rave stuff" really started more in 1988, the development of jungle/dnb music took off around 92, and is often referred to as Britain's and even more specifically London's very own homegrown music. A good resource on the music side of this and how it developed into a large subculture would be "Generation Ecstasy", although the author's name escapes me right now...
posted by the foreground at 7:52 AM on September 25, 2009

Hardly any mobile phones (or internets) obviously. Using phone boxes. Routemaster buses with open backs and Yellow BT vans. Smoking in pubs (and possibly on buses too, but I think you had to sit at the back). Rave music everywhere at that point too. Wimpy Bars instead of Burger King. Only 4 channels on the TV.

The strange feeling (for me at least, as a teenager in the previous decade) that It Wasn't The Eighties Anymore, and that suddenly the future was arriving and I wasn't too sure about it at all. That seems ridiculous now- living in the future is a wonderful thing...
posted by Chairboy at 7:52 AM on September 25, 2009 [2 favorites]

The Last Party by John Harris (called Britpop! in the US) has a pretty good overview of the state of British music between 1991 and 1994 and the wider culture, though it is mostly about Britpop.
posted by Kattullus at 7:54 AM on September 25, 2009

Bah.... should have previewed, seconding what the foreground says about the music, and its emergence from the London scene (I'll add 'to an extent', before I get flamed).
posted by Chairboy at 7:56 AM on September 25, 2009

Response by poster: I remember rave culture and such pretty well, but how much did it really hit the mainstream? Mainstream life was more what I was looking for (I believe I've read that book though if it's by Jane Bussmann...)

I didn't visit London until 1998, which is why I ask. Wages? Drinks? Sandwiches?
posted by mippy at 7:56 AM on September 25, 2009

This might help.
posted by gadha at 7:59 AM on September 25, 2009

You still stood up on the terraces (behind the goals) at football grounds. You could get into Chelsea's ground for a match against Liverpool for 9GBP. Try doing that nowadays.

Sunday pub hours were much more restrictive - they had to close between 3pm and 7pm on a Sunday. The fact that they didn't have to close for a couple of hours even on weekday afternoons had only recently been implemented.

The Conservatives were in power - and Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister (at least in the very early 90s).

CCTV Cameras didn't track your every move.
posted by Nick Verstayne at 8:24 AM on September 25, 2009

I remember fears about mad cow disease, and I'm barred from donating blood in the US for the rest of my life because I lived in the UK from 1993-94.
posted by woodway at 8:25 AM on September 25, 2009

Oh, and the Albert Memorial was in scaffolding until just around the time you visited London first.
posted by Nick Verstayne at 8:27 AM on September 25, 2009

There's this pretty lame DVD called Live Forever thats about the rise of Britpop. Because its about the rise of Britpop, much of the DVD is about the time immediately prior to the Britpop-domination era, and its got lots of footage of shows and malls and so on from that time period. It's not that good, but, it might have the kind of mundane details you're looking for. On the other hand, the Gallagher Brothers never disappoint in an interview situation.
posted by jeb at 8:36 AM on September 25, 2009

I don't know if it's actually available on DVD anywhere, but there was a season of the Real World filmed in London in 1995 which might give you a good first-hand perspective, if you can get your hands on it.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:44 AM on September 25, 2009

I have never lived in London, but I spent quite a bit of time there throughout the 90's/early 00's, and then didn't return again until 2007. The main differences I found were:

1. Ease of use. London has always been a big sprawly pile of craziness, but throughout most of the early 90's, for example, it still was tough to find a cash machine that was not attached to a bank, and banks weren't everywhere you wanted them to be. Same with coffee places (and not just Starbucks, although those are EVERYWHERE in London now).

2. Ease of transit. The Tube has always been amazing, but for a long time any question asked of a Tube employee about how to get from A to B was met, at best, with a certain level of condescension, like "how can you not know that? It's perfectly simple..." and at worst with disdain. That has changed quite a bit.

3. London has acquired a velocity it never had before - it's always been a great big city, but it never had the urgency and energy of a New York, where people go a million miles an hour by default. Now it does. It's not to the NYC level yet, because London still isn't a fully 24/7 culture, but life there seems to be a lot speedier now than it ever was.

Dear God how I love London.
posted by pdb at 9:10 AM on September 25, 2009

Not an Englishman, but I remember there was a lot of excitement about the Chunnel and its possibilities (and the fact that they finally finished the damn thing).
posted by spamguy at 9:12 AM on September 25, 2009

pdb is right about it being quiter back then.... in the suburbs EVERYTHING was shut on Sundays. And I do mean everything.

Also, all of the quality daily newspapers were broadsheets back then (rather than tabloid or Berliner formats). This made reading them on the tube almost impossible.

Coming back to the drugs/music thing: There was no hydroponically grown 'skunk' back then (or very little of it). Most people smoked bad hash (or soapbar, as it was known). And pills were bloody expensive...
posted by Chairboy at 9:24 AM on September 25, 2009

Response by poster: I do remember Britpop well, though as with punk it wasn't really a 'scene' outside of cities. I remember shows well enough - readin Victor Lewis-Smith/Tapehead on Television helps - but it's all the details only accessible to adults that I'm not clear on.

It took me a good few visits to get a handle on London myself - seemed like there was advertising everywhere. I was in my then-boyfriend's car driving through the city when we stopped at traffic lights, two blokes got out, punched each other a bit, then got back in and drove off.

What about immigrant culture - in Ealing there are a lot of Polish/Asian shops and delis, obviously mass Polish immigration is fairly new but how common was it to see 'foreign shops'?
posted by mippy at 9:36 AM on September 25, 2009

This isn't about immigrant culture, but how England seemed to a US exchange student living on campus in the west of England, so a different culture perhaps compared to life in London. I lived in a brand new dorm for foreign students, but we didn't have telephone lines in our rooms. When the hall payphone rang, anyone passing by would answer and try in good faith to hunt down the right resident. Attitudes towards women surprised me, coming from America. Professors expected that students would write essays long hand because PC adoption was still limited. The computer system was down when I opened my bank account, which isn't so unusual even today, but the clerk who took my money didn't give me anything official in return. He just told me to come back the next day; he'd remember me. At the time I was startled and a little worried -- but the slower, more personal interactions became something I really valued.
posted by woodway at 10:49 AM on September 25, 2009

Random list. ( I was just a kid at the time so it is a bit vague )

No £2 coin
No Electric doors on Southwest trains
Racism was a much simpler subject.
Threats from the IRA.
No premiership football
No americanised coffee shops (I could be wrong about this one)
No GCSE's
Kids playing on the street

Females - leggings
Males - bowl cut
posted by errspy at 11:11 AM on September 25, 2009

The Underground wasn't yet fully automated, and many stations still had a human in a booth that you showed your ticket to as you exited. In 1990 and 91, the Mornington Crescent station was still open. Also, during those same years, the wall in front of Freddie Mercury's house wasn't covered in graffiti.
posted by Oriole Adams at 11:32 AM on September 25, 2009

Have a scan through flickr for some inspiration. Mostly, though, London seemed poorer and less sophisticated than it does now. It was also rather bleak. The UK was in recession, the Poll Tax Riots happened in March 1990 and by the end of the year Operation Desert Storm was imminent (I have vivid memories of standing before a TV shop in the middle of the night, circa January 1991, watching little animated graphic maps of hypothetical Middle East missile ranges - it felt very apocalyptic).

Large swathes of modern London simply weren't yet built - the skyline would have been completely unrecognisable. One Canada Square hadn't yet been completed. Squat culture was still vibrant (see Joe Moran's excellent On Roads for a vivid account of the last stand of local communities and activists in East London against encroaching road schemes). Pre-Britpop, 'indie' was still very alternative and not especially visible in popular culture (although this applies more to the late 80s - by 1990 it had crossed over).
posted by jonathanbell at 12:37 AM on September 26, 2009

I lived in the northern UK between 90 and 92. I occasionally spent time in London. One thing I remember (as an american abroad) was how hard it was to get a good cup of coffee. You could occasionally find a cup of drip coffee or a cappuccino at a fancy continental-style cafe, but most restaurants and cafes offered instant coffee, if they even offered coffee at all. When I went back for a visit in 2001, I was amazed to find coffee nearly everywhere in London.

Also in the food category, the campaign for real ale seemed to be really picking up speed.

Fashion: giant wool jumpers over leggings.
posted by amusebuche at 10:27 AM on September 26, 2009

Less use of credit/debit cards meant, for tourists, going to the American Express office to cash a U.S.-drawn check in order to get pound notes. (Yeah, I could have swapped dollars at a bureau e change, but this was a neat way to do an international money transfer if I could get someone to put money in my American checking account.)

They were still trying to make Carnaby Street a tourist destination.

Turning in university-level work that wasn't written on a computer and printed on a laser printer: some of my essays were on ragged-edge notebook paper.

You couldn't get a decent cup of coffee (or, later, an awful one) on every street corner.

When declining-balance phone cards were new for use in phone boxes, you could put a piece of clear (cello) tape over the mag stripe and the reduced value couldn't be written when the call ended. Sweet (if dubiously effective)!

They had just outlawed newsprint for wrapping fish & chips.

(I visited in 1986 & 1988 and then spent half of 1992 there, plus we went back in 1997, so there may be a bit of conflation in the above notes.)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:54 AM on September 28, 2009