How busy were you in the 1980s? If you were of working age through the decade that took us from the murder of John Lennon to the meltdown of the USSR then you weren’t anyone at all unless you were complaining about being overstretched.

Time wasn’t just of the essence in the 1980s. The essence of life itself depended on the diurnal. The constant, emaciated, Valium-requiring lack of minutes was a status symbol far more valuable than your Filofax, Ferrari, Frette linens or the Fiam deckchair on the balcony of your Docklands apartment. The fewer seconds you had to spare, the more aligned you were with the raison d’etre of the times.

There’s a photograph (pictured above) in the series Working Stations, a book created by Anna Fox and first published in 1988, which captures the decade in all its kinetic, premonitory wonder. A man is eating bacon at a cramped table. Except he’s not eating it. He’s devouring it. Shovelling the undercooked porcine strips into a mouth that you feel is resentful of the fact that it has been forced to stop talking for a moment thanks to mastication.

His lapel is sharp enough to cut flesh to the bone. The full English breakfast in front of him is almost gone, apart from the egg and the toast; two items which you suspect the diner finds rather too effete and old fashioned to bother with.

This man is busy in the true 1980s, buy-your-council-house, worship-the-free-market, screw-the-unions manner. He’s advanced himself enough to know what kind of suit to buy and just how clipped his hair should be – but he’s not yet mastered the nascent art of dealing successfully with rogue eyebrows. The bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup in the corner of the picture suggests that here is an individual who, despite feigning appreciation of nouvelle cuisine when necessary, is, even now, much more comfortable with the grub he was brought up on in his parents terraced kitchen in Chatham or Braintree.

Fox’s photograph is a thrilling spectacle; emblematic of an era we now love to mock, but whose nuances and consequences are being explored in a new photography show at the Tate Britain; The 80s: Photographing Britain.

A common adjective to describe the 1980s is ‘divisive’. Yet, looking at the exhibition’s photographs, taken by luminaries including Fox, Martin Parr, Tish Martha, Mumtaz Karimjee and John Davies, what is striking is their sense of being unified by both dissatisfaction and the propinquity of time.

In the 1980s you were in one of two camps: you either didn’t have enough time in your day, because you were hungry for more of the goodies that Thatcher’s opening up of the markets allowed you to possess. Or, thanks to post-industrial decay and increasingly authoritarian governance (resulting in the images taken by John Harris and Syd Shelton of anti-racism demonstrations and coal miner strikes) you had far too much time on your hands. You spent it either actively rebelling or staring into a barren, derelict abyss, as ‘Critch and Sean’ are doing from the front of a caravan in Lynemouth, Northumbria in Chris Killip’s haunting photograph from 1982, also included in the show.

But it is Anna Fox’s photographs of the hungry young go-getters of London and the South East during this era that are the most provocative, and give us the clearest sense of the pathway from how we were then, and how we got here.

The term ‘Yuppie’ (the first three letters standing for young, urban, professional) was first coined in a Chicago Tribune column in 1983 and it’s from Uncle Sam that we Brits borrowed the yuppie handbook.

The most Yuppie TV show was Dynasty. The most Yuppie lifestyle guru was Jane Fonda. The most yuppie pop star was Madonna in her material world. The most Yuppie businessman was Donald Trump. And, just like America, only a very small proportion of the British population were living this kind of lifestyle. Everyone else was waiting for the benevolence that either Thatcher or Reagan would perhaps remember to bestow on the majority. The wait continued. And continued. And then it all came crashing down.

On Black Monday, 19 October 1987, the stock market collapsed, sending a lot of gentrified barrow boys from Essex back to their dad’s greengrocer stands. It marked the end of Falstaffian expense accounts, cocaine snorting at the desk and any dreams Yuppies may have had of buying more Frette linens for their guest suite.

‘After a decade of putting its faith wholeheartedly in free enterprise and free markets, of focusing on achievement and success and money and materialism, the country was ready to slow down again, to get back to normal,’ writes the American journalist Tom McGrath in his new book, Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.

Britain seemed to feel exactly the same way. By the time a young Tony Blair took control of the Labour Party in 1994, a generation of Thatcher’s children were coming of age and understood that the Yuppie ethos was always going to be too aggressive to be sustainable or palatable to Critch and Sean up in Lynemouth.

So we learnt (or simulated the sensation of having understood at least) a less amoral outlook. We began to care about climate change, deforestation, the amount of meat we eat and whether we really need to take our cars into the congestion zone. We still crave wealth but we behave like cats having their bellies tickled when we’re told that we’re using our cash ethically. The 1980’s Yuppie simply couldn’t have cared less.

This evolution didn’t come without some pain, however, in the form of titanic financial losses (FS Rothschild), crooked titans of business jumping off yachts (Robert Maxwell) and pop stars' credibility collapsing (Madonna’s SEX book). Anna Fox’s Target was taken at the start of the 1990s and depicts a cardboard cut-out of Maggie Thatcher, splattered with viscous gunk, fired by paintballers playing weekend war games. Part of a series entitled Friendly Fire, other targets for wannabe commandos to shoot at included Mr. T from The A-Team and the actor Jason Connery in his role as Robin Hood from the lamentable mid-80’s TV series.

Thatcher’s face reflects her de facto late period pose of being both stentorian and slightly befuddled. Yet the slicks of goo that covers her looks like the regurgitation of the breakfast that the Yuppie was heaping into his mouth just a couple of years previously. The image should be this exhibition’s close, displaying as it does the return of all the sugar, fat and chewed up time that we forced down ourselves too quickly in the 1980s.

The Yuppies played at being masters of the universe. The next generation played with paintball guns in disused hospitals on the fringes of the M25. Whether that’s regression or progression, what stays with the viewer is that, in either epoch, whether we’re managerial leader or manual labourer, most of us remain equally powerless in the face of larger, darker forces

The 80s: Photographing Britain runs at the Tate Britain from 21 November 2024 to 5 May 2025. Visit tate.org.uk.

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