In these blog posts, I’m casting my mind back to my first year at university in Liverpool. I arrived in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots and a city in ferment. Can’t deny it was very exciting. But it was also a time of massive poverty and sky-high rates of unemployment as well as shocking…
Tony McMahon recalls how he arrived as a student in Liverpool in 1981 after a summer of riots had devastated Toxteth
1982 was a stormy year that saw the Falkands War, mass unemployment and a scandal involving the Queen’s bodyguard
Young Boomers in the 1980s weren’t all rich and privileged – millions were out of work and in poverty, as Tony McMahon discovers
The Russell T Davies series It’s a Sin shows what it was like to be young and gay in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and with AIDS
Local youth and university students often connected badly in the 1980s with acts of violence not being uncommon as students were viewed as privileged
Dave Wakeling was the front man of the British ska combo The Beat and here is a self-portrait he penned when the band was at the height of its fame
LGBT people faced discrimination, the AIDS virus and homophobic legislation from the Thatcher government in the 1980s as Tony McMahon reports
Margaret Thatcher is sometimes presented as a gay icon, but in the 1980s she led an onslaught on LGBT rights at the height of the HIV crisis
Most of us got our first pocket calculator in the 1970s but were then told by maths teachers that we were forbidden to use them in our exams
