The 1980s were tacky, yes, but glorious

It is mocked as the decade that taste forgot, but it was also a time when we had freedom of expression

Icould almost hear the collective spluttering across breakfast tables yesterday morning as people of taste opened their newspapers to see that Historic England has listed 17 postmodern buildings from the 1980s, from the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery to a trading estate outside Slough. For many people, the fashion and design of the Thatcher years, from shoulder pads to go-faster stripes on cars, will always stand as a symbol for everything they think went wrong with Britain at that time: rampant consumerism and the worship of money.

But I didn’t join in the gasping. I have always had a sneaking regard for 1980s design, even when it was an act of defiance in educated circles to admire it.

In 1987 I was thinking of changing from the engineering to the architecture course at Cambridge and went for an interview at the department. All was going well until the don asked me: was there any sort of architecture I especially admired? It seemed too easy to name a palazzo in Florence, so instead I picked a new office block at the north end of Cambridge with very faux Palladian windows. “That’s not architecture,” the don protested, adding that it had been put up by a design and build company, which had bypassed his profession altogether.

But that was the point about 1980s buildings – many of them were the creations of amateurs, the Alfred Wallaces of architecture. The only tragedy about yesterday’s announcement is that Historic England is too late to save Marco Polo House, the glass and fake marble-faced office block with a broken pediment that stood at the southern end of Chelsea Bridge until it was demolished in 2014. Its creator, Ian Pollard, was a property developer rather than architect.

That many 1980s buildings were conceived to please the public, rather than members of the architecture profession, is part of their appeal. The decade saw a marked departure from what had gone before, when the dreamers of modernism decided to try to impose their often-brutal visions on the rest of us. Architects had seen themselves as Stalin had seen writers, as “engineers of the human soul” – never mind whether we actually wanted our souls to be re-engineered.

Instead, the style of the 1980s was inextricably linked with the individualism and economic prosperity that came with Thatcherism.

Privatisation of British Telecom allowed us to choose our telephones for the first time – no longer grey boxes but flamboyant designs in every colour. With the demise of nationalised British Leyland, car showrooms filled up with flashy VW Golf GTIS and Nissan sports coupés.

The rise in earnings brought a surge in the growth of accessible fashion retailers such as Topman (complete with shiny suits). It’s easy to mock, and say how much better 1960s fashion was – but previously it was something limited to Carnaby Street and the Kings Road; for everyone else, clothes remained pretty drab. But in the 1980s, fashion became easily available, whether on the High Street, or in the retail palaces of the time, such as the Gateshead Metro Centre.

People could suddenly express themselves how they chose. Council house tenants who had exercised their right-to-buy discovered that they were no longer bound to have their front doors painted in the same municipal shade as their neighbours. They fitted Georgian doors – in some cases adding stuck-on pilasters from B & Q.

One homeowner in Oxford even stuck a 25 foot shark on his roof – successfully lobbying the government for the right to keep it, over the heads of the city council. He claimed the sculpture was a comment on nuclear weapons, yet inadvertently it became a symbol for an ultimately far more enduring cause of the 1980s: the right of people to express themselves through their possessions.

Culturally, we seem to have come full circle since the 1980s. We are back to a time when we feel obliged to read the books, watch the films and appreciate the art that critics tell us we should like.

The Eighties felt different. We felt freer to like what we wanted to like. Call it a cultural wasteland if you like, but it was the democratisation of taste that made the 1980s special.