it's washyourhands continually punching a mentally ill man in the face at a bus stop. it's bricks through windows of a Pakistani family home in Blackburn. it's football hooligans making everyone around them totally miserable. it's British soldiers in Belfast oppressing Shiels' relatives. it's Gary Glitter on TOTP. it's all a little before my time.
3 of these are a tad geo-specific generalisations and for my own part a paranoid schizophrenic was disarmed. Try Hyson Green for a few years. Eventually the same thing will happen to you.
i think we all feel massive nostalgia for the period, despite not having lived through it. we did grow up among its ruins.
70's kid and lived through it. Power cuts, ltd working weeks, post-industrial nightmare. For my Dad, either you were a union man and up for taking on management with the use of force, or you were a traitor regardless of sectarianism. There's a resilience there that's missed a bit in this thread. Not solidarity in being miserable commies, more 'we will get through these cunts and their agendas' because there wasn't a choice. The grimness of the British isles is eternal, but there's a spirit to it all, a spirit of resilience that, again, is glossed over a bit too much in these discussions.
It's not an aesthetic, it's called poverty. Poverty of aspiration is only one aspect though. First its immediate and direct counterpoint, which Craner's model pics nail. Overt, unattainable, middle-class marketing pastiches. Second, all the building pictures. However, only the improvised playground pic gets to the heart of what i'm attempting to convey. Yes, never going to win building of the year comps (unless portrayed like they are here, well done to the photographers among you), but we grew up having so much fun in these places. The best adventure playgrounds of all time and all with a local nonce who you'd better know about, otherwise...
It never went away though. It got worse in the 80's because of heroin, the historical differences between north and south compounded by Maggie's crew, the rise of the mullet and tache look, football firms in town EVERY fucking weekend. The only thing that changes is your own age. Your perspectives broaden, but you still feel blessed for the freedoms afforded by smashing up abandoned mine workings, destroying empty tenements or best of all, a new building site that afforded mock battle fields, climbing frames AND timber/piping that could then be sold on for a raise. Do you know how many cola bottle sweets that equated to?
Embrace the grim because it's always out there, lurking, waiting, ready to embrace you and you better have an answer when it calls.