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This article explores ways of writing the history of 1980s Britain. It argues that historians should avoid an overreliance upon identifying the decade with the politics of Margaret Thatcher and her government. Instead, the article suggests that a richer historical understanding of the 1980s will be achieved if we look for other trajectories and developments that intersect with immediate political change, but are not entirely dependent upon events at Westminster. This article also offers thoughts on how historians might conceptualize social change in the 1980s. The article reviews both older literature on Britain in the 1970s and 1980s and more recent interventions and suggests directions in which research might proceed.

This article examines pictures taken by the British photographer Roger Mayne of Southam Street, London, in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores these photographs as a way of thinking about the representation of urban, working-class life in Britain after the Second World War. The article uses this focused perspective as a line of sight on a broader landscape: the relationship among class, identity, and social change in the English city after the Second World War. Mayne's photographs of Southam Street afford an examination of the representation of economic and social change in the postwar city and, not least, the intersections among class, race, generation, and gender that reshaped that city.

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