Blitz, a short lived but influential club, is the focus of the latest London exhibition which looks back to 1980s youth culture.
The 1980s are big news right now. Current day cool kids are wearing 501 jeans and oversize jackets, and a slew of recent exhibitions have mined the decade, most especially the youth culture angle. In London’s major institutions 2025 has already seen The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at National Portrait Gallery, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at Fashion and Textile Museum, and now Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s at the Design Museum.
Outside the Blitz club in 1979. Photograph: Sheila Rock
The back story to explain the flowering of youth culture, as articulated by all these exhibitions, is that the UK was down at heel and depressed in the early 1980s so as a route out of the drab austerity young people made their own clothes and music, created their own subversive (and hugely influential) glitter-filled worlds, and generally cocked a snook at the pervading big and small C conservatism. This explosion of 1980s counterculture was undoubtedly built on the groundwork of punk but with influences from European art movements, literature, cinema, and inspiration supplied by long standing cultural agitators and dreamers (Bowie), the post punk generation effectively created their own fun. It’s hard to overestimate the influence of art schools here, which were of course free, but also, as the Blitz exhibition, and Millennials more generally, point out, London rents were cheap, and squats were plentiful. I don’t think the Blitz kids clutched copies of Deleuze and Derrida on the dance floor like some art schooled exponents of the indie new wave, such as tScritti Politti whose name itself is derived from Gramsci’s ‘Scritti Politici’ (political writings) and in 1981 had a song called ‘Jacques Derrida’. But the thinking behind the looks and the larks was deeper than the hedonistic tag attached to the ‘new romantics’ (the name used to describe the movement which flowered from Blitz and other clubs) suggests, most particularly in the mining of history to create glamour.
Although there is treasure to be found in Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s it somewhat lacks the spark and sparkle that photographs of the Blitz kids suggest characterised the club. The clothes on show, such an integral part of the scene, mostly look a little dull – could it be that without the spectacular hair, makeup and attitude they are not really that interesting and are ultimately more musty than outrageous. It is also apparent that all the promise of the Bowie worship soon morphed into something more trad. Could it be the lure of commercial concerns that made the new romantic/Blitz look quickly morph into what looks like only slightly veiled versions of the traditional attire of the landed gentry – tweeds, spats and rope of pearls (see Spandau Ballet). Maybe the Blitz kids were far more typical of their era than the pull quotes suggest – less revolutionary and more wannabe Loadsamoneys.
Despite my quibbles (to which I add that I can't remember the term 'new romantic' being mentioned at all) there is much to enjoy in the exhibition for students of British 20th century culture as it journeys from 1970s art to 1980s exploitation. Highlights include Bowie scrapbooks (courtesy of Iain R Webb), 'Looks Even Better on a Girl’, ads for 17 Cosmetics (from 1985 issues of Smash Hits), a map of the London haunts of the Blitz kids and even a pack of Sobraine cocktail cigarettes. But aside from gorgeous photographs of Blitz kids, including a dynamic on the dance floor image from Homer Sykes, there is little left of the actual ephemeral experience of the club.
This brings me to the weird recreation of the Blitz club with its despeckled and smoothed video projections of dancers, a virtual Rusty Egan in the DJ booth and Spandau Ballet cutting a long story short. Although an amusing oddity this does not feel (or smell) like a basement club and its uncanny glossy veneer makes the dull clothes, on the mannequins, and behind glass, look even less connected to the short story of an influential hub of defiant creativity that (unbelievably) ran for less than two years.
Cathy Lomax
September 2025
Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s
20 September 2025 – 29 March 2026
the Design Museum
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