Meandering look at era of protest and change is low on punky irreverence

Picture the 1980s in Britain, and what comes to mind? Margaret Thatcher? Big hair? Striking miners? Shoulder pads? The poll tax? Greenham Common? New Romantics? Yuppies? Dole queues? Whatever you know, or indeed remember, of the country in its Sinclair C5 era, Tate’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain will remind you that there is an abundance of other perspectives.

- Hettie Judah

In Tish Murtha’s study of unemployed people in Newcastle, a girl in a trenchcoat sits in a tipped-up armchair poking rubble with a stick while junked furniture burns behind her. Meanwhile, Savile Row-suited toffs lounge on Chesterfield sofas, safely out of reach of Mrs T in their members’ club, in Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen.

The exhibition starts along thematic lines. The opening room is dedicated to protest, from the Grunwick strike led by south Asian migrant workers in Brent, through clashes between pickets and the police at the Orgreave coking plant, and marches opposing the homophobic Section 28 legislation. In a gallery dedicated to money and the growing divide between haves and have-nots, Paul Graham’s grimly atmospheric pictures of DHSS waiting rooms face off against Martin Parr’s snarky snaps of garden parties and gallery openings. In the next section, the lens is turned on the landscape, and the transformations wreaked both by industry and its removal.