Here’s me in Ellesmere Port in 1984. Channel Four has just started and I’m wearing dyed Adidas Trimm Trab with split bleached jeans, a Ben Sherman under a crew neck sweater, the remains of a wedge haircut and no genitals. The dog was called Frisky and I still miss her.

Image and text courtesy of Mark Leckey

This photo was taken at the University of East Anglia in 1977.

I’m on my 1958 Triumph 500 Tiger and my friend Pat (right) is on his Kawasaki KH500 Triple Cylinder 2 stroke. I bought my clothes in a motorbike shop and I am wearing my dad’s Aviator sunglasses. He was a pilot with the RAF and I used to “borrow” them all the time, until I became a pilot myself and got my own pair.

Photo and text courtesy: Ash Mitchell

This photo was taken in my bedroom when I lived with my mother in Bury, just experimenting with my photo gear.

I was about 20 years old then and I had a Triumph Benneville 650 (one of top bikes of the time) The combat jacket was probably part of the gear I was issued with when I joined the TA, couldn’t afford a leather jacket.

When I was in the TA about 1968, this was when the regiment was the Lancashire Fusiliers. as an aside I tried to join the regular army, I’d signed up for REME and all I needed was a medical. Unfortunately about a year before I’d had a motorcycle accident and had a spleenectomy, so they wouldn’t accept me, but the TA was OK. As it happens I was taken ill on weekend exercise and had to have an emergency op!!!

This was taken at Hollingworth lake (Littleborough) with colleagues that all worked in the laboratories at Transparent Paper in Bury, we were more than colleagues we were friends and went out together drinking etc. I ended up marrying the girl on the far left, still with her today (2013)

In the routine laboratory at Transparent Paper, standing L to R, Jan Zuc, Nigel O'Garr(Nog), me, Paul Hughes, Steven Atkinson (Ackers), sitting Geoff Stretch. It was like a big club we had a social club we used to go to at lunchtime for a game of snooker or a game or a game of table tennis. Playing jokes on each other… a good time!

Images and text courtesy of Pete Spooner

I failed to get the trend right. I took hemlines up by hand as I was always a bit short! Always hurriedly taken up because I wanted to go out that evening. Later on I was a Beatnick, and then to acceptable dress but still keeping my own style.

I failed at being a mod, pleated skirt and winkle pickers with heels - and very neat hair, but my hair never looked quite as neat as I would have liked.

Hippy changing to more acceptable but still a bit offbeat. I never looked like anyone else, I had cheap clothes, as I never had any money!

The Beatnik look was  dyed t-shirts, shrunken/bleached/slashed jeans (looked like you had been painting the house) and mid length skirt Amy Winehouse hairstyle - half a beehive with the rest down. I wore black tights with holes - which was fashionable if you were a beatnik, wore moccasins with jeans or skirt with a little black heeled shoe.

In the late 60s/early 70s I wore - knee length brown maxi wool skirt, very Bonnie and Clyde. I used to wear it with boots or a Biba shirt, at the time Biba was very cheap too.

We were incredibly innocent but my parents read an article about people having sex in the garden/drugs and my dad forbade me to go but we never knew about that. We often went to Wimbledon Palais, a dancehall, with big lights, no particular style - live music - some Mods and some non-Mods. We got accused of being Beatniks by some lads, we spent so long trying to look like Mods! 

In Soho, we went to Ad Lib a couple of times but it was very elite and hard to get in. We managed to get in with a regular - very exciting!

Also went to The Pheasantry, famous posh place that people like Twiggy went to but we only went a few times but we were very impressed.

We used to stroll along the Kings Road and hope people would come and talk to you but no one ever did!

In the late 70s’s I changed my hair to platinum after being a warm reddish blonde, that was a big change because I started to have more sex appeal after that! I remember getting a blue linen dress with a keyhole back, to me was very daring at the time.

I found a pair of 6 inch round toe beige stiletto and was delighted, you couldn’t get them anywhere (only in film star shops) and I wore them with shiny lycra jeans or my turquoise Fred Perry dress. The shoes used to get caught in the escalator if I wasn’t quick off the mark.

Image and text courtesy of Lynda Dagley

I was eighteen at the time, and by 1992 the Glam Metal look of 1990 was well and truly gone. Grunge was doing a great job of hoovering up all the debris Glam metal had left behind, informing, converting and directing youth culture that stood in its path, a bit like Punk. I was well and truly sucked in, I didn’t resist, Nirvana ruled.

Rundown backdrops for your band pics were a must, looking scruffy and down and out was a bonus, it was all so D.I.Y. In this picture I was intent on finding the right backdrop to create a punky scene, the graffiti in a Manchester backstreet was perfect, along with the first release version of this iconic Nirvana T-shirt. Displaying a long ponytail down the back of my leather jacket separated me from the trendy short hair brigade. A  black bobble hat with the bobble ripped out completed the look, this was before they were known as ‘Beanie hats’, wouldn’t of known where to buy one from back then. The hat had belonged to my mates’ sister that had somehow ended up living on the dashboard of his grubby orange K Reg Volvo that he used for his gardening business.

I remember being on a mission with a pal of mine to find a rundown backdrop to pose in front of. The pointy finger gesture looks far from menacing, think I had spent too much time studying the grittier visuals from the Oi Punk genre often pictured on the back of albums such as the Cockney Rejects Greatest hits. After this photo experiment, sadly it was back home to a boring  middle class suburban 1930’s semi in Chorlton South Manchester, a far cry from squatters ville.

Images and text Lesley Lewis

These are pages from my diary of 1999, when I was in my final year of school. The outfit in the photos is an example of a 16-year-old me mixing sportswear and formalwear. I’m still wearing black men’s overcoats with Nike caps! This was a typical school outfit. I always wanted to dress smart. While the other kids were wearing football manager coats, I wore a formal coat from Next bought with my own pocket money. I also had a handbag instead of a backpack. I always had good trainers though. 

Images and text: Sharmadean Reid, owner and founder of WAH Nails