The view of the world from an eyrie in London's Fleet Street is somewhat different to one from a saloon bar in Mansfield. And it was to try to reconcile these radically opposing standpoints that John Michael Wade, a Fleet Street journalist, chronicled the strange world of 1985 and also set off on a journey across mainland Britain to record the changing aspects of the land as he and its inhabitants saw it in the Thatcher apogee. It was a world of contrast - from the rural shenanigans of a shepherds' meet in Cumbria to the metropolitan sleaze of the Derby at Epsom Downs. Towns that only long-distance lorry drivers and travelling soccer fanatics ever visit are here laid bare to display undiscovered delights and disasters. From Wild West antics at the Windmill Inn at a Midlands village most of the world has never heard of, to modest female chit-chat in a Fells pub... all human life is here, warts and all. For it was a rough and tumble world, this world of 1985, with its heroines and villains, cocky Tories and outmanoeuvred striking miners. This was a world before the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, the London Eye ferris wheel, the Angel of the North and even the soccer Premiership had come forth to imprint themselves on the national consciousness for good or ill. In many ways, 1985 appears with hindsight to be a gentler world than the 21st century one in which we now live, but the distant past invariably grows a patina of gold about itself - a gold that on close inspection turns to base metal because '85 was as garish and as glorious as the contemporary scene.
