Turned Sixteen

Abstract

What is it like to be a 16-year-old school-leaver in London in the mid-1980s? I interviewed seventy-two young people, with all the inhibitions such interviews normally entail: the young have no place to call their own, and neither they nor you can feel at ease in the college canteen, the local Wimpy, the parents’ front room or the manager’s spare office. I also however spent days alongside many of them at college or in their training workshops and this filled out the picture.