Blitz was ‘the club that shaped the 80s’, according to the title of a new exhibition at the Design Museum, lasting just 18 months from when it opened in a wine bar in Covent Garden in early 1979. It was a period in Britain, and not just in London, of astonishing cultural fertility set against a backdrop of societal decay. The Winter of Discontent, at the fag-end of Jim Callaghan’s Labour administration, saw nearby Leicester Square reduced to a rubbish dump as binmen, among many other public-sector workers, withdrew their labour, hastening the demise of their own interests. Margaret Thatcher’s radical Conservative government would arise just as the entrepreneurial founders of the Blitz found their audience. The club, like so much youth culture was, though the participants might protest still, a very Thatcherite enterprise.

Like the club whose brief history it portrays, the exhibition is a small one. Just two rooms and, behind a pair of curtains, a recreation of the original venue. It concentrates as much, if not more, on the scene that developed around the club and spread to other legendary venues in London, such as the Mud Club and the Wag.

The exhibition gets a lot right. It highlights the ubiquitous influence of David Bowie, who was then in his ‘Berlin’ phase, anticipated by his masterly Station to Station LP, and who had already united a generation against parental pieties with his androgynous 1972 Top of the Pops performance of ‘Starman’ – and Roxy Music, whose opening three albums were a primer in mixing US glamour, European aesthetics and English irony. While Mick Jagger was turned away from the famously exclusive Blitz because he was not considered cool enough, the style guru Peter York was allowed to enter because he was a friend of Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry.

We are reminded that this all took place nearly half a century ago, long before the advent of mobile phones and social media. Among the exhibits is a payphone – nostalgic for those who were there, inexplicable to those for whom this is a first encounter. Indeed, how did young people organise their hectic social lives then? I can barely remember, and I was one of them. Circuiting favoured pubs (with highly condensed and concentrated opening times), such as the Spice of Life in Cambridge Circus (also the site of John le Carré’s fictional ‘Circus’ of spies). Flyers, often brilliantly designed, gave details of gatherings. And then there was simple word of mouth – and habit.

The drugs of choice were traditional: booze, cigarettes and amphetamines, the latter enhancing the extraordinary dance moves developed in the early 70s Essex soul scene of places such as the Lacey Lady, and the frenetic all-nighters held at the ‘Northern Soul’ venues of the Midlands and the North West. It was pre-AIDS (just), pre-ecstasy and pre-‘lad’ culture, hence the importance of androgyny at a time when feminism and gay liberation were ascendant. The film-maker Derek Jarman was a prominent older figure on the scene; he had his own coterie of apostles centred on St Martin’s art college, then bang in the centre of town.

The viewer is taken aback by how smart everyone looks, despite the freakish abundance of ‘slap’ and big hair. Vintage suits were de rigeur for the men, elaborate dresses, often of historical provenance, for the women. Vintage clothing had not been categorised and commercialised as it has now, and anyway, rent was cheap if paid at all. A celebrated squat in Warren Street was a focal point of the movement.

And yet Blitz and the scene that surrounded it were, in many senses, a victory of style over substance. The music that originated from Blitz culture was not great (unlike the mix of European electronica and American funk spun by the house DJ Rusty Egan). Co-founder Steve Strange’s band Visage had a minor hit with ‘Fade to Grey’, the rather lame Spandau Ballet were the house group, while the smooth, jazzy pop of Sade went on to sell 54 million albums.

However, in contrast to what was happening further north, it was thin gruel and owed much of its national reputation to coverage in The Face magazine, which was launched in 1980, and especially the romanticised takes of journalist Robert Elms, a Blitz staple. At the same time, Leeds, for example, produced the short-lived but lastingly influential Gang of Four, Sheffield gave the world the Human League, while Manchester trumped them all with Joy Division, whose two LPs, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, remain among the highest peaks of British popular music – and still sound like tomorrow.

Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis, plagued by epilepsy and contorted by an illicit affair, killed himself in 1980, having listened to Iggy Pop’s LP The Idiot, produced by Bowie in Berlin, and having viewed a BBC screening of Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek. And that memory reminds me of what the exhibition gets wrong.

I suspect that the curator, Michelle Thom, is, like most of London’s cultural operatives, fiercely opposed to Brexit, and the exhibition makes a great deal from the outset of the UK’s place in Europe, citing the Referendum of 1975, when Britain opted to join the Common Market, even displaying pamphlets from the campaign. This particular generation of youngsters was indeed obsessed by European culture: the music of ‘Krautrockers’ such as Can, Neu and Kraftwerk; of European cinema, such as Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; of the café culture of Weimar; and the European classics published by Penguin and Picador and available at any high street branch of WH Smith. But this was a Europe of the imagination rather than Brussels’ butter mountains, wine lakes and common fisheries policy. Indeed, few had visited the Continent to any great extent, certainly not the predominantly working-class aesthetes and intellectuals who dominated the scene.

There was also a darker edge to this fascination with Europe. Blitz culture can be traced back to the Punk revolution that began in 1976 and which flaunted a lot of Nazi imagery, emboldened no doubt by Bowie’s notorious Hitler salute, captured on film as he began his British tour that year. The Sex Pistols and Siouxsie and the Banshees wore swastikas, Joy Division was named after the Freudenabteilungen, forced prostitution wings in concentration camps, while one of the leading music promoters at the time bore the name Final Solution. No one is suggesting that any of these individuals, bands or organisations supported fascism; in fact, quite the opposite. But the Second World War was still very much a living memory and employing the imagery of a former adversary of an especially malign kind was an easy way to wind up parents and grandparents. Whatever the cause, it sheds a more nuanced light on the relationship with Europe, real and growing though that was.

Anyway, such rebellion usually failed, as parents and children then fundamentally inhabited different worlds, speaking almost a different language. And no one was cancelled. Today, we inhabit a much more controlled environment, especially the young, who, it is suggested, have taken a puritanical turn. And so, this small but fascinating exhibition is ultimately a paean to liberty, as well as a reminder that dancing, in every way, is so much better for you than running.

‘Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s’ is at London’s Design Museum until March, 29, 2026.