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A new exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry celebrates a century of teenage life.
Even though the word “teenager” only began to be used in 1944 – typically, it was coined by advertisers and used to make money from this newly minted consumer group – the images and artefacts from Grown Up In Britain: 100 Years of Teenage Kicks show the spirit of rebellion and generation gap-inducing music and youth fashions were in evidence long before the word appeared.
So it is that we see a flapper dress worn by women in the 1920s, and Tommy Sussex’s photograph of a young woman with her fist raised at a Black Lives Matter protest in London in 2020, can be shown as part of the same cultural phenomenon. Music has been such a huge part of teenage life in this country.
Clare Muller’s punk and skinhead girls at a gig in Hastings in 1981, Tony Davis’s teenage ravers at a motorway services after a night out in Shelley’s Laserdome, Stoke-on-Trent in 1992 and Lucy McCarthy’s rave bedroom in Coventry in the same era, plus Aiyush Pachnanda’s shot of DJ Gracie T at a Boiler Room night in London in 2021, show different subcultures – all linked by a spirit of youth, rebellion and lust for life.
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![](https://www.bigissue.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/1521_Photo_Tommy-Sussex.jpg)
Visitors are encouraged to bring in shots of their own youthful hijinks,making this free show in the brilliant exhibition space in central Coventry a truly interactive experience.
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In 1966, John Lennon – who with The Beatles did so much to establish a space between childhood and adulthood for young people to rebel and grow – said: “America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.”