On Bank Holiday Monday in August 1979, Virginia Turbett photographed young people gathering on the seafront at Southend. Mods, skinheads and punks appear in the same sequence. Some are dressed with precision; others combine clothes and references that do not fit neatly into any single group.
The photographs introduce a wider body of work made between 1979 and 1981. During those eighteen months, Turbett moved between the mod revival, Rock Against Racism, the first 2 Tone tour and London’s emerging New Romantic clubs. She also photographed a memorial march for Sid Vicious and a skinhead demonstrating against the National Front.
Seen together, the pictures resist the idea that one youth movement ended before another began. Punk had not disappeared when the mod revival gathered pace. Skinhead style could be found at a 2 Tone concert or an anti-fascist demonstration. By early 1981, the carefully constructed image of the New Romantics was taking shape, but many of the people involved had come through punk.
Turbett photographed these shifts as they happened. Her attention was not confined to performers. The audience, the clothes and the social life around the music mattered just as much.
Photographer
Virginia Turbett
Body of work
British Youth Culture
Locations
Southend, London and Edinburgh
Dates photographed
1979–1981
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
Virginia Turbett was born in West Sussex in 1957 and began taking photographs professionally in 1977. Her first assignment was to photograph the Sex Pistols making the video for “Pretty Vacant” at ITN Studios in London.
A chance meeting with a journalist from Sounds during a Right to Work march led to several years of music assignments. Turbett photographed punk, reggae, heavy metal and pop, then followed the mod revival, 2 Tone and the New Romantics. She contributed to publications including Sounds, Smash Hits, The Face, i-D and Record Mirror.
At the same time, she worked for the socialist press, covering demonstrations, industrial disputes and the rise of the National Front. This parallel career is important to the photographs. Music and politics were not separate subjects. Rock Against Racism deliberately brought them together, while the style of punk, skinhead and 2 Tone developed amid arguments over race, class and national identity.
Turbett made the three Southend photographs on 27th August 1979. The mod revival was becoming nationally visible, driven by bands including The Jam and a renewed interest in the music and clothes of the 1960s. The film Quadropheniahad opened in London ten days earlier.
Southend gave the revival a recognisable setting. Like Brighton in the original mod story, the seafront became a place to gather away from home, display clothes and meet people from other towns. Turbett’s pictures, however, are less theatrical than the mythology surrounding those earlier seaside encounters.
The young people do not divide themselves into orderly groups. Mods and skinheads stand together. Punk remains visible in hair, badges and improvised clothing. The photographs show how youth style was actually lived: through shared garments, borrowed references and small personal variations.
Research into British punk dress has since challenged the tendency to remember only its most spectacular forms. Most people did not wear a complete uniform. Harrington jackets, boots, jeans and army surplus clothing moved between punk and skinhead culture, while the mod revival drew upon both inherited and newly manufactured styles.
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
Several months before Southend, Turbett had photographed the finale of Rock Against Racism’s Militant Entertainment Tour at Alexandra Palace. Held on 14th April 1979, the event brought together eleven bands after a tour that had travelled through towns and cities across Britain.
Rock Against Racism had begun in 1976 in response to racism within music and the growing presence of the National Front. Its gigs, tours and carnivals connected anti-racist campaigning with the culture young people already used: bands, records, clubs, fanzines and clothes.
Turbett’s Alexandra Palace photograph is centred on the audience. It records political music as a collective event rather than presenting anti-racism as a message delivered from the stage.
Two weeks later, she photographed a skinhead at an anti-National Front demonstration in West Bromwich. The picture matters because the racial politics of skinhead culture were never as simple as later stereotypes suggest. Far-right organisations attempted to recruit within football grounds and youth scenes, and some skinheads became associated with racist violence. Others opposed the National Front and took part in anti-fascist activity.
The demonstrator in Turbett’s photograph makes that political choice visible. The same frame also belongs to her wider record of protest and resistance in Britain during 1979.
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
By autumn 1979, the revival had moved from the seafront into clubs and concert halls. On 19th October, Turbett photographed mods dancing the conga at a 1960s disco night at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead.
The picture is loose and physical. It shows the revival as something people did together rather than a collection of correct clothes. Dancing, records and the weekly club night gave the style a social life.
Less than a month later, Turbett travelled to Edinburgh with the first 2 Tone tour. The Specials, The Selecter and Madness played Tiffany’s on 12th November. 2 Tone brought Jamaican ska and rocksteady into contact with punk, pop and the mod revival. Its mixed line-ups and graphic black-and-white identity also carried an explicit opposition to racism.
Turbett’s photograph of Madness belongs to that early moment, when the band’s debut album One Step Beyond… had only just been released and the tour was turning 2 Tone into a national youth movement. The small stage placed musicians and audience close together. Turbett photographed that proximity, rather than separating the band from the people who had come to see them.
The Moonlight and Edinburgh pictures show how quickly a style could travel. What appeared on Southend seafront in August was moving through clubs, records and a national tour by November.
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
Sid Vicious died in New York on 2nd February 1979. Exactly one year later, hundreds of punks gathered in London for a memorial march from Sloane Square towards Hyde Park.
Turbett photographed an individual marcher at close range. The picture is not a conventional portrait and it does not attempt to settle what Vicious represented. It records the way punk survived beyond the break-up of the Sex Pistols as a public identity shared by people who had never been members of a band.
By February 1980, accounts of punk were already beginning to turn the movement into a short, finished episode. The memorial photograph complicates that version. Punk continued through its audiences, local scenes and later forms, even as music and fashion moved elsewhere.
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
The latest photograph in the selection was made at The Wall in London on 12th January 1981. It shows fashion designer Stephen Linard, one of the figures associated with the Blitz scene, sitting in a club booth.
Linard had studied menswear at Saint Martin’s School of Art and developed a style that drew upon historical dress, tailoring and the theatrical possibilities opened by punk. His appearance was constructed in detail, but Turbett caught him away from the performance of the dance floor.
The photograph marks another shift in British club culture. Punk’s improvised challenge had not vanished, but a younger London scene was turning self-invention into something more controlled. Clothes and make-up changed from week to week. The club became a place to test an image before it reached magazines, record sleeves and the wider fashion industry.
Turbett’s frame provides a useful companion to Andrew Holligan’s photographs of the Blitz Club in 1980. Both archives show the scene before its visual language became part of mainstream 1980s pop.
Photograph © Virginia Turbett. All rights reserved
These nine photographs cover a brief period, but they contain several histories. They show the mod revival on the street and in a club, 2 Tone becoming a national movement, punk being remembered by its own audience and the first New Romantic experiments in image.
They also preserve connections that disappear when subcultures are treated as fixed categories. Punk borrowed from the styles that came before it. Mods and skinheads shared the seafront. A skinhead opposed the National Front. Rock Against Racism and 2 Tone made music part of a wider argument over the kind of country Britain could become.
Turbett’s position between music photography and social reportage allowed her to see those connections. She photographed well-known performers, but she did not build the archive around celebrity alone. Fans, marchers and club regulars carry much of its meaning.
That is why the photographs now have value beyond the assignments for which they were made. They record youth culture from within its own spaces, while its identities were still changing and before their histories had been made tidy.
First published by British Culture Archive on 2nd May 2020. Revised and expanded as an editorial feature on 27th July 2026.