Acid house and Thatcherism: Contesting spaces in late 1980s Britain

Abstract

From 1987 to 1990, hundreds of Acid House parties were held across Britain. These parties became the subject of an intense moral panic. The scale of the measures taken against these parties can be understood in terms of the disruptive presence they presented to Thatcherism—the hegemonic project built around Margaret Thatcher's leadership of the Conservative Party. The successive Thatcher governments held jurisdiction over the territory of the UK and it was over this national space that Thatcherism attempted to assert its hegemony. This paper analyses the way in which the disruption presented by Acid House to the organisation of spaces within contemporary Britain contributed to the threat it was perceived as presenting to the Thatcherite project.