Gifted Children, Youth Culture, and Popular Individualism in 1970s and 1980s Britain

This article examines a niche space: youth clubs created by small voluntary organizations for ‘gifted children’ in 1970s and 1980s Britain. It asks how individualism shaped everyday life and demonstrates how youth culture was much broader than just the permissiveness that dominates the literature. Gifted children are currently missing from accounts of modern Britain, which focus on mainstream educational categories. Yet, including them in our analysis provides new insights into the diversity of youth cultures that existed in these decades. Drawing on new uncatalogued archives, and centrally poetry, letters, and stories from young people themselves, the article shows that conservative and radical visions co-existed. Young people shaped their own culture, subverting and challenging ideas of themselves as distinctive future leaders.