It was the age of the Ford Escort, the video recorder and the mullet and the Princess Di bob.

The 1980s, when the world changed from the dying days of punk to the riseof house music and rap, the decade of Margaret Thatcher and privatisation and of mass unemployment, boom and bust.

A group of photos found in the bottom of a filing cabinet from the era show the streets of Bridgwater with two-traffic, Vauxhall Countryman estates and a branch of Tandy. Readers guessed at the year of when they were taken, but only one person actually knew the answer and that was photographer Keith Painter.

“I can’t pinpoint the year exactly but my best guess is 1987,” he said. “I freelanced at the Mercury from 1983 to about 1988, then I was taken on as the staff photographer until 1993. I see in the photographs Angel Place Shopping Centre opened by the Queen in the summer of 1987.”

He said that all the negatives were lost during a move along with the prints and the photos of the streets were likely have been for a feature such as Focus on Eastover in the paper.

“I have to say they were the happiest days of my life at the Mercury. It was hard work, long hours, working every Saturday, but I never lost the thrill of watching the print come up in the developing dish exactly as I had seen it in my mind’s eye and of course of beating those impossible deadlines,” he said.

The process of developing photographs is another revolution that began at the end of the 1980s as digital images began to replace film. Then every newspaper had a dark room in which there were trays of developer, stop and fix with a final wash for the black and white prints. The paper was kept in black sealed bags and made by Kodak or Ilford and the like and was in a range grades from high contrast to light greys.

The film was taken out of the camera in the dark and fed into a developing unit in the dark and the developer added before being drained and replace with a fix. Negs were washed and then held in drying cabinets before being cut up and placed in an enlarger and exposed to light sensitive paper. Quite a process and quite a skill for someone like Keith who would have to turn the print round very quickly for a breaking news story on press day.

Now with digital cameras including mobile phones the picture is snapped and emailed straight to newsdesk and can be on the page or website with a minute or two. However things were changing as Keith recalls: “The Mercury offices were on the second floor of the former Royal Clarence Hotel, having previously been opposite the town hall. The newsroom consisted of trainees, and soon to be retired reporters who had done their time in London and had returned for semi-retirement, the older ones taught the newbies and the system worked very well.”

Do you remember the changes in technology in the 1980s? Did you have a mullet hair style or drive a Ford Escort complete with tumbling dice? Were you a Duran Duran fan or into MC Hammer? We’d like to hear your stories of 1980s Bridgwater especially if you have a photo or two. Email harry.mottram@nqsw.co.uk