As its subtitle, The Last Days of the British Underground, suggests, this is a show with an agenda.

Bringing together a slew of artists, performers, dancers, nudists, video-makers, designers and other miscellaneous creatives who flourished between 1978-1988, it celebrates what the curators contend was "the last period in British culture before the rise of the consumer environment and the flattening of subcultural manifestations and creative industries into a single, pasteurised range of commodified styles".

Gallery: See more pictures from the exhibition here

This statement is swiftly followed in the catalogue with a dig at the commercialism of the Young British Artist phenomenon - commonly deemed to have begun with the 1988 show Freeze.

So this, apparently, is what art and culture was like before Thatcher's children grew up and ruthlessly colonised art: messy, angry, occasionally nude, mostly shot amateurishly on video and just as likely to sprout in nightclubs as in galleries.

There are compelling works here: the sharp, punky collages of Linder (who did the Orgasm Addict cover for The Buzzcocks), some funny videos of a group of Neo-Naturists and a room-sized installation by Richard Hamilton, in which the patient can look forward to being brainwashed by Margaret Thatcher, terrifyingly present on a TV screen.

A video of a four-day act by the legendary performance artist Leigh Bowery is genuinely amazing, while an installation by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, including among other things a strobe and a DIY koi carp pool, is strangely evocative.

However, the rhetoric of the show isn't remotely justified by the substance of the work, which while sporadically interesting doesn't smack of historical uniqueness. To present this as the last gasp of "underground" culture is historically inaccurate.

It's a romantic oversimplification, redolent of the cruder forms of anti-capitalist thought that fondly dreams that the people were free and culture was pure before the rise of McDonald's and Starbucks.

Economies and cultures do change, but most human behaviours adapt and survive. Myriad subcultures flourish today, many facilitated by the globalising force of technology. Nor are they all "pasteurised" into a uniform cultural product. Which happily means we need not be as mournful as this show would have us be.

• Until 6 May (020 7930 3647)