Those were the days

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.dailymail....ruled-elf-safety.html

Ah! weren't times easier in those days, when children knew how to play and enjoy themselves?

Due to such things as the health & Safety measures, are children losing their natural instinct of taking risks and 'having a go'?

Yes some of this play equipment seem pretty dangerous by today's standards, but I can never remember the emergency services being constantly called out to attend to a child's injuries.

[suechu]

Yeh, I played on all those, distinctly remember the enormous swing - about 15 kids hanging on for dear life - god help you if you should get in its way.

[anneasquith]

( before my time ) but great pictures :)

[suechu]

Think the photos were a bit before my time as well, but all that playground equipment was still in use in the 50s.

Spent loads of time in all the local parks on this stuff. No such thing as boredom to us kids. You could also hire stilts in our local park as I recall...

[daffy654]

Those photos were before my time but we still had those same playground apparatus when I was at school in the 1970s and 1980s.

[pusskin]

Brings back lovely memories of me taking my younger siblings to the park, and being so happy and carefree till we were starving and went back home for a bit of bread and jam, and dinner to follow later that day. treasured memories for me x

[rowanwitch]

Oh memories I was a child in the early 60s and loved going to the park got hit in the head and knocked out by a swing once... and fell of the witches hat as well...

[andy-hughes]

I played on all those pieces of equipment, and so did my eldest girls. yes they were lethal, but that was all the fun!

We had an impossibly high slide in our local playground, and the 'slide' part was polished brass plates. If - as we always did - you rode down a couple of times sitting on a greased Champion bread wrapper, the achieved speeds were awesome! We always used to shoot off the end, and our accumalated speed and trajectory ensured that our bottoms would hit the tarmac - no woodchip or rubber mats then! - about six feet further on from the end of the slide.

I also recall the 'flying boat' with the metal 'cup' seats at each end. If you were brave enough, you'd stand behind it, and grab the cup seat as it swung up past you, and hang on and get taken about twelve feet in the air at a rapid rate. The trick was not to let go, or you'd be flung about twenty feet away and could land on your head - again on solid tarmac!

The local youths used to whip the boat up to the vertical trajectory, and then step off the end. God help you if you were on it when they started, you had to hang on and pray while the rest of us stood around for five minutes until it slowed down enough to be stopped.

Ah, happy days!

[pusskin]

While looking after my 4 younger siblings, I quickly went on my skates to spend one penny for a few sweets, and slipped on the mat coming out of the sweet shop, then all hell broke loose.-- broken right wrist and ended up in A/E after man in shop rescuing the kids and calling my mum an dad to go to the hospital. Mmm, I remember it well, haha. What a performance!

[pusskin]

i'm loving reading all these posts. Very interesting stories x

[FredPuli43]

I remember them too. Why , we were encouraged to act like growing men in those days, laughing off a broken leg ("Don't wince. You've got a spare"), and taking crushed fingers as a matter of course (though it was hard to hold a slate and pencil then).Of course, playgrounds were for softies, really. The real fun was falling out of trees and dancing on 15 foot high walls with broken glass on the top (which latter pastime my late mother enjoyed in the 1920s).

In contrast, our village has trouble persuading the local playground safety inspector that a hinge on a gate needn't be 'proofed' against a child trapping a finger. The fact that, to achieve that injury, the child would need fingers the size of sausages, remarkable dexterity, and, in the normal course of events, arms about a metre long, does not satisfy him.

[paddywak]

What memories those photos recall, we lived near the local Miners Welfare which had a bandstand surrounded by a skating rink made up of several concentric rings and on fine days half the kids in the village would be whizzing round it without any supervision, near to it was a tower with a pulley at the top that the pit Tug o'War team used for training and on training nights all the lads would hang about hoping they'd be the one picked top to climb the 20 foot tower to put the rope over the pulley. Playing football and cricket in the middle of the road, you could count the cars owners in the village on one hand and noboby thought it was anything special to jump on your bike and cycle 10-15 miles to go "Train Spotting". I know people tend to look back at life through rose tinted glasses and there a lot pretty nasty things like Polio about but I wonder if the kids of today will look back at their youth with the same affection?

[emmie]

those photos bring back some very good memories, The Witches hat was a nightmare really, times you fell off, or went through the bars, because some joker kept pushing it round really fast. I do wonder that much has been lost in recent years. we played out most days in the holidays and weekends.
As pirates, cowboys and indians, Man From Uncle, don't ask.. with little money as well, only enough to get our penny sweets. I am getting too misty eyed here.