Batgirl
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Post by Batgirl on Jan 3, 2016 4:29:06 GMT
This relates to 1970s and 1980s so not sure where to put this thread. Most places were probably dangerous by today's standards or else you were out playing after dark and your parents didn't know where you were. If it was school holidays they didn't seem to mind back then, as long as you managed to get home. I used to play in the giant pipes that had sections under the roads that opened up at the creek beds in the park. They usually just had a small stream of water flowing through them and you could climb the ladder halfway along to see where the grate was on the road. You'd never play there alone so I guess that was the safety net back then, if you got hurt they'd be a kid to run and tell someone.
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Post by Gene Hunt on Jan 3, 2016 9:18:18 GMT
There was an extensive canal system close to where I lived as a kid and we used to play around the area all the time. Over the years, a number of kids and adults alike fell into the water and drowned, usually in bad weather so it was not the safest of places to play. There was (still is) a canal tunnel which runs for just over 1.7 miles which was a good place for us to have fun as kids too. We used to hide in alcoves, covered in white sheets and jumping out on passing boats and scaring the passengers witless!
There was a disused railway station in the middle of it too and we used to play in there and around the sidings a lot, building camps etc. One lad "borrowed" his mothers chip pan from home once and I liberated some potatoes. We started a small fire and cooked our own chips along the railway line.
Can't imagine kids these days doing anything like this. It's all iPad and PS4 now
Gene.
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Vienna
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Post by Vienna on Jan 3, 2016 14:42:15 GMT
As a kid I used to live near a disused railway line which became popular as a play area during the 1970s and '80s, before it was eventually turned into a proper cycle way and footpath. There was once a steep bank where one of the original bridges used to be and when it snowed it was a great place for tobogganing, although probably quiet dangerous by today's standards. On the railway bridges that were still there, one kid I remember tried to walk across balancing on the edge, which if he had fallen would have been certain death! What fun we used to have, eh? Vienna
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Post by Gene Hunt on Jan 3, 2016 15:23:39 GMT
There was once a steep bank where one of the original bridges used to be and when it snowed it was a great place for tobogganing, although probably quiet dangerous by today's standards. On the railway bridges that were still there, one kid I remember tried to walk across balancing on the edge, which if he had fallen would have been certain death! What fun we used to have, eh? Vienna You'd be OK Vienna with those 9 lives
Gene.
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Post by Steve Austin on Jan 3, 2016 16:04:12 GMT
I can relate to the chips Gene, I used to live in the country near woods and the beach and we used to make dens and fires when we weren't playing football at the old school, which was pretty much all of the time.
We'd go to the beach via the pea fields and help ourselves as we made our way. There was a patch of land nearby where we used to ride our bikes, it was magic - a natural bmx track. Didn't matter what time of year we went, the sea was always freezing and the beach always full of space.
We were lucky living in the sticks, we used to ride motorbikes at 14 along the cliffs and round the village, "play" with air rifles and there was also a time where the council we replacing the windows and modernising the electrics etc and we borrowed some putty and copper pipes, which made great blow pipes.
Simple things like climbing trees or just playing in the wheat fields and watching the combine and playing on the bales and throwing stubble. Seems like a lifetime away now but it is true, in my case at least, that you could leave the doors open; my mum worked during the holidays and so me a my sisters were left to look after ourselves and there was never any thought of anything horrible happening.
The whole place was a giant playground, ironically we didn't have any swings or a slide.
Good times
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Post by Arthur Pringle on Jan 3, 2016 17:32:15 GMT
I remember playing on building sites as two of the estates where I lived were new ones & there were houses still being built. Thinking back I don't ever remember seeing any builders or being told not to play there. There always seemed to be bricks & sheets of wood about that would be made into ramps for bikes. Not so happy memories for me as there was a gang of kids on bmx's that ruled the area. One birthday I got a brand new bike, a lovely blue chrome coloured Raleigh Bomber & the leader of the gang bullied me into having a go on it, he started performing tricks with it & whacked the back wheel hard down on a kerb making a huge bend in it. The rest of the kids laughed but I was heartbroken & my dad was fuming. He found the kid & demanded to know where he lived, taking the bike with him. It turned out that the kid's dad was a copper! The bike was repaired locally but it was never the same. Another time I'd left the bike outside the local sports centre & when I came back to it some nasty git had nicked the handlebar grips. Instead of getting replacements I ended up with a crappy pair that didn't match the bike. It still angers me to this day
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Del Boy
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Post by Del Boy on Jan 3, 2016 20:33:38 GMT
Sorry to hear that Arthur. A similar thing happened to me in the early 80's when a local kid nicked my Raleigh Striker. I remember getting a lot of the blame for "letting him have a go" ! You don't get over these things As a kid growing up in the suburbs of London there was plenty to get up to. Local to us was a row of garage's and a playing field either side of a flyover. We used the flyover for a climbing frame. If someone in the local flats chucked an old mattress out we would drag it to said flyover and use it as a crash mat ,jumping of the abutments of the bridge and doing other stunts Great days. In the summer holidays we would be 20 handed. If anyone was having any building work done we would jump in the sand which in them days was always piled up outside in the roads. The holy grail though was a dumped car. This used to happen quite frequently in the early 80s. It would become our den for a while and we loved pushing them around
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Villain
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Post by Villain on Jan 4, 2016 12:42:02 GMT
Great idea for a thread... jumpers for goalposts and all that Not far from us back in the '70s there used to be an old WWII pill box at the top of the hill near the local shops, we used to play soldiers in there as kids until it gradually filled up with water and the council blocked the doorway up (spoilsports!). It's long gone now, at that time it was surrounded by allotments but the inevitable housing estate sprung up on the site a few years ago. What was once a proper kids adventure playground is now the local Eastern European 'ghetto', populated by some seriously dodgy types who are always in trouble with the Rozzers and getting there names in the local rag. Really glad I live in a different part of town now! Another favourite spot for us was the trackbed of the old Great Central Railway line which cut right through the middle of town, the station platform under the bridge at Rugby Central was always a meeting point if we were out on our bikes before venturing off elsewhere. Under the bridge there was often a stash of 'adult educational pamphlets' which taught us a thing or two about 'life'. We never made any plans as to where we would go, we just set off on our bikes down the lanes, across fields etc but made sure we were home by the time it got dark. Nobody worried about anything in those days although our parents told us to beware of one or two unsavoury characters. We never, ever came to any harm though. If we stayed close to home we always seemed to gravitate towards the railway, Rugby had (and in some places still has) a vast amount of old railway infrastructure which was like a magnet to us in those days. On a site which is now occupied by warehouses and small industrial units there used to be the old Locomotive Testing Station, it had been closed in '60s but stood empty until well into the mid '80s. We'd often hang around in there, kicking bits of rubble around and generally passing the time until some heavily built railway type bloke would chase us out with a severe warning about telling our parents what we were up to, even though he didn't know who we were! Happy days indeed. Villain
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Post by D.C. Burtonshaw on Jan 4, 2016 19:25:16 GMT
I don't think I went anywhere particularly dangerous to my knowledge, and only really went down to the park or my next door neighbours house in my pre teens. The only things I can think of was a long walk one summer in 1982/83 I think down to an area where my younger brothers friend knew which was to some fields. I was only about 11 or 12 and was the oldest and my brother would have been 8/9 and his friend younger still. The walk seemed like ages. Not sure our parents would have been that happy about us walking that far but we were home safely.
Me and my next door neighbours would be a bit silly from behind the hedge in the front garden of their house sometimes. The houses were/are on a raised piece of slip road above the main road. As well as shouting silly twoddle at passers by that couldn't see us, one day we lobbed small apples from a tree and try and hit passing double decker bus roofs. One day we were playing cricket in the front garden and my mate hit the tennis ball we used a bit too hard and it went over the hedge and hit a passing Triumph Dolomites roof! We realised this when we heard the bang and saw him pull over and put his hazard lights on! First we scarpered, then went in the house and looked from the upstairs bedroom window, and eventually the car pulled away, although we never saw the driver get out!
I remember the adventure playground at the park nearby and the completely wooden climbing frame that was made, which was literally 4 stories high with stairs leading up to the levels. Probably wouldn't be allowed to be built now and in later years the upper two levels were closed off for safety reasons......... (something had happened I think..) - It's not there anymore.
I remember as a 10 year old, (1981) thinking some of the makeshift climbing apparatus was a bit dangerous looking, and didn't help when some bigger teenage loud mouths turned up either with black leather jackets or some skinheads with Doc Marten boots, frightening the kids off, (that was all they seemed to do though, so were "Nothing!" as Carter from the Sweeney would say! LOL). Also my mate at the time, who was a year younger, climbed onto a big pile of scrap sawn off wood in the playground and stood on top of it, until the council official on duty told him to come down as it was dangerous, (could have collapsed I suppose and would have had splinters) - at least the official was polite about it. Bad though, that the wood wasn't yet collected or roped off or moved out the way of the playing kids. Obviously excess sawn off debris from the various "building projects". Wouldn't happen now of course!
Finally, - a story a mate at work told me (who is now about 54) - Back in probably the 70's he was saying he and his mates were walking on top of the railway viaduct on the way to Wolverton, Bucks (I hope it wasn't still in use!) and there was only a low wall next to the track, which one of his mates started walking on the edge of, one day (Not sure if my mate was with him at the time...).
Blooming stupid as there was a big drop and yes........ his mate lost his balance and did fall off but his fall was broken by hitting and bouncing off the stone structure/pillars sticking out, a few feet underneath and sliding down the sloping part, until he fell into trees - broke his leg - but he was lucky it was just that!! Don't know how the lads explained that to their parents/authorities etc!!
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Post by Sam Tyler on Jan 4, 2016 22:54:14 GMT
Where I lived backed on to Thorpe in Surrey where the Thorpe Park theme park is now. All the landscaped lakes around the park were pits that had been dug out to extract gravel.
We used to play around these pits when the original machinery was still in use. There were long conveyor belts that we used to 'surf' on right up to the hoppers that fed the gravel to the next section of conveyor. The last section fed a hopper down on to a conveyor that ran about 3 metres down beneath the road. Obviously we used to leap off in the last few metres before the hopper.
There were also high, rickety and rusty, towers that elevated the gravel to giant hoppers that fed the gravel into lorries. We used to climb the towers to pick stones off the conveyors to lob at various 'targets' such as the roof of the security hut. We were often shouted at by the security guards but they never ventured up to chase us off.
Further down the site the gravel would also get graded into different sized stones and piled into huge mounds. Three mounds arranged in a triangle were great for 'tobogganing' down on a piece of old corrugated iron, turning as we met the next mound.
We also went skinny dipping in the pits a couple of times during the summer of '76 when we were out and got too hot. That was until one day when we found a dead pike about 6ft long on the bank. Knowing that pike were notorious for biting peoples' fingers when over the sides of boats, we decided against skinny dipping again in case they took the bait on something else!
Aside from the pits there was dirt-tracking on our bikes down long hills but that today would come under the category of mountain-biking. A good few croppers and broken bikes but they were easily repaired for the next day.
The most memorable was getting to the bottom of the track to find that my brother had put a tree log across the track just as I turned the corner. That broke the bike's headstock and front forks.
As we were also close to the Thames we also had a thick steel plate ramp on the bank so that we could do an Evel Knievel launch on the bikes into a shallow section on the meander of the river. It was even more fun with the spokes stuffed with paper and set alight!
Sam.
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