Playgrounds...

[ecfc girl]

We had a swing like that in the garden. Remember a nasty incident involving me my brother and the little girl down the road when we were all on it and it came out of the ground and we landed in a heap with half the swing on top of us!

The rocking horses were great too, but you always wanted to try and stand on the seats like the big kids, until you came off and cracked your skull open!

Kids parks were great in the old days. Never a week went by without someone coming to school with a limb in plaster due to falling off something (normally the rocket or the igloo thing in Redhills park)and landing on the concrete below....... do you think the powers that be were trying to kill us all off?

 

[Swanaldo]

You'd rip the swing from the ground after a couple of minutes.

Ahh, that unmistakable feeling when you realise the back pegs have come out of the ground and you're in a particularly fast forward swing.....

 

[Swanaldo]

The classic Witch's Hat and Igloo set-up.

 

[ecfc girl]

That's not a proper park. It has no concrete!

 

[Swanaldo]

At least there's no bark or rubber flooring.

The park near to my Granny's (in the arse end of Midlothian) had a enormous version of the igloo frame. The challenge, of course, was to climb all the way across the inside, traversing the big hole in the centre. 8-foot falls onto bare earth were the norm.

 

[GrecianWonder]

football with a stone cos we werent allowed a ball!

 

[Donna]

Ahh, that unmistakable feeling when you realise the back pegs have come out of the ground and you're in a particularly fast forward swing.....

Yep!

We also had a slide where the sides of the ladder extended to form handles at the top. Jolly handy to stand up there & see which bit of Belfast had just blown up when we lived on a hill to the south of the city.

Anyway, these days the handles would loop round & down the slide again, these ended with a rubber bung just about dress hem height, so one day hem of dress caught on it and instead of going down the slide I fell about 6 feet off the side onto solid sun baked garden.

Ouch.

Then got up, slightly winded, and went back up the ladder & down the slide.

If it got really hot you could put base of slide into paddling pool and create a splash. Worked really well until local fat kit came round one day and ... rriiippppppp. End of paddling pool.

 

[Red Lion]

I always liked the Witches Hat too.QUOTE]

Me too! It was terrifying but brilliant. You hung on really, exceptionally tight cos if you were to come off, you'd probably land in the next county!
I can see why they are banned. I used to go to the park with no adult supervision (I am talking about when I was a kid!).
In this day and age that doesn't happen much. I reckon my kids would probably be alright on a Witches Hat. It's the wussier kids with their wussy parents flapping beside them that would fly off, leading to litigation etc.....

Surprised no one has mentioned the most timeless playground, the beach! Has to be a North Devon beach though, preferrably Putsborough. My kids enjoy it just as much as I did, and it's free, apart from the greedy bastards running the car parks.

What have kids got now that I wish we had as kids?
Where do you want to start?

Not particularly Crealy, or it's richer cousins Legoland, Alton Towers etc, but all the stuff that is there, Log Flumes, RollerCoasters, fantastic indoor and outdoor play areas etc.

Centerparcs, especially the rapids.

Countless after school opportunities, like Tae Kwondo, youth football etc!

 

[EdwaltonGrecian]

The classic Witch's Hat and Igloo set-up.

is she smiling because she's the only kid left in the village after numerous deaths on it? you can see the ashes of dead kids around it.

i think we got about 30 + kids on one of these once.and we'd get a speccy geek in the middle to kick and slap as we went round.i think he hanged himself....

 

[LOG]

To this day, i can remember hanging on the the outside ring of one of those cast iron roundabouts that took about two days to stop spinning, they were that heavy. I had hold with both hands and was horizontal.

This presented me with a decision to make. Let go and be throw across the concrete or hold on and hope for the best. I let go and it hurt but i got back on.

Those rocking horses were f*cking lethal as well. Much like the roundabouts, they weighed about 24 tons. If you walked in front of one at the wrong time, you'd be butted by the horse's solid cast iron head. They were good for "surfing" on though.

I used to enjoy jumping off swings once you'd got it up to a dangerous height. One memory in particular was when i attempted a mid air forward roll. I landed on my head. On concrete.