What was a feature in your childhood community that isn't in your current community?

[Trothetoy]

A children's playground on my street

A small 2 screen cinema.

Car free roads (I am that old)

Kids playing out.

Hopscotch grids chalked everywhere on the pavements.

All the dads went out to work, all the mums stayed at home and did housewife things.

There was a grown-ups 'eyes and ears' network, and children mostly behaved when they were outside, because they knew if they didn't, their parents would find out. There was very little antisocial behaviour. The unspoken threat of "Wait till your father gets home" was a deterrent.

'Best Garden' competitions run by the local council and heaavily supported by many residents, with hundreds of gardens all filled with neat rows of bedding plants.

The children all went to the nearest school to their house, and walked there and back, and by about the age of 7, unaccompanied.

We all knew where not to go, and would avoid such places as the house with 'the witch lady', or the 'weirdo in the bushes'.

Children going out to play (in the street or in the local countryside or to a playground) or walking to school, from the age of 7 without the supervision of adults (or younger than 7 if they had an older child of 7+ with them).

Saturday morning pictures.

“Bicycle gangs”. We weren’t gangs at all, but on long summer evenings during the holidays all the local kids would meet up with their bikes after tea and we’d go for a long cycle. Explore random corners, build rope swings etc. I lived on the edge of a city verging on countryside, with suburban and country roads and we’d all be out on our bikes from age 7-8. Parents didn’t know exactly where we were for hours but it was all very wholesome and innocent. Couldn’t happen now with 4WD’s tearing around packed roads.

All the local kids meeting at the park in the summer holidays with our jam sandwiches and bottle of orange squash our mums had made us before telling us to be back by teatime. We used to go up to the woods and climb trees and build dens all day .

Brick bus shelter with a long wooden seat inside

Hatch at the pub entrance where I could buy my mums cigarettes for her without stepping inside

Pushchairs left outside local shops

Big mobile library coming round in school hols

Getting snowed in... 4,5,6 foot snowdrifts cutting off villages

Sitting at the top of a field in school hols with other kids whilst our mums worked the field in lines picking asparagus for local farmer!

Fox hunting meets at local pub

We all did that too

Something special about a jam sandwich!

Roller skating on the street

Screen free fun

A library

A children's centre

A bus service

A doctor's surgery

All gone over the last decade

People who used to deliver stuff. Bread van, coal van, butcher's van, pop man all had a specific day.
I don't recognise the mums at home thing though. All the mums by us went out to work 1970s.

Town on a Saturday on the bus

Hillards supermarket

Market day

Shops closed weds and sat afternoons

We would go and 'visit the old people' in local council retirement bungalows... always came away with 50p or off our faces on cakes/biscuits/squash

Most everyone lived close by to their families. Virtually everyone I knew as a child could walk to their grandparents’ and most of their aunts’ and uncles’ homes within ten minutes.

I’m kind of glad to have lost that. It’s bad enough now when my mum tells me she’s been telling my business to all the people she knows back in my hometown, without having to be there myself 😅

Walking to school with my friend when we were 5 years old.
Our Mums waved us off! 1976.

I have really vivid memories of the chats and little adventures we would have. Finding a coin in the street and going into the shop to work out what sweets we could buy.

We knew to cross the road at the crossing.

Our school bags were small suitcases, sort of made of stiff cardboard. Did anyone else have these? Seems crazy, now. My case was green and my friend’s was blue. They hurt a bit if they knocked into your knees.

The boys had satchels at this point.

Yes to visiting the old folks! So so weird in hindsight, our whole primary school class would traipse down to the community centre on the sheltered housing council estate and we’d have to sit on elderly people’s laps after singing for them.

I grew up in the 1990s so not that long ago, but these are no more:

Kids playing out (yes to the bicycle gangs, I was in one of them!)
Knock a door run/kerby/football
Kids from age 7 or so being given 50p money to buy sweets etc from local shop on their own (I never see kids under about 14 on their own here)
Youth clubs
Bicycle park (with manmade hillocks, proper paths etc)
Very tall, almost vertical slides
Bonfires in the back streets on 5th Nov
Bobbies on the beat (despite living 50 yards from a police station, I've seen a police officer on the streets twice in two years)
Public phone boxes to make prank phone calls from
Ice cream vans