Kids of the 70's/80's - what did you do playing out that would horrify people today?

[IncompleteSenten]

I grew up in a pit village and we'd play on the pit tip, including round the slurry pond. We'd chuck sticks in and try to get them round the other side, we'd climb up and slide down the tip mounds. I only remember getting chased off once, it's bonkers to think it was all mostly open and unguarded!

There was a big open sewer? Storm? Drain or massive pipe with a grill across it that had been prised off and we used to go in there. I don't really know what it was, just that it was metal and massive and a bit wet and smelly and you could crawl quite a way in.

An old pit tip that time had grassed over but was not all that stable and had a chunk out the side of it. We called it "holey hill" and would sit in the carved out bit and make it bigger.

There was a stream with a big tree next to it. We had a rope tied round a branch and a stick to turn the rope into a swing. One side of the stream had a really steep banking and we had a massive knife and took it in turns to swing as high as possible and stick the knife into the banking. The next person had to swing to get the knife and then swing to put the knife higher up the banking. The winner was the person who got it so high nobody else was able to retrieve it.

Gathering hay from the fields and making a massive pile under a tree (different tree) then climbing the tree and jumping off it onto the hay. Bonus points for fancy jumps.

Playing chicken across the new road (it's still called the new road even though it's been there 40 years now and the old road's been buried for 30)

Climbing onto the row of garages at the bottom of the estate and jumping from one roof to the next.

God, so many!

I was chatting with my mum the other day and was reminiscing about all these games when I noticed my mum had gone absolutely silent.

She had no clue what I'd been doing all that time. She'd assumed I was just in the park. (Nobody played in the park. Who wants proper swings and slides when you've got pit tops, slurry ponds and knife games 🤣)

Nothing as dangerous as some of these stories but we'd go into a derelict house and make fires and spend lots of time going up and down in the lifts of the local tower blocks. Also ringing people called things like Mr Bum and putting the phone down. All upper primary age. My kids had a pretty tame time by comparison.

I remember flying down a hill on my bike with no helmet (never wore one at all). I sometimes drive up that hill today and it makes me feel sick. If I'd come off, it would have been curtains for me.

All sorts here too. Used to cross a dam wall much like this one, which had no barriers as it wasn't meant to be a bridge.
Used to play in a graveyard before knowing what it was.
Crossing flowing river aged about 7, just to go and pick fruit from the other side.

Hitchhiking in my late teens. One long distance truck driver even asked why I was so trusting and said I should never do it again.

I guess the equivalent now is accessing bad social media sites.

Oops, forgot the image.

Loved in a new town for a year when I was 5 ish. Brookside in Telford. Many brand new houses and they were still building the row behind us, so we used to wonder in and out after workmen had gone home. Don't remember having to negotiate any fencing or anything. And surely we would have been visible from our houses? Anyway building sites were fun.

My brother and I used to jump off the garage roof onto a fold up sunbed to see if it folded up when we landed. I sometimes wonder how we didn't die. It was a significant drop and this was about 1978 so sunbeds were shite and fell apart very easily. Our mum used to laugh watching us while she was looking out the kitchen window 😆

It’s possible to parent in a way where children spend lots of time outdoors exercising, having adventures and exploring in an age appropriate way. My kids have never been obsessed with social media. It’s not an either or situation, it just requires thought and effort which many parents both back then and now, aren’t willing to put in.

@IncompleteSenten playing in open water, railway lines, jumping on the back of moving lorries (until someone in my class was killed), going into condemned tenements and abandoned factories. Basically just out from morning until late afternoon.
I do wonder how I made it to adulthood.

Bloody hell 😳

At the end of my street was a derelict farm, slowly taken to bits by us kids. In the meantime it had newts in ponds, frogs, huge jumps in barns into straw, rope swings. When visiting an aged umpteenth cousin in another town, my DB and I would explore the half-wrecked mill at the bottom of the street - huge tilted slabs of sandstone, a factory chimney still standing, a stream running through it.

Amazing stuff. This was early to late 60s. As others have said, you just went out for the day. No wristwatch either.

I would walk for miles across semi-marsh entirely on my own. Since you ask, yes I was approached by a pervy man and thank God we were separated by a lively watercourse.

My friend's and I hired a rowing boat at the seaside. We rowed across to where our other friends were waiting and allowed them to climb aboard. The boatman was yelling at us to come back. None of us could swim, nor control a boat. Somehow we made it back. We were all about 12. In hindsight he shouldn't have hired a boat to children.

Lostincyberspace · Yesterday 19:42

We used to make prank calls - we found teachers' numbers from the Phone Book.

We never thought about teachers... Someone found out that you could dial free from the old phone box handsets, by tapping the numbers out on the cradle. A gang of us would dial random numbers and ask to speak to Mr. Wall, then ask if Mrs. Wall was there. We'd then ask the bemused person, "Are there no Walls in your house? Well, what's holding the roof up?"

Both my parents were strict, not even allowed to play in neighbourhood kids houses (which I did).
I took any opportunity when their backs were turned, especially after school or school holidays when they were at work.
Also made up stories about school trips, volunteering, all sorts of stuff.

To be fair, I was the most adventurerous of my siblings as they did as told and stayed home.

If I didn't have a strong resemblance to parents and siblings, you'd have thought I was switched at birth.

Born into a family of pearl clutchers.

Siblings told on me a few times, but they soon gave up as it didn't stop me.

I remember naively giving my dad an address for an evening career's function I was attending.
He came to look for me as it was getting late, it was a nightclub! Quiet ride back home.

Gave my mum many a sleepless night through my teenage years. What she doesn't know is it started from when I was about 5 and would walk for miles with friends after nursery 😅.

Poking at snakes, daring each other to eat poisonous flowers to see how quick we'd die.
Railway lines were our favourite spots.

Ditto primary school and beyond.

Very zen these days and a homebody having lived a life of trying something at least once.

Taught me to be resilient and streetwise though and were very lucky to never have been abused, broken any bones or died 🙌.

You have to tag @Lesina for her to see your comment.

Thought I'd seen and done it all but had no idea about the babies being taken for walks, nor the adventure playgrounds like
@GoodOldEmmaNess posted 😱.

When I was 7, in the 70s, my parents bought a big old Victorian house that they couldn't really afford to do anything to, with a massive garden. They spent an awful lot of the next few years rotavating bits of the garden to make vegetable beds, and my brother and I were basically feral. We used to make dens in the shrubbery at the front of the house and throw things at passing cars, make fires, etc. We once found a box of WW1 ammunition in the stable loft and played with it for ages before my mum found us with it and called the police (it was apparently very unstable and the pretty purple crystals we liked so much were actually TNT...).

My brother and his best friend used to go to the farm across the road and annoy the very placid Hereford bull by waving their red-lined anoraks at him and then on the very few occasions that they could get him to chase them, riding their bikes into the stream to escape.

My parents regarded our childhood as fairly constrained compared with theirs, as my mother spent a lot of her free time playing and tunnelling in a sand quarry, and my father spent the summer on his grandparents' farm, pretty much unsupervised, and once, aged 9, painted a tractor blue with some paint he found in a barn.

Bloody hell!

Just remembered another one, not super dangerous but wouldn't happen now. We had a babysitter who used to let us put duvets on the front garden and jump out of the sitting room window half a storey up and over the courtyard that let light into the basement window. People would be strolling home from their evenings out and no one batted an eyelid.

@TimeInBlue
@Almahart,

To think I couldn't even swim!!
We used to spend whole afternoons playing there and don't remember anyone telling us to get off.
Guess no one went that way 😅.

Used to dangle our little feet over the edge 😱.

Just realised, we couldn't tell time but knew to be indoors before parents got back from work.

Funny thing is, I'm now afraid of heights 🤣. You'd think that would have set me up for life...

Oh gosh, that's just reminded me of how my elder sister and I used to play on the stairs! We used to grab the mattress from our little sister's cot, take turns to sit on it at the top of the stairs and be pushed down. An indoor slide!

We also used to like going downstairs on our tummies, usually head first. My mother used to occasionally tell us to stop, but without much conviction. I think she was just too busy with housework to get too involved with what we were up to.

However, we never played near the stairs on the very cold winter days. Our house had very little heating. A coal fire in the sitting room (that was only used in the evenings by my parents: we children weren't allowed in there unsupervised) and a coke boiler in the kitchen. The house was perishingly cold upstairs. I remember that famously harsh winter of 1962/63, which was just after I started school. I think my chilblains had chilblains that year!
So, to bring the temperature up above zero upstairs, my parents had placed a paraffin heater in the hallway, near the bottom of the stairs. We girls were drilled to avoid bumping into the heater or going anywhere near it, otherwise it would set fire to the house and we would all die! My mother did a good job of scaring me off. I was terrified of it. I used to have a recurring nightmare about fire! There was no way I was going to be playing anywhere near it!

My friend told me there was a tunnel under the road near her house. It was probably something to do with drainage. As a small child she and her friends would inch along the tunnel and come out the other side of the road. Makes me come out in a cold sweat thinking of it.

I remember once calling round for a friend (we were 6). Nobody was in so my other friend and I decided to break in to borrow a toy she had. Friend tried to get through the catflap and got well and truly stuck. 😂

Another memory:
climbing out of the bathroom window to play on the flat garage roof. There were often 2/3 kids up there while everyone played in the cul-de-sac on bikes, sitting on the kerb. We were all between 6 and 9. My brother wasn't allowed on the garage roof by my parents because he was 'only 3' 😆

Lots of sitting on kerbs poking around in the stuff at the edge of the road.

As soon as he was 4 ‘yeah knock yourself out son’ (probably quite literally 😆).

That's my old area too. 😃
What school are you talking about ?

We used to call our paraffin heater the Dalek because it looked a bit like one.

Remember those pink strips you'd hit with a stone and they'd bang?