What random school trips did you go on?

[DhIsAJudge]

GCSE drama and we were studying a midsummer’s night dream. We trekked over to the Lowry from north wales to watch a performance.

It was so bizarre, it wasn’t in English it was in Sanskrit, Hindi and another language which was fine but it was really hard to follow. It was also set in modern times and there was a massive scaffold on the set.

Then about 45 mins in the smoke alarm went off in the Lowry and the stage filled with smoke and the audience (us included) just stayed in our seats as we all thought it was part of the play until the ushers came round and told everyone to leave as one of the actors behind the scenes had accidentally set fire to a prop.

I genuinely think that if they hadn’t come out to tell us it was on fire we’d have just stayed there and burned to death.

We also went to a sub station and learned about electricity and as we went round the site I saw my dad who forgot we were coming 😂😂 (he was head engineer and he knew he had a school trip but didn’t know it was my school)

Love this

I did Law at college. We did a trip to the local court, the trial on the day was a man who had bitten another man’s ear off in a fight

My ds at primary went to a local working quarry and came home with a lump of painted concrete. Still got it 😂.

same primary also used to take them to the local Tesco a lot, think they had community rooms upstairs where they used to make pizza and have a tour round the big freezers, fridges and all the warehouse bit at the back.
my dds said it was mind numbingly boring after trip 2…

I quite liked my primary school trips, I do remember going to fishbourne Roman palace in Sussex in the mid eighties and I’m pretty sure they’d unearthed a skeleton which was on display, fascinating but gave me bad dreams for a while

Basildon (in Essex), a secondary school geography field trip a long time ago when it was still a new town so we learned about town planning, it was actually quite interesting!
I believe it was also home to the biggest supermarket in Europe at the time (a Tesco) which was a major attraction for the town, people flocked from miles around to marvel at the scale of it

We visited the Ford plant in Dagenham and the workers cat called us as we toured the factory.

Another one who had the sewage works trip. Other schools went skiing in Austria, we went to Earlswood sewage works.

Just thought of another, not a trip but a visit to our primary school. A band called Rock Bitch came to do a performance for us.
They were a lesbian band and I remember us asking them if they had boyfriends!

The teacher that arranged it (think they were his friends) nearly got fired for it, there was a petition to keep him and everything. Think it made the front page of The Sun 😂

We went on a school trip to the control tower at Bristol Airport. Nothing was flying in or out of the airport because it was fogbound, so the controllers had time to chat.

Lovely thread, I remember various school trips. Some of the primary school ones were:

Drawing the shapes of windows in houses nearby.
Being shown the vegetable patch in the garden of somebody who lived nearby.
The police station. (I was disappointed not to be locked in a cell!)
The Arethusa water sports Centre in Kent; all we did was look at boats and collect shells.
Box hill: we did interesting stuff there, such as surveying. The same day, we went to nearby stately home Polesden Lacey, with an actress pretending to be the owner, asking us to help save it from being sold.

At secondary school, we did a geography field trip surveying a small town.

I'm envious of those who went to the sewage works! I've been to Crossness pumping station as an adult, but it's not the same awe and wonder when you're a child.

With my youth group (boys and girls), we once went to Covent Garden for a day, when I was six. I remember a Punch and Judy show, and a street entertainer who did lots of slapstick such as hammering a huge nail into his mate's head; then handing a long cardboard tube to a girl in our group, telling her to hit the other man as hard he she could. That man then fell over, with his face landing neatly in a paper plate of creamy stuff, and when he stood up, the plate had "the end" written on the bottom. I remember a passing elderly man telling me to stay with my group so I wouldn't get lost; all I could think of was "that stranger spoke to me!"

And with the same group, I went on an overnight trip to an activity centre, and my dad came too, sleeping in one of the boys' dormitories (unthinkable now!) We left after only one night, and my dad explained ten years later that some of the teenage helpers were having sex with each other in the children's dormitories in the daytime, and some of the children knew this.

I've remembered another one: a trip to a nearby art gallery, where four children were invited to dress in period costumes, for the rest of us to draw.

Yes. And I didn't realise until I was older. I was only 9 or 10 at the time so didn't realise their following or talent.

@DhIsAJudge I bet that actor who set fire to a prop was smoking!

If we're also allowed to talk about interesting visitors to our schools, here are some others:

A puppet show; but I remember the disappointment that it was a thinly disguised moral lecture about the importance of cleaning our teeth.
A man in Roman soldier costume, who explained that his spear was made of weak iron so it would bend when used, and he'd be arrested if the police found him with it.
The police, who demonstrated using their dog to catch a robber, and put handcuffs on the teacher.
A gentleman who brought an eagle owl. I remember the headteacher telling us not to give him a clap, because it would frighten the owl.
An African husband and wife who demonstrated dances and chants.
A saxophone band who played the Pink Panther theme.
Two actors from the National Theatre who brought lots of props and costumes, with participation by the children, and one of them rode a stage horse: the sort that he stood inside and danced about in, so that it looked like he was riding it. He was St George, and "killed" one of the children who was in a dragon costume.

A geography trip. Our male teacher wore leggings which wasn’t perhaps the best choice especially when he fell in the river

@TheCountessofFitzdotterel
Yes! It's a shame it's not still going, was such an informative experience.

That reminds me of a book I got from the library about Brownies and going to the woods at night to see badgers and there was a bee orchid. I really wanted to find one.

Most memorable trip was probably a tour of some kind of bunker underneath our town council offices. Which I now can’t find any mention of online, but definitely existed!

We also for some reason did a very long day trip to Ironbridge Gorge and Blists Hill. Probably an interesting day out if it wasn’t a 4 hour drive each way.

We had this trip in Y6 too. I was adamant I didnt want to go and I tought I was so clever and lied to my teacher to say that my Mum wouldn't sign the permission slip. The teacher questioned my clueless Mum at pick up time and I ended up having to go (unimpressed).

@LighthouseLED It wasn't in Hatfield by any chance, was it, the secret bunker? And I'm guessing you don't mean the secret nuclear bunker in Essex, which Thatcher might have used (and there's a figure of her in the bed in the Prime Minister's quarters).

Here's a sad realisation I had with school trips: they were always followed by having to write about them! I actually got a detention at secondary school for not writing about a trip to London Zoo.

It wasn't in Hatfield by any chance, was it, the secret bunker? And I'm guessing you don't mean the secret nuclear bunker in Essex, which Thatcher might have used (and there's a figure of her in the bed in the Prime Minister's quarters).

No, further South than both of those. Very small, unimportant town!

@Lifeisnotalwaysfairwe also went to a farm in primary school and I got picked to help deliver the lamb 😳

Did anyone go to the Earth Centre in Doncaster? What a load of rubbish that was. Even the teachers said it was a waste of time.

Thames bloody barrier

We had a day out at the local mental health hospital and we had to sing Rocking Robin to the residents.

I also went to a water treatment centre, I do actually remember it so it must have been quite interesting!

Also in infants school went to Aberdovy for a lovely day out at the beach. On the windiest day ever in shorts. Forced to run down to the sea in tears with sand whipping the backs of our legs. Ate sandy sandwiches.

Best trip was battlefields trip for GCSE History. Was actually interesting. But also we discovered that in Belgium they would sell alcohol to 14 year olds. 🤣

My son was deeply unimpressed with his trip to Battle. He said 'It's just a field'