P ~ Playground
When I was young, we were fortunate to have a field at our disposal for playing in, right at the end of our long gardens. It certainly did not look anything like this:
Is that a playground I see before me
Play areas in public parks these days are so inviting, that I want to be a child all over again.
I want to be four again!
Amazing equipment such as swings, slides, climbing frames & walls seem to shout at us to stretch our limbs and live out an adventure.
Come climb on me.
They sit a top bouncy tarmac soft pour safety surfaces with embedded graphics in a myriad of colours that include red, yellow, green, orange & purple & blue. A real rainbow.
The ground beneath my feet can provide inspiration for play
Itsy Bitsy Spider even has a look in!
Itsy Bitsy joins in the fun
Who knows, this wall might lead to a healthy hobby in rock and mountain climbing in future years. Everest perhaps?
Learning to reach great heights
I find these spaces quite sterile, GM. I absolutely loved the forts and castles and treehouses we would build as kids. Our imaginations knew no limits. and the fact that we could wander at will everywhere, often Mum packing a lunch and we’d be gone all day. And the “gangs” which we’d ward off from other neighbourhoods. There was a huge shortage of girls in our neighbourhood so I was inducted as a ‘boy’ quite early in life (those were highly gender specific days – even distinctly separated at schools) and had scraped knees, elbows and a bruised face to show regularly. I could wield a catapult with the best of them.
Thanks for the memories!!
XO
WWW
WWW, We had the enclosed field at the end of the garden for playing in. It ran along fourteen houses and was land left over after the houses were built. Each house owner paid a minimal annual rent, and it was allowed to grow wild – as were we when we played there. All the parents shared the responsibility of checking on us and that was done by looking out a bedroom window, or walking down to the end of the garden and looking over the wall. On long summer evenings, some of the parents joined us to play in our games.
My first thought was ‘and not a child in sight’. We had lethal see-saws, rickety metal slides, swings that everyone fell off and a climbing frame that was bent to pieces from teenagers sitting on it in the evenings. The ground was that horrible gravelly Tarmac that ripped your hands and knees to shreds every time we fell, behind the playground was a field full of gorse bushes that made a fantastic space for hide and seek, chasing & dens, and further afield again were the building sites that we clambered all over, I ruined a brand new pair of shoes by getting them stuck in some wet cement…. I could have seriously burnt my feet…. I was more worried about what mum would say.
Those fields, building sites and climbing frames were filled with children, making up their own games, entertaining themselves for hours and hours on end. Now the playgrounds are empty because not a parent worth their salt would let a child ’round the park’ for 30 minutes let alone half a day, unsupervised.
The imaginations of the children born in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, who made castles of bent metal cages, and foreign kingdoms of a patch of gorse scrub, designed these beautiful empty playgrounds. What will the imaginations of 90’s, 00’s, 10’s and onwards…. children come up with?
These photos were all taken on a morning walk, when young children would be in junior school, kinder-garden, or preschools. I am rather cautious about photographing ‘other people’s children’ without permission. When they are in a photograph that I want for a blog post, I try not to have them facing me.
What actually horrifies me about these modern playgrounds, is they are enclosed and gated. Dogs and cats have more freedom to roam these days than children.
As to the question What will the imaginations of 90′s, 00′s, 10′s and onwards…. children come up with? I hazard a guess that it will be more computer based games of war and killing! But, wait now, war and killing are not new. We played cowboys and injuns, and the shooting went on for eons just like in the pictures. BLAME AMERICA! 😉
Now I wonder… if we had panned for gold back then….. Would we all be millionaires now?
Lol 🙂
This looks like the new playground at Riverwalk:
http://nrhatch.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/riverwalk-grand-opening/
Kids LOVE it!
The sky is a different colour! 😉 Today was another pet day with temperatures of 20°C I hope the playground was well used and busy today. I went further afield and had fun.
From the viewpoint of my tired and aching bones and muscles, this looks more like an obstacle course than a playground. Is there a first aid station nearby?
No first aid station, Al if the little darlings fell off any of the items, the parents would be far too busy claiming compensation from the local council to worry about the kids!
Bring back the empty box, I say!