Ring bang skoosh in Gourock. Still remember the fear and running down the street at the absolutely limit of speed, chased by a thundering adult. Awesome.

The garden creeping as above was our fav.
Would imagine it would now qualify for several crimminal charges

Knock down ginger in London in the 60s. These days I don’t have a front door but the kids round here are surprisingly well behaved and don’t go in for that sort of thing anyway.

Knock & run in Worcestershire

The garden creeping as above was our fav.
Would imagine it would now qualify for several crimminal charges

Garden creeping, yes I’d forgotten about that one! That was great fun!

Chap door runaway!

I feel sorry for the poor gingers! 😆

The garden creeping as above was our fav.
Would imagine it would now qualify for several crimminal charges

Garden creeping, yes I’d forgotten about that one! That was great fun!
Hedge jumping was our favourite.
Up on the council estate each house was separated by a 4 foot privet hedge. The game was to start at one end of the street and smash through jump as many hedges as possible.

We called that Garden Hopping one of my mates claimed to have done the whole of Queens Drive in a single run which allowing for topography and artistic licence would have been about 1/2 a mile.

Knock and run here in York.
Used to love garden hoping. Had an epic route that had around 10+ garden’s and exited by a different street you entered.

Knock down ginger here in deepest darkest devon..
Cow tipping was reserved for the bravest souls

Knock and run & hedge hopping! Used to do the conifer bouncing thing but didn’t have a name for it.

Scrumping was a real favourite too. Bl00dy hell we had some close ones!

Where I lived we were obviously far too posh to even think about doing it 😀
I’d never even heard of it until I was an adult!

OP – Just you wait until you move. We have three that can tag team chap n run….

Chappie or chappie-door-run

Or my favourite… The Grand National which involves a row of houses with hedges…

‘Fancy a game of Chappy’ and jumping the hedges was the Grand National.

Oh and climbing the social ladder to Weedgie….ROFL.

I was inside doing some fettling and gave me big fright

No wonder you got a shock if you were fettling in the garage. Did er indooors know what you were up to? 😯

Talking of scrumping.. Being surrounded by cider orchards we used to have huge all day apple fights..
Two teams, everyone armed with a freshly cut 2 foot frond of supple apple wood.. Pierce an apple and then fling it at your opponent using the frond as a slingshot..
Launched in this manner an apple would fly three or four times as fast as the strongest child’s best throw, which was evidenced by the immense swollen (and often bleeding) bruises..

Skirmishes would go on all day through the summer holidays before hopping the factory fence to scrump crates of cider to numb the pain..

Good wholesome entertainment for a nine year old 🙂

Knock a door run in Lancs.
Did it on a drunken new years eve a few years back when i was 42 😀
Still got the thrill of the chase

Did anyone do Toddy Twanging.

Two groups of mates either end of a massive field. Clumps of claggy soil and super flexi long branches trying to lob the soil across to the other group and hit someone.

giantalkali – Member

That’s Knock Down Ginger where I’m from

+1; Knock Down Ginger growing up in the wilds of Wembley……

yup, knock down ginger where I was from. don’t know why though

Anyone else up this by using gaffer tape to keep doorbells ringing on?
Other activities –
Swapping front gates around
lobbing water bombs over hedges
dropping those small paper banger things down a hole in a park tunnel
using putrified conkers as stink bombs

Ahh good times.

Knock a door run in Lancs.

Aye.

I only vaguely remember doing it, certainly wasn’t a common occurrence for me. I’d probably been egged on by some “bad kids” at the time (back when bad kids knocked on your door and ran away, rather than stole your car stereo to pay for an eighth).

Chap-door-run in Queensferry…

And then we moved onto setting fire to a tissue wrapped dog shite on the doorstep we were chapping.

Well, not me exactly…

The garden creeping as above was our fav.

+1

We called it the “Grand National” 🙂

A total of 20 large gardens behind a load of council housing.

Many memories were made doing the Grand National:

A friend breaking his arm at the first fence, being detained by the homeowner, bitten by his dog and then “arrested”, all before they finally worked out he had a broken arm

Hiding in a garden in the middle due to the owners spotting us…but then looking up to the window on the house backing onto the other side (right in front of where we were hiding) and spotting the school hottie in her bra

The old man who lived in the 6th house used to set traps for us. Harmless at first, then it got serious – wire at neck height, wet concrete (yep!), glass attached to his fence and eventually two geese. I think he enjoyed it more than we did! He caught one of us once (was hiding behind a bush) and was literally shouting with glee “I got one, I got one! hahahahah!”, before letting him go 🙂

Getting trapped behind a hut towards the end because a couple of local nutters who lived in one of the houses were after us. A middle aged guy who lived in the nice house behind spotted us and rather than give us a bollocking he guided us to safety away from the bat wielding lunatics.

Getting to the other side (which was rare), clearing the last fence and immediately running into a police car which parked up while one of the cops was buying ice cream in the local shop. Most got away but my best mate was taken home to his mum and dad.

Going carol singing one year and we decided to go to all of the houses we used to run through. Bad idea, we were recognised by the second house and chased away!

ah man, I miss being a kid 🙂

“chap door run away” was what my flatmates from the West Coast called it when the doorbell rang on Hallowe’en eve – as in “don’t answer it”

We called it Knock a doorie night, and to be fair usually kept it to that day or thereabouts..

That and plundering for fruit.. oops.

On a similar vein, I used to stay for a couple of years in Inverness, my mates stayed in part of a house house that backed on to the Ness. They had a piddly tree house, which got burnt down (hessian sacking and matches don’t mix). Anyway they rebuilt it using wood from sawmill up at Holm Mills, we simply went in at night, chucked a heap of timber into the Ness, then ran back to the house and collected it from the river. Genius.

Chap door runaway

Ah that makes more sense!

I used to play chap door runway. Chap the door then take off down the path, running in circles arms out making noises like an airplane.

No wonder the oldies never bothered chasing me.

knock-on-ginger for me (Devon). we did the garden Olympics too but never had a name for it.
one of the most fun was finding flat topped hedges generally 6ft+ in height, gingerly climbing atop and seeing just how far you could run before being swallowed up by the hedge.

It was known as ring bang scoot in Peebles in the 1980s 🙂

The last time I did this I was a student in Newcastle aged erm 28…. Knocked and started to run.. guy came out without any delay wielding an axe shouting unpleasantries. ‘Run’ was an underestimation. The main thing I remember was running past a gate and a dog came out after me. I’m sure to this day I outran it. I never looked back so good chance mr axe never actually chased me.

Aye, chickenellie in Dundee. No idea why but that’s what I remember playing.

Chappie or Chap door runaway in Cumbernauld. Also Mouse Trap, where you dared someone to chap all the doors on the way down in the flats. The bottom flat would be chapped by the rest as soon as the top was chapped.

‘Stinky slipper’ was a bit cruel

Chappie in Troon as well.

Disappointed that The Ness is actually Inverness as opposed to Bo’ness (heard of someone referring to it as that once).

Lobby – Abronhill or Seafar? Can imagine it would make a fair difference (not to mention the nut jobs) in risk factor.

The old Village.

One of my favourites was to get a mate, stand on the pavement on opposite sides of the road and pretend to take the strain on an invisible rope stretched across the road between us. The challenge was to see who would bolt first when a car stopped.

or…. get an old purse of your mum’s , tie some fishing line to it and leave it on the pavement at the bus stop whilst concealed behind a hedge. When someone bends down to pick it up, you yank it away. 70’s entertainment at its finest.

Ahh ‘Roapie’ pechypanther. Classic!

Hey Breadcrumb, where in Cumbria are you based?

I was going to mention hikey dikey myself then I read you got there first. Where I lived at the time in Carlisle we had a 200mtre down hill (Queensway) where you could rattle the first 5 or 6 letter boxes whilst hikey dikey the front gardens as well all the way down the hill.

6 Knock & Nash plus about 30 hikey dikeys past peoples living room windows all at once. Amazing evenings spent casing the houses to make sure it was safe.

It would seem I’m alone in knowing it as postmans knock?

Wolverhampton in the 70s / 80s

rope trick still played around here sometimes – have passed kids going through the motions a few times.. 🙂

rope trick still played around here sometimes – have passed kids going through the motions a few times..

I hope that you screeched the car to a halt, wound down the window and shook your fist angrily……the little bleeders have gone to the effort, it’d be wrong not to play your part. 😀