Things you played with as a kid

tarzan rope swing over local beck.
mattress for the den inside the bonfire.
doors for ramps laid on the milk crate.
wagon tyres for rolling down pit stack.
fertilizer bags for sledging on in winter.
homemade bogey from old pram wheels and some old wood.

We had 2 old mattresses in the garage, a few times a year we could convince my dad to drag them out- too big for us- and we'd do our best to kill ourselves. Jumping off the top of the climbing frame, over the bars off bikes onto them, putting them one on the other and then one brother climbs between them and the others jump up and down on the top one... Ah smelly old mattresses how I miss you.

Also, coke bottles full of either water or dirt, built into bike assault courses. With the theme from kickstart playing in your head at all times obviously.

Sounds like we had very similar childhoods

i reckon most kids in the 60's and 70's had similar childhood.

fishing for sticklebacks and tadpoles, or if you were lucky a frog.

Cardboard boxes, for dens, forts, hurling yourself onto/over, etc. If someone had a new fridge (or even better a kitchen!) everyone would be round for the boxes to play with.

I remember one summer holiday, someone found one of those huge bags of spuds (we couldn't lift it) and spent what felt like the entire 6 weeks in two gangs just lobbing spuds at each other. The well off kids got spud guns but we were stuck with grenades.

My bike.
Action Man.
Airfix.
My train set.

Inside-Lego, my parents bought a big box of basic bits second hand and it lasted me and my brother from about age five till at least ten.
Outside- much as above-cardboard boxes, old mattresses, a climbing frame and blankets made a teepee etc.
But best before I got my first bike at about 12 was a space hopper

All a bit warlike I'm afraid (but it was the 50's)....   A friend had a German WW2 steel helmet and Officer cap. Another friend a .303 Lee Enfield rifle (whether it was decommissioned or not I have no idea but we took turns to have it. I lived next to some woods in Shepperton (now sadly disappeared). There was a bomb hole crater in the woods that was full of water permanently in which we found a machine gun ammunition belt (with ammo) in a sack that we draped around ourselves whilst we hid and played in the woods.  We never brought it home but eventually one of the parents spotted it and it was handed over to the police.

There was also the simple pleasure of sliding down the grassy hill on the local golf course on a sheet of lino, damming the stream or just sitting in the top of a tree on a sunny day.

Can’t say that my kids have ever done any of the above.

My sepia tinted view of the past sounds like a Hovis advert. But, the golf course was in the shadow of a coal fired power station, I was wearing homemade trousers because my parents were skint and Peter Sutcliffe was at large.

Marbles. There was always suddenly a marble 'season' in school, it was crazy. Rules were seemingly ever changing but religiously followed. Similar for conkers. (as a note, did a conker night with the cubs recently, none of them had a clue! WTF?)

Then there was a weird period when everyone was into yo-yos, there were all these yo you sponsored by CocaCola/fanta etc.

Fire. Of any kind.

A ball for games of 'kerby' (but west of Scotland, so pronounce 'kurby'). Bizarrely, my kids grew up, and now also live, in an area without kerbs. Whereas the street in Gourock where I grew up has about 10" high belters. and a good width too - not too far, not too close. Kerby for hours! Taught my kids recently on the self same street at Granny's. Awesome.

Spend hrs and hrs making "bombs" on building sites (not real) just used all the offcuts of single and triple core cable and other bits and bobs to assemble complex creations!

Also match heads and tennis balls - fun

Had a whole shed full (hidden from my parents of course) of potato cannons made from pvc pipework, duct tape and a piezo electric igniting system taken from lighters

Gat guns (lots of my friends had these and we would run about the garden shooting each other with darts)

Black widdow slingshot with the arm brace - would shoot a steel ball through half inch of chipboard no issue

Archery - this ended abruptly when I shot a few arrows through my fence into the neighbours shed

Bb guns - the gas type (used to be able to buy them as toys from Daniels in Windsor (no age restriction) so used to hide in bushes and shoot cars

Air rifles - used to use 3 in 1 oil to diesel the pellets. My parents were perplexed at the pattern of holes in the fence and both sides of the shed. This was really dangerous looking back as probably classed as a firearm

Fun snaps.. They were fun... Used to buy boxes and boxes from the market and cover the road with them as cars passed

Stink bombs - got sent home from school for that one as dumped a pack in the old fashioned air blast heaters in the assembly hall. Smell disappeared after about a year

Fireworks and old washing machines were fun..chuck one of the air blast bangers (can't buy them anymore sadly) into the drum and close the door. Remember being lucky one time as the door blew past my head at extreme speed..

Jolly Rogers cookbook... Need I say more

I do wonder how I escaped unscathed from my childhood. I miss those times... All too PC these days 🙂

Harry_the_Spider
Full Member
My bike.
Action Man.
Airfix.
My train set.

Yep same here, plus Lego

I used to read a lot.

I then bought an RC car (Tamiya Martini Renault F2), some used Sanwa RC gear. I used to run it outside the shop on a patch or tarmac with the owner playing with a RC bike. It started bringing customers in, they hired me to build Tamiya kits for customers, then work Saturdays and school holiday, cut a long story short I ended up racing all over the UK 1/8th circuit and buggies. Taught me a lot and paid for a few ski holidays in the process

We also used to 'borrow' cones and signs from roadworks, then set up an 'incident' in the street with an area coned off etc. Mum still has a classic roadwork triangle and a couple of big cones in the garage from the 80s 🙂

Action man, action force, tonka truck, bikes, scalextric (is that how you spell it?) Star wars stuff, guns made from planks of wood, football and the side wall of the grumpy old sod that lived down the road*....

*I actually feel sorry him, it must have been a nightmare. Sorry old man.

1. Tape a football card to a box. Preferably Kevin Keegan.

2. Put a worm down the barrel of a Diana .22 air rifle.

3. Shoot worm through Keegan's face.

4. Look for more worms.

My dad dug up some lawn to make a pond. The turf were stacked upside down in a big heap in antipation of a future trip to the dump.

Best toy evah - clambered all over it, dug dens  and foxholes for action man, made mountain passes for matchbox cars and slalom courses for marbles. Then a colony of ants moved in and we'd make little obstacle courses for them and occasionally  peal back turfs to reveal the workings of the nest, all the worker ants grabbing the rice-crispy-like eggs and running for cover with them.

I think was pretty much where me an my pals played for about 3 years

The Crag.

The Crag was a five minute walk from my boyhood home in Knaresbough - a strip of steeply banked limestone outcrops alongside the River Nidd - full of places to climb, caves to explore, mud slides to slide/run/ride down and, as I got a bit older, crag-porn to find hidden away in nooks and crannies in the various caves. I spent almost my entire childhood down there.

Youngest of 5, so mostly I was the one that got "played with/tortured" 😠

Go carts made out of planks and scrap wood - what Ton described as a Bogie. Every time we went to the local tip my dad would in the metal skip trying to retrieve old pram chassis' for the wheels.

One year we had a double airbed that all the internal baffles had failed in.  It probably took us the first week of the summer holidays to blow it up, but after that, the most excellent, dangerous bouncy castle ever. The proper ones have walls for a reason!

Bikes and skateboards naturally, (this was very much the era of Back to the Future)

FIRE. A can of Ronson lighter fluid and a box of Swan Vesta matches. Hours of fun. (late 60s/early 70s) 🔥

Fireworks. Dissected for the explosive bits.

A copy of Lofty Wiseman's SAS Survival handbook and a big welsh hillside (my folks moved there when I was 7). It was bliss - I'd pack some supplies, my trusty British Army camo jacket and disappear for days... or until I ran out of jam sandwiches.

Knives..we all carried them,nobody got stabbed.

Home made catapults ..no head shots.

Rope swings ..the local little Lord Fauntleroy's mum was wrong,they were not deathtraps,but we had a constant battle with the coppers cutting them down.

Airguns ..no head shots .

Louise .. who dares wins

FIRE

Good shout - my weapon of choice was a magnifying glass and suitable tinder in a tin box. Also used for frying alive various wildlife by the power of sunlight.

Branches, bits of string, bamboo canes.
Marbles
Sheets of plywood, bricks, bicycles

Dens made out of party seven cans
Tree-house from old kitchen cupboard doors
Skateboards from wood and roller skates
Airfix and hornby when interesting rubbish wasn't available

A couple of (substantial) lengths of concrete reinforcing bar. From recollection they were about 6-8ft long and maybe 1/2" diameter - dad had made some cast fenceposts at one stage and these were leftover bits. Basically we turned them into javelins, and threw them back and forth between our back lawn and the one next door. Nobody died or even got skewered, although quite how that is the case I'm still baffled by.
Knives & matches & spud guns, obviously. I do recall scratching the phosphorus part off a pre-safety match one day with a thumbnail, and it ignited under the nail; not something I'd recommend.

We made a sledge one winter, the design based on a combination TV images and zero physics knowledge. Essentially a board with perpendicular runners like skis. We dragged it to the top of a really steep hill and jumped on all excited... at which point the runners promptly sank straight through the snow onto the grass below and stopped fast.

Grew up on a farm, Dad was(is) bike mad and an ex works Cheney-BSA rider, so we had our out mx track round one of the fields along with tracks through the woods, so spent all my time riding bikes, driving old car dad had swapped for bales or work (First one was a Morris Marina with an 8 Track and Mr T air freshener), playing with farm machinery, climbing though the baler or building hay bales dens and trying not to loose a limb in the bake elevator, messing about on the old combine (Dad bought it back about 5 years ago), my uncle owned a local transport company so there was a ready supply of old lorry’s with grot mags, which made excellent Air riffle targets.

Toy wise was either Britain Farm Toy, Transformers or Scalextric.

Straw bales - build with them and watch the constructions get destroyed when discovered by dad.

I think some of you lot are definitely Beano characters

Gas board signs (red and white striped, thin but long plastic with a little bit of rope each end) as sledges.
Catapults made from the spring/ linkage from single bed frames.

Did the square bales construction, cheeses more commonly known as conkers, a milbro gutty or posh name catapult and the local dump raids for bikes/wheels etc or to make bogies steered by the feet no ropes whatsoever
Also had a BSA 250 Starfire but no engine to push up a hill outside the village and glide down at 25mph on the main rd

We made a sledge one winter, the design based on a combination TV images and zero physics knowledge

I made a sledge once. Took one 1x1.5 metre plastic cored sign (vinyl alu plastic alu vinyl stuff) thread string through convenient holes at one end aim. Method of operation was simple, sit, pull string to lift front up, waft down the hill, hit jump, actually take off, accelerate fast and faster, hit fence. Repeat with sister onboard to keep it on the ground. Epic it was.

It was 2 years ago, I was 35.

We made a sledge one winter, the design based on a combination TV images and zero physics knowledge. Essentially a board with perpendicular runners like skis. We dragged it to the top of a really steep hill and jumped on all excited… at which point the runners promptly sank straight through the snow onto the grass below and stopped fast.

My Dad had a phase of "have tools, must build wooden things!" when we were young and built us what sounds like an identical sledge. It was fine on hard packed snow but absolutely rubbish on anything fresh cos the runners just sank in and it stopped. It was very nicely made though.

I had a spud gun which was great - once got through a fairly large pack of potatoes which we found out that evening were supposed to be for tea. Parents not impressed.

Conkers and marbles were both big things at school along with all sorts and of arcane rituals to toughen the conkers.

Always wanted a Scalextric track too after a friend got one

Other than that, just bikes. Was forever out on my bike. I did crash into the garden gate once. That hurt.

Lighter fluid in little rubber sacks - mini flame throwers.

Not so much things, more places as nobody had any money back then. Wolves was pretty derelict in the late 60's, meaning my toys were the canals, railway lines and old "cholera" pits in the centre of town. Not sure how any of us survived - would roam for miles, in all weathers as come 9am you would get thrown out, not to return until 5pm. Got mý first jacket at 15, and winters were proper cold.

Best fun was reserved for the thrown away mattresses that we would drag near to tall walls, and jump onto for a whole summer.

Got chased out of a derelict stately house while ghost hunting. Got chased away from a farmers field for making a "den" in the crops. Got chased by grown ups for squirting their kids with water pistols. Got chased on the way to cubs by a dog. I did have some toys but seemed to spend a lot of time running. I wasn't very fast though, the dog caught me and bit my arse. Probably deserved it overall.

Another vote for ropes for swings and old mattresses for stuntman antics. Also trees and rocks, climbing them and falling out of/off them made up about 90% of my childhood. Anywhere with a KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY etc sign made me think there was something worth seeing in there. So a lot of time spent scuttling around dangerous places like scrap yards and derelict buildings. Never got caught either. Missed my calling as Sam Fisher.

Once lived with a neighbour who worked in the docks and often came home with boxes of exotic fruit. My mother was less impressed when she found myself and my twin brother poking a highly venomous scorpion with sticks in the garden!

Not sure how many of us survived

Harsh for kids in the Black Country.

Anywhere with a KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY etc sign made me think there was something worth seeing in there.

Years ago now, Hyndburn Borough Council built a skate / BMX park in town. No-one used it because it wasn't cool, they preferred to cause havoc on the surrounding pavements and walls. In a moment of genius, someone (presumably) from the council stuck a "KEEP OUT" sign on the gate. It's been dripping with kids ever since.

Almost forgot not old enough to buy pellets my hidden .177 air rifle we used small unripe blackcurrant that really did sting the butt cheeks if hit, nicking fruit before it was ripe plums,apples and rock hard pears
Mixing 2 stroke for the Lambretta never measured just a guess
Trying to put rabbits with "mixingmatoasties" out of their misery but probably caused more
If your parents were posh with an only child then a chopper was given and they usually owned the football

+1 for kerby. I'm ashamed to admit I had a bit of an intolerance for kids from down the street playing it outside my house for hours. Other than that, rope and branches. Used them for everything. Favourite probably being a death slide between two big trees. Oh aye, trees themselves. Despite having the body-eye coordination of a pissed newt.