HistoryPorn

I miss being indestructible.

No parents. No Internet. Very limited home entertainment. Full boredom.

Growing up Gen-X was like a perpetual episode of Jackass starring The Goonies.

Thatcher was PM, if you were a kid then you’d be throwing yourself off a building too.

We jumped off buoys and navigation markers as a kid.

Sure it was water below but under the water … the supports and ladders of the buoys, mangled barnacle mess.

And the ospreys.

Goddamn did an angry osprey make jumping off the buoy that much more exciting, a little bit of “and maybe we’ll get attacked by a raptor” excitement….

This is what happens when you cancel Doctor Who, BBC.

Ah yes, back in the good ol’ days when natural selection was still a thing

Maybe it is just the angle, but why are the kids jumping out those windows and not the ones that seem to be directly over the mattresses? I guess this shows my age: my first reaction was to ensure these kiddos were safe! It does look wicked fun!!

Well shit, 80s kid here and we kinda did this. We had a pile of old mattresses and cushions. The mattresses were the super cheap and crappy kind with no springs so were actually really good for landing on. The ground floor of our house was maybe 6ft higher than the back garden and we had a kinda small raised patio at the back door with steps down into the garden. We piled up the mattresses on the lawn, beyond the flower bed. And threw ourselves off the wall at the edge of the patio down onto the mattresses. Lots of fun.

My siblings and I used those same mattresses to slide down our stairs, crashing into them at the bottom. That was fun too.

I also remember finding these long smooth metal sheets somewhere and using them to make a slide down our garden steps. Then using a sledge sliding down it and crashing into the mattresses.

I miss those days.

That would be a hard pass for me.

Bless single payer healthcare.

slightly (or absolutely) unrelated story, but I remember we built cross tracks in the forest for ourselves and our crappy bikes (I'm talking early-mid 80s on the other side of the Iron Courtain; the best bike I had was a rusty Csepel BMX, then my father's Sputnik race bike). once we decided fuck it why don't we do the same in our own street (a mud/gravel street at that time), and took shovels and stuff and destroyed the street. when the first adult residents got home, they were very pissed for some reason and commandeered us to restore the street. I remember the feeling of betrayal / injustice to this day! :-D

We used to jump off the roof into a snowbank. Then when the snow got deep enough we would just sled off the roof onto the snowbank.

Comment from an old reddit post:

Ashfield Valley estate in Rochdale. It was completed in 1969 and while it was initially popular, like many housing estates at the time, it quickly declined and by the 1980s was a haven for drug users, glue sniffers and squatters as well as being home to a large number of families, OAP's and single people. In January 1987, frozen water pipes cracked, flooding 15 of the 26 blocks. Many of the tenants were evacuated, with some having to sleep in a local church. 23 blocks were demolished in 1992.

ah, the British Space Program of the eighties!...

This is why video games are important.

That's crazy!

But it looks like crazy fun...

1980s England wasn't the most sheltered place I guess

And then after playing head inside and watch ma’s Corrie and make her a proper cuppa I remember these days I do

What's the spring situation like here? Did mattresses not have them back then? Have they been removed?

I did this in the 70s!!!!!!! good old days :)

Holy shit!!! We did that too! And we did it inside the building too.

I did that until i knocked a kidney stone loose at 14

Good, clean fun.

We used to do this off roofs into the snow as a kid.