Paradise Street – a nostalgic retrospect of British playtimes past

Remember when kids used to play outside? In the streets, in all weathers and generally unsupervised. As a child of the early noughties these memories are only second-hand to me, my playtime was generally restricted to my house, my garden or the thirty-metre radius surrounding it, and never far from a parent. To me anything else was unthinkable, and yet I grew up listening to stories from my Mum about how she and her (four) siblings would be kicked out of the house at morning with a packed lunch, and be expected to entertain themselves until dinner! Their favourite haunt was a place called “The Vineyard” – a grassy hole in the ground where my uncle once broke his arm!

That sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, and yet the latest ‘Vintage Britain’ book from Hoxton Mini Press: Paradise Street: The Lost Art of Playing Outside, provides a window into what it really looked like. Spanning the early thirties to the late seventies and drawn from photographers who lived and worked among the photos’ subjects, it provides a fascinating insight into playtime has it once was – take a look: