This amazing photograph, titled “Kids jumping onto mattresses” was taken by Tish Murtha in 1980, and rather beautifully encapsulates life growing up in urban Britain in the 70s/80s.
image by Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha, All rights reserved.
Notwithstanding the kid in the foreground holding the ventriloquist’s dummy (wtf?), the rest of the scene could have been from any summer in my early youth growing up in an industrial corner of Yorkshire. We did that kind of thing to entertain ourselves – we climbed trees, rummaged through quarries for pram wheels (with which we would make and then race trolleys), and we played in and around abandoned, or semi-built, houses and burned out cars.
Elswick Kids, image by Tish Murtha © Ella Murtha, All rights reserved.
How times have changed. No longer would such a derelict house or rusty old car be left so blatantly abandoned and accessible like that. And no responsible, modern day parent would ever dream of letting their children loose, especially unsupervised, in such dangerous environments.
Through modern eyes, and with seemingly ever increasing levels of paranoia, we can see nothing but danger and neglect in these scenes, but with our 70s outlook we can see only fun, excitement, camaraderie and danger.
Back then, we climbed and fell out of trees, we played football on fields laden with broken glass strewn with (white) dog shit. And we jumped out of abandoned or derelict houses onto filthy, disgusting mattresses, before returning home, scruffy, scratched and grazed, starving hungry and totally and completely knackered. If it was Saturday we may have had a bath, otherwise our mums reluctantly washed our faces with a flannel, fed us a jam sandwich and sent us to bed. The next morning we would wake up, hurriedly get dressed and repeat it all over again, for six glorious weeks throughout the summer.
Should we return to those days? Of course not, that’s a bygone age and we have moved on. But looking back, none of us died, yet we did have immense fun and learned ever such a lot about the harsh realities and dangers of life, something I wonder if kids today in their sanitised, indoor, digitised cocoons, will ever get to experience?
SpinningHead 
Love this post! So true as well, if my kids did the same dangerous things I (we) did as children I would be horrified! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
You sure you are only one year older than me? Sounds like the ‘50’s or maybe life was simpler in Yorkshire than the midlands 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
You were probably playing on your BBC Acorn …
LikeLike
This eloquent post reminds me of my days growing up in the southern United States. We did much of the same types of things. Dangerous and outrageous by today’s standards. However, we had fun and survived. Now kids have cell phones and video games to entertain them. We had imagination and time to dream as kids. Those days are bygone but I think about them often. The 80’s was a great time to be a kids. Probably the last decade that outdoor fun was the center of childhood. Thanks for this great post. I will be reading more.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re very welcome. Glad you enjoyed it.
LikeLiked by 1 person