Life In Britain 1950's

[emmie]

interesting piece, especially for those born around the same time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39235590

[emmie]

the beginning of our multi cultural society, as the pictures show.

[emmie]

where are our oldies when you want them......

[Tilly2]

I was born in the Fifties and I remember my mum wearing sticky-outy frocks with a net petticoat underneath.

None of my little friends smoked though. Naughty boys!

[emmie]

tilly i think my brothers smoked when little, they certainly did later on in their teens. it an interesting snapshot of life in Britain in the 50's, shows how much has changed since..

[Tilly2]

Yes, Emmie. Not many children play in the streets nowadays.

[emmie]

no they don't, when i was young there wasn't half so much traffic. You could roller skate down the street with no thought other than wheee

[Old_Geezer]

You aren't allowed to wheee in the street these days.

Yeah pictures aren't unfamiliar.

[emmie]

OG, true, but i meant in in the childish sense.
those pics bring back a lot of memories. they missed out ones
where us kids played on bomb sites, and wore knitted jumpers that were often two sizes too big, hand me downs in other words.

[Tilly2]

I never wore hand me downs. I was always dressed nicely. I was an only child.

[emmie]

i was a tomboy so could wear the bruvs jumpers. But as the only girl i was also dressed fairly well. we didn't have a lot of money in those days and had more freedom than children have now.

[EDDIE51]

The pictures are good but they are of a London 'inner city' street that would be called a 'slum' now. I was born in 1951 but lived in a newly built council house 35 miles North of London with our own front and back gardens.

[EDDIE51]

I was the eldest so I never had 'hand me downs' my two brothers had that !

[ExiledinNotts]

I remember the 50's playing hide & seek with lots of us playing. Hopscotch there's a throwback. The main thing I remember as a child was that there was 4 distinct seasons whereas today they all seem to roll into one.

[emmie]

exile
the seasons did seem to be separate, perhaps its a happy memory, not a fact.
biking along the street, off to the local swimming pool, no supervision, even at a young age, couldn't do that now i think.

[Togo]

I was a child all through the 50s and remember well playing out and roaming for miles for 12 hours a day in the summer. I am the oldest of a very large family and always had new clothes when needed. Times were hard but happy in the main. I was 13 in 1961 so was a teenager all through the 60s, now that was special. Our milkman had a black and white horse, and the coal man was darker than Bob Marley. We knew all about diversity. (^_*)

[emmie]

togo, we didn't have any black people in our area, not at least until the 60's. seems all so strange now.

[mikey4444]

This business of "children don't play n the street anymore" seems to persist.

In my area there are plenty of kids playing in the street, and they are out there now, screaming their heads off !

Boys and girls still smoke, otherwise the habit of smoking would have died out years ago.

But its been a long time since I lasts saw kids on a go-cart, made from old pram wheels, thats for sure.

[hereIam]

I was a child of the 50's and we played out for hours perfectly safely with our picnic of jam butties and bottled water. I used to wear dresses with sticky out petticoats as a child and the summers were always hot and we had loads of snow in the winter. Hopscotch was the girls' favourite game and our brothers dressed up as red indians or cowboys. I had long hair and was called 'sally pigtails' by the other girls.

[Tilly2]

My dad worked with black men in the coalmines. They used to rib the black men about not getting all the coal dust off in the showers.

That was early sixties.

[emmie]

i preferred hanging around with my brothers, or male friends, we would play pirates, cowboys and Indians, man from uncle, don't ask.. or knocking dollies out of bed, something that seems to have died out.