Gunnersbury Park, less than two and half miles (4km) from our house on Croft Gardens, was a favourite place to pop out for some fresh air. To this day the park offers a variety of recreational facilities including boating pond, a putting course, a local musuem, some ruins (a 19th C. folly) - but for me, most importantly, the swings. And not only swings, slides and roundabouts - but climbing frames. My favourite one, left, was built to resemble a tanker truck. You could clamber all over it or pretend to drive it. Here I am demonstrating use of hand-signals - which in the autumn of 1962 were still in common use.
Right: the relevant page from the Highway Code that I would study diligently as a child. At this time, my father drove a Morris Minor 1000, which had semaphore trafficator (lovely archaic term!) masts which would pop out from between the side windows. This system was in use until the early 1960s, and hand-signals were useful in case the trafficator broke.
Left: back to the park and another climbing frame to conquer. Photos by my father, Bohdan Dembinski, who was 39 years old when he took them.This is around the time of my fifth birthday; by now, I'd have been at primary school for a few weeks. There was a similar climbing frame in Oaklands Road Primary School infants' playground, though not as high and with more densely spaced tubes.
2 comments:
Looks like a tanker of circular section. I recall many tankers of that era having oval section tanks which my child's perpective equated with 'Murray Fruits' (if you recall, were a boiled sweet).
Curious how those Murray Fruit-shaped tankers disappeared towards the end of the 60s.
Gunnersbury Park really was the gold standard of parks in our part of Ealing. A Sunday treat for the family would be to catch a bus (E3, I think it was in the early 70s) from Northfields Avenue, opposite the Leighton Road turn off, to Gunnersbury Park. Having the best climbing frames and the longest slides made it a cut above anyway, but I loved the paddle boats on the boating lake, and it also had a cafe where you could get a Sky Ray lolly. I'd say that about half of the times we set out to Gunnersbury Park we never actually got there. The buses were infrequent on a Sunday, and my Dad was not a patient man. If you had to wait longer than about 15 minutes he was as likely as not to call it off, and walk you to Deans Gardens where you'd have to lump it.
When I was at Oaklands Juniors in the early 70s all of the kids were put into 3 houses and they were all named after local parks - Elthorne (house colour blue) - Walpole (Red) and Lammas (green). I was put into Walpole House, but my favourite out of the parks themselves was Elthorne. Mostly this was to do with convenience - I grew up in Elthorne Park Road, although to be fair we were right at the other end of the road from the park. Walpole Park had a lake where you could see fish - little green ones with red fins,, and was right behind the Uxbridge Road. Lammas Park actually backed onto Walpole Park, even though the entrance was on Northfields Avenue,
There were two others which come to mind. There was Deans Gardens. Deans Gardens had the appeal of being entered from the Uxbridge Road, which meant you could blackmail your mother on a shopping trip to West Ealing that you'd be much more likely to behaviour yourself if a visit to Deans Gardens was part of the package. One thing Deans Gardens had going for it was it's proximity to Rossi's ice cream parlour, which we thought was the best there was. One thing it had against it was that it was home to a large colony of foul-smelling alcoholics. Years later when I was studying for my A levels I worked on Saturdays in the Co op near the park, and we often had some of them trying to steal booze just before closing time on a Saturday. Looking back, I'm sure that they each probably had a sad history behind them, but I found it hard to be very sympathetic towards them back in the day.
Boston Manor Park was also a cut above, although in a different way from Gunnersbury. Strictly speaking Boston Manor Park was in Hounslow, not Ealing, but it was still within walking distance, and it was a really nice place. You could see grey squirrels there, and the lake was home to different species of ducks and geese.
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