Do you remember calling for your friends to come out to play? What did you do??

Scottish here and a sandwich was always called a piece. We moved from a tenement to a brand new council house when I was four and I was the lookout for the night Watchman while the bigger boys and girls played in the unfinished buildings. We went as a group to school from the age of five. No parents but there were older children there. We walked alone to brownies in the church hall too. It was a simpler life which I miss very much.

I let my grandson out and about, and probably up to all sorts, but I think it's important to have free time. (For him, although I love it too)

I'm always expecting a knock on the door to say he's been misbehaving, or he's fallen off his bike though.

Our street and the one behind us gave us a gang of about twelve so someone was always able to play out when called for! Great times. Hopscotch chalked on the pavement, lethal roller skates, hula hoops, handstands against the wall, leaning backward to make a ‘crab’ and walk (gosh, weren’t we bendy?) jacks, skipping ropes. Once we met up with some older boys. I was in top juniors and was a bit scared playing ‘split the kipper’ with a penknife!
?

On the bus on Saturdays (on our own, no mum’s) with swimsuits and towels to catch the 94 bus into Chorlton Baths. Such freedom. Can’t imagine young ones nowadays going ‘swimming’ without an adult?

So many children now are ultra-supervised, on their iPads. No one just seems to ‘play out’. It’s either organised club activities, birthday parties or play dates for the littlest.

They call it a piece in Scotland, too.
At least in the part I used to visit.

French skipping and climbing trees! Making telephones with tin cans and string.

I am from the midlands and we used to call a slice of bread (from an uncut loaf) buttered with jam or sometimes cocoa and sugar spread on top A PIECE never a sandwich. In the same way we had different names for various types of bread roll.

I lived in London and remember all the games mentioned above plus two balls (up the wall) dabs, and if I got roped in by my brother, cowboys and Indians - I always volunteered to be the horse! I also had an autograph book - anyone else have one of those?

We used to go to the outdoor swimming pool and stay all day. It must have been freezing cold. We climbed trees and explored building sites and jumped off shed roofs. We built bonfires and struck matches. Our mums didn’t expect to see us all day. We used to take strangers babies in prams for walks.

We knew all the odd people in the neighbourhood and gave them a wide berth though we didn’t know why we should.

Lovely story GrandmaSue .

We used to collect sticklebacks in jam jars. One of the older boys - he must have been about 18 told us that they cooked them by putting them on a pin and holding them in a candle flame. We couldn't wait to try it but were really put out when parents said no!

One of our friends (when we were aged about 6) had a row with her mother, so we decided to hide her and take her food, until she was grown up and then we would surprise her family when she turned up. She hid in a den we had made, while we went home for dinner. We brought her half a tomato and an apple, which she didn't like, so she went home. No one had missed her as it was still early afternoon.

We used to make camps, climb trees, catch tadpoles, and lizards, and adders sometimes!

We put on shows, and made "dinners" out of flowers and leaves, picked blackberries and scrumped apples. (Well, we never did scrumping in case mum found out!)

What lovely memories! As others have said the main change has been the increase in traffic eg no one had a car in our street (or anywhere due to wartime fuel rationing.) and we used it as a roller skating rink.
I grew up on the NE coast and like you sodapop we spent most days at the beach. Although the beach was closed off during the war because of the risk of invasion. As someone else said, it was the almost complete lack of adult supersion that made us so adventurous. We had a "Dare" club.
One strange game we played was secretly tracking 'hockeys' - poor harmless old men who we thought might be spies.
No idea why we called them hockeys.
Came home every evening looking very scruffy.
I tried to give my own children the chance to be adventurous.

We used to call for each other. So did my children, and so do my grandchildren. I don’t think life has changed for children as much as some imply. The biggest change is the increase in traffic, which can be limiting in some places, but it depends where you live. My grandchildren live in central London, but their road is a quiet backwater with no through traffic, and they do play in it..

I think most of us had an unrecognisable childhood by today's standards, wall to wall freedom to roam, as long as you came home sometime. Benign neglect from parents was pretty standard.

I grew up in Surrey, there was a stream leading into a pond just beyond the fence at the bottom of our garden, I was under that fence and playing around it aged about 5. I can't imagine letting my children do that I'd take the view they could fall in and drown, always fearful of mishaps me. My brother would give me lifts on the handlebars of his bike, I didn't get a bike till I was about 10, he got his much younger than that, although I paid the price for riding on his when I came flying off the handlebars and chipped a tooth. Mostly we went to school on our own with another girl who lived close by, school was a good twenty minute walk. I also remember going to and from Brownies at my local church hall on my own from aged 7. Saturday morning cinema was laid on for children which took us out of the house most of the morning. I remember getting 2/6 pocket money on Saturday. We also spent hours at the local swimming pool during the school holidays. As well as roller skating, not the sophisticated in line blades my children had, but the convoluted type that you tied on and could be expanded as feet grew. I remember falling out of a tree in our garden and breaking my arm, the right one of course! so had to write with my left hand while it was in plaster, I was berated for my awful handwriting at school every time I attempted to form spidery lettering with my left hand

In the summer my mum made tents for us in the garden by putting an old sheet on the washing line and pegging it down. My friend and I had a lot of fun playing in and out of the tent with her lovely Old English Sheepdog in tow who we occasionally dressed up in my school uniform complete with beret, he was so good about that

Sundays were all about going to mass in our house and if we were really unlucky Benediction in the afternoon other than that I think our parents gave us a lot of freedom, but that was standard helicopter parenting was years ahead in the dim and distant future.

A magical childhood, we had a not very deep strip of woodland parallel to the back gardens on our side of the cul-de-sac so used to disappear most of the day. Mum and Dad had a special tune they whistled to get us in, I used the same on my children. Dad used to travel abroad and bring back different marbles, great for swaps and those old metal roller skates, many a grazed knee. A ‘slide’ made of a plastic sheet on the grass with a hose on it in summer and a treat if the corona van came round, take the empties, or the ice cream van. I was always called a tomboy as I lived outside. Fortunately my children had a taste of this as we have woodland near, the GC’s less so.

I remember a couple moved into a flat close by and they had a baby. I knocked on their door one day and asked if I could take the baby out for a walk in its pram! Not a problem and I was usually given sweets or whatever for doing it. Imagine the furore nowadays! I was around 9 I would think.

I frequently played with young children I had never clapped eyes on before. It gave their mothers time to themselves even although most had never seen me before. Times have changed.

I had an idyllic childhood in a Wiltshire village. After Tea we would go out into the village street and play with whoever was around, boys and girls together. Our activities were seasonal, sliding on the pond in winter, blackberrying and nutting in autumn, rose petal perfume and snail racing in summer and - collecting birds eggs in spring. ?

We played elastics WW010. It was a favourite with the girls, once we had managed to get 1s 11d out of one of our mums to buy a yard of elastic from the village shop.
If the boys were out with us they would want to play bows and arrows and we’d make them out of branches of trees that grew in a field behind our houses.

Oh yes the rose petal perfume in a jam jar mixed with a stick.

The singing one where we formed a circle and sung The farmer’s in the Den, where the farmer chose a wife a child a nurse and a dog which were called into the circle one by one, finishing with everyone patting the dog.

Yes, WW010 they do still do this.
They may be a bit older before they are given permission to call on friends but my older grandchildren do this a lot it seems.
The younger ones make plenty of dens with sheets etc but mostly in their own gardens now.

French skipping, 2 Ball against the wall of the house. Hide and seek, jacks with a bouncy ball; clapping games in pairs and then more and more

I introduced some in the playground at school when teaching which the children loved

Witzend

I remember it well, but whether they still do I don’t know. Gdcs still too young for such things.

One such ‘calling round’ went down in the annals in our house - my father would still laugh about it years later.

He opened the door one day to a boy of maybe 8 or 9, who asked whether my younger brother could come and play.

Since my father didn’t recognise him, he asked his name.

‘I’m BristleBonce’s bruvver.’ ?
My DF didn’t know BristleBonce either! But since DB clearly knew them both, he went to play with him anyway.

Was BristleBonce and his brother from Bristol then Witzend?
Or was the nickname because of his hair cut???

This is a wonderful thread I remember playing orange and lemons too. I also used to make 'perfume' with my Mother's rose petals. My Mother was obviously not too precious about her roses as I learnt later when I picked the neighbours roses and got into huge trouble!

My dgs 11 and 8 have never gone out to play without parents /us being present.
It’s rather sad because we learned so much and had a lot if fun when out playing with our friends. I played our from 5 and we used to be our fir quite a while, often up in the woods, well out of sight of any adults.

Reading this thread has brought back many happy childhood memories. I would play out in the street or over the park with friends from after breakfast till teatime. One of my favourite games was Jacks. We would spend hours playing. Also loved playing marbles and two balls against the wall.
I had many a grazed knee from roller skating down hills in the park.
Happy days.