Children enjoyed life in a playground they largely created themselves.
The site was at Slade Park, Headington, where dozens of families had lived in wooden huts in the post-war period.
When they moved out, there was plenty of room to establish a play area and plenty of wood to equip it.
Children lost no time gathering beams from the old huts and building all sorts of structures, some of which looked decidedly rickety.
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It appears the playground project got off the ground in 1970, thanks to Oxford City Council’s children’s department after pressure from parents in a nearby homeless families’ unit.
Wayne Storey, 24, who was studying play leadership at a college in Essex, was put in charge of the work.
He said: “The aim is to provide a place where children can play safely, using their imaginations with scrap materials to construct things.”
Many of the volunteers who helped were students from the Continent, sent by International Voluntary Service.
When the Oxford Mail visited the site, children were pictured collecting bits of wood from the old huts to add to the challenges on the playground. One man who was particularly pleased to see work start was Ted Wheelock, one of half a dozen volunteers who helped from the nearby St Francis Church.
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He said: “I’m heartily pleased. I ran a boys’ club here for 10 years which failed through lack of money – now this playground is doing something useful. It is 20 years overdue.”
As we have recalled, Slade Park was a former Army camp which provided much-needed housing for dozens of families in the post-war period after the Army moved out. Residents who moved in have written to Memory Lane over the years with their memories of living there.
Patrick Cummins, of Cumberland Road, East Oxford, who was in Ninth Avenue with his family for 15 years, said: “I loved it.”
But Robert Brechin, who moved to the site with his family in November 1948 before they transferred to the new Northway estate three years later, described conditions as “terrible”.
He said: “The Army was still trying to make the huts habitable. Our hut was a single room with no water and one light. It was 80ft long with just one stove against an end wall. It did not heat the room very well.”
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Another former resident, Ian Roberts, now living in Italy, recalled that the site was originally a prisoner of war camp for Italian soldiers.
He wrote: “Apparently, there were still exquisite artistic reminders of their stay when the first tenants moved in.”
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