Leeds Kids the 1970s

 

Self-styled ‘Luddite photographer” Eric Milese (“relatively recently gone digital – 2011”) named the picture below of kids ‘tobogganing’ down a dry, rocky slope in the northern English city of Leeds in the 1970s “The Cresta Run”. It is not the original Cresta Run, which is a natural ice track in St. Moritz, eastern-Switzerland, used for skeleton-toboggan racing. That one was founded 100 years earlier by British guests holidaying at the town’s Kulm hotel, and only removed the ban on women riding it in 2018.

The Leeds Cresta Run ran from the top of Sugarwell Hill to – if you were lucky to cling on for dear life – the bottom of it. Girls were allowed to take part. It was just one of a number of outdoor pursuits for Leeds kids in the 1970s, which included jumping into the canal, making dens on the street from bricks left over from slum demolition and hurtling down very tall, very thin metal slides onto asphalt decorated in flesh-coloured stains. You know, the kind of things featured in our story 8 Reasons Children of the 1970s Should All Be Dead.