Southern Town Park is at the southern edge of Abingdon on a former landfill site beyond the houses. At 9:30am this morning cars were arriving with dads and mums bringing their children to rugby practice at Abingdon RUFC. The car park was getting full, and cars were starting to park in the road.
The play park beyond the Sunny Vale of White Horse District sign was deserted at that hour so I took a few pictures.
There was little more than a couple of broken swings and a makeshift seesaw when we first visited with our children 25 years ago. It felt like a derelict out of season place.
Now there is a colourful fenced off area with little spring rockers, climbing apparatus, swings, and slides.
There is also a more rugged looking adventure play area with a zip chord, big swing, a series of pieces of equipment to climb across in sequence,
and a sand pit with large rocks, tree trunks and several springy circular boards.
There is also a basketball court. The backboards were painted by a brought in grafitti artist, with help from young children, about ten years ago, That original graffitti art has faded and been added to by the more usual graffitti of the area …
‘OX14’ and ‘SAKY’.
…as a fairly new resident if Abingdon, and an even more recent one to the ‘notorious’ Saaaarf Abingdon, I think that most people are about 15 – 20 years behind the curve…as the reputation, that only some die hard Abingdonians seem to have, is totally unwarranted, from what I can see.
The ‘usual’ graffiti referred to above, is, as far as I have noticed, actually quite rare. Certainly no more frequent than elsewhere in the town. The “Saky (baky. Craky)” tw@ts are the same everywhere.
There’s a decent community feel in this part of town, the schools are now equal to or higher Ofsted rated than elsewhere in town (if that’s important to you), and the cost of houses are equally out of the reach of most people.
I just felt the article had a negative slant…and I felt galvanised into addressing that out of date, ill informed reputation from yesteryear. Hold the view if you want, but acknowledge your opinions are a decade or so out of date…
Finally…as a reasonable connoisseur of parks having spent many hours playing with my kids at all the .playparks in town…Southern Town park is one of the best.
I fail to see a negative slant in this article – in fact, other than a small comment about graffiti, it seemed to me to praise the improvement in the facilities in the play park in contrast to Backstreeter’s first visit 25 years ago. Might I suggest that Daniel reads the article again but this time more carefully?
Good suggestion Mike, and I agree that there is a positivity at the start….but the reinforcing of a negative stereotypes towards the end will only reassure those behind the curve that yesteryears reputation still exists. I don’t think it does. But others do.
But you are right, it is a positive article, I guess.
Doesn’t matter I suppose. I enjoy leaving here,.
The Saaki refers to the Saaki gang who used to graffiti all over South Abingdon. Even did a swastika on Reg’s shop front Young children used to go around with spray cans and I found one spraying graffiti on our garage door. It made the neighbourhood look run down.
….*living here. Not ‘leaving’ here ….
Glad you’re staying, Daniel 😉
Methinks Daniel doth protest too much….maybe HE is the phantom paint sprayer…. :o)
The park is great for wildlife and birds-considering its small size- with plenty of thorny trees to give them shelter.