I’ve saved myself a lot of time by having written about this 6 years ago on Flickr - I’ve been remembering things for a long time! Here’s what I wrote back then…
In my childhood, climbing frames like this were everywhere. They were a British byproduct of the space race and based on space capsules. What’s not obvious on the photo is that there were always a couple of plastic seats inside, pointing up towards the opening - there’s a kid sat in the back one (but too chicken to sit back in it).
Back in the late 70s and early 80s the shape and design were lost on me; by the time I realised that we were playing in an unrealised dream of living on the moon, it was too late.
They were in hundreds of playgrounds and parks, but these days they’ve all been replaced by climbing frames less likely to cause death. Note that this is on a concrete floor, another thing I remember being a staple of playgrounds, and you can guarantee that on a Sunday morning the floor underneath this would be covered in broken cider bottles that the big kids had been drinking the night before. Just looking at this photo I can feel the texture of the frame and the (probably lead-laden) paint flaking off the patches of rust, and can smell the smell of the metal on my hands. I seem to remember one like this with a slide along the centre as well.
This photo is from here: www.search.windowsonwarwickshire.org.uk/engine/resource/d… and copyright lies with them. I’ve included it here because, upsettingly, it’s the only photo of a space capsule climbing frame I can find on the whole internet.
I miss climbing frames. The ones of my (American) youth were not quite as dangerous-looking as this, and not on concrete. Nevertheless, by the time I aged off the playground in the late 90s, they were all being removed.
Oh I remember these. That conical form didn’t really remind me of Apollo because when our elementary school upgraded its climbing frames and swings
(previously they’d had like a geodesic half-dome and a linear monkey bar arch over grass, and a big multi-function climbing gymnastic frame of bare iron over blacktop that’d later been buffered with first-generation rubber jigsaw pads, my friend still broke an arm off it)
to a big woodchip section, they still had one of those cone-w/cylinder stub top shapes but bigger, way too big to mirror capsules if we’d even had a sense of them in 1991, with a fire pole in the middle
(are they still pitched as kid-appeal thing about firefighters? how would a Paw Patrol dog even use one?)
So I just associated the shape with playgrounds as such
Also at Burpee Park (after the seed magnate) in my hometown, which the Catholic school used as a playground there was a climbing cafe with a much narrower laypout and almost art deco curves, I liked to stand inside at one end and pretend I was in a theatre box office vending tickets but no one played along and came to buy them
