The Past is a Misty Place

Spending an afternoon in a misty Dundee I visited the site of my old primary school. I say site, as the school buildings were demolished last year. In the short term it is set to be a car park, although there are apparently unspecified 'longer-term plans'. Is that code for 'sitting on the land until it becomes more valuable for housing'? Anyway, the school gate and railings along Park Place survive, as does the gently sloping playground that used to go down from the street to the school buildings. Although it was Park Place Primary School when it closed in 2012, when I was there it was the Demonstration School, attached to the adjacent College of Education. As result we had a plentiful supply of trainee teachers, especially for PE that was often next door in the College rather than in our school gym, either in the old wooden gym in the heart of the old building or the white walled modern gym hall that towered above the lower playground where the P6 and P7s always played football. Whether it was part of the college connection or not we also seemed to get a number of new teaching methods, like ITA - the Initial Teaching Alphabet - although that may have just been standard across Dundee's primary schools at the time. I know other schools did the SRA exercises the same as us. Apparently the school I went to was only built in 1966 so it was still very new when I started there. So the buildings lasted just fifty years.