Chapter 2 Competing playground visions: ‘a distinctly civilizing influence that gives much health and happiness’

‘Properly equipped playgrounds’ in the early twentieth century

At the turn of the century, advocates of the transatlantic playground felt that providing apparatus for entertainment was the least important element in a playground. In the USA, Henry Curtis argued that ‘the thing of first importance is organization; next in importance is equipment for games; next comes provision for athletics; and last such apparatus as swings and slide’.¹ In contrast, British commentators increasingly imagined the playground as a space where equipment was a central feature. The pioneering garden historian Alicia Amherst argued in 1907 that a fully equipped public park needed to include not just high-quality horticulture but also swings and other gymnastic equipment for children.² For the author and journalist Annesley Kenealy, also writing in 1907, the ‘pitilessly meagre surroundings’ of the gravelled children’s playground in St James’s Park did little to save children from the ‘unwholesome sights and sounds of a sordid, huckstering, fetid slum street’. Instead, a properly equipped playground was needed in every park, including amenities such as seating, a water fountain, sandpit, low swings, see-saws, horizontal bars and a giant stride.³ In 1909, an anonymous letter writer to The Times concurred, suggesting that the nearby Kensington Gardens needed at least another dozen swings and a shallow pond for paddling, plus an end to Sunday closing of playgrounds more generally.⁴

This emphasis on the park-based playground was a result of the continuing anxiety about the health of working-class children, the perceived problems of the urban environment and an enduring faith in the curative potential of urban green space. Medical ideas about the cause of disease had been shifting since the late nineteenth century, moving away from a belief in the role of miasma or bad air as the main vector for ill health, towards germ theory where specific organisms caused disease. At the same time, the power of the public park to provide metaphorical lungs for the city and fresh air for its inhabitants remained powerful. These sociomedical beliefs were given material expression in the development of open-air schools, often in or near parks, and the restorative potential of open-air treatments for illnesses including rickets and tuberculosis. In London, experiments in open-air education had started in 1907 adjacent to Horniman Park, while in Nottingham, open-air schools were built in several public parks where sunlight and fresh air would improve the health of the children attending.⁵ At Cropwood School in the West Midlands, open-air classrooms, a sleep garden, outdoor swimming pool and playing lawn all facilitated the combination of clean air, playful exercise and enforced rest needed to treat illness and restore pupils’ physical and moral health.⁶ Beyond this belief in the power of fresh air to treat specific diseases, exposure to sunlight and outdoor recreation were also positioned as healthy activities more generally. For instance, park-based lidos provided the wider population with opportunities for outdoor swimming and exposure to the sun, and they were built in increasing numbers by municipal authorities.⁷

Within this wider social and cultural context, a belief in the benefits of open-air physical exercise remained a powerful and widespread justification for playground provision. For the youth worker Charles Russell, speaking at a meeting of the Manchester and Salford Playing Fields Society, dedicated space for children was vital to ‘check the degeneration which any overcrowded area in the kingdom could show’.⁸ The Liberal politician and author Charles Masterman may have disagreed with the imperial politics of Brabazon and the MPGA, but he also emphasised the problematic association between the unhealthy environment and urban childhood. The twice-breathed air and disconnect from nature resulted in ‘the production of a characteristic physical type of town dweller: stunted, narrow chested, easily wearied; yet voluble, excitable, with little ballast, stamina or endurance’.⁹ An appropriately sited playground could help to tackle many of these physical and moral issues.

In practice, inserting dedicated open-air spaces for children into the urban environment was far from straightforward and advocates needed to negotiate a route through competing expectations of public space that were shaped by notions of age, class and gender. The way that park administrators responded to these calls for playground improvements provides an insight into the factors that informed the way that spaces changed on the ground. In 1909 and in response to newspaper articles, Kensington Gardens’ administrators attempted to provide facilities and shape regulations that balanced the needs and expectations of a wide variety of groups. In establishing Sunday opening times, officials needed to find a balance between public pressure and the views of influential religious groups. In assessing the need for more paddling pools, they set out to find a balance between providing an appropriately equipped place for children to play, and the risk that they would be ‘continually receiving complaints from irate parents’ when children fell into the water. The provision of a new sandpit would put a strain on finances, but parks staff demonstrated their willingness to use the media to their advantage, suggesting that an anonymous letter to newspapers might solicit a private donor to pay for new facilities. They had much less trouble in fixing gender- and age-related boundaries; park keepers were warned to ‘prevent grown women using the present swings’.¹⁰

But just as calls were being made to improve playgrounds by adding appropriate equipment and facilities, the principle of providing space for outdoor, energetic exercise was being questioned. By 1909, the Primrose Hill gymnasium (visited in the previous chapter) was seen as improperly equipped and acted as a focus for debates about what was considered to be legitimate use of equipped public space. The gymnasium caused practical and moral problems for park managers, who had to navigate a path between the differing expectations of wealthy neighbours and the gymnasts that used it. Its drinking fountain was ‘a source of constant annoyance’ as children splashed passersby. On another occasion, the entire gymnasium was closed at the urgent request of the police, as a result of unseemly language, rowdyism, and the misuse of the space as ‘a training ground for prostitutes’. While a subsequent petition called for the gymnasium to be re-opened, petitioners also complained that a proper gymnasium should be indoors and accompanied by changing facilities and appropriate instruction.¹¹

Such anxieties over the appropriate use of public space, and wider concern about the health of the population, were exacerbated by the First World War and its impact on the home front. Large numbers of working-class conscripts were exempted from military service as a result of physical unfitness, with over a million rejected on medical grounds in the last year of the war.¹² Furthermore, absent fathers, children working in munitions factories far from home and even the cinema were blamed for a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency.¹³ The perceived contribution of such misbehaviour to a shell shortage in 1915 prompted the government to establish Juvenile Organisations Committees who would channel the work of existing philanthropic and voluntary organisations towards the wartime military objectives of the state. Although primarily established to structure the leisure time of adolescents and young adults, the committees symbolised the beginnings of a shift towards promoting welfare, rather than criminalising young people.¹⁴ For Lord Lytton, chair of the State Children’s Association, a system of ‘reclamation through friendship’ rather than resorting to the courts was the solution to the problems of youth.¹⁵

The provision of playgrounds for younger children seems to have proceeded in this vein too, as play provision became associated with the broader welfare of children and their families. During the war, the philanthropic Carnegie UK Trust appointed the noted physician and medical officer Janet Campbell to undertake a comprehensive investigation into the health and wellbeing of mothers and young children.¹⁶ Campbell’s influential report, published in 1917, examined in detail the provision of midwifery services, nurseries and play schemes, as well as the playgrounds’ role in improving the welfare of children and their parents. Echoing Masterman’s view from fifteen years earlier, Campbell argued that the lack of suitable play opportunities contributed to defective child development. In contrast, the provision of appropriate play spaces and activities would ensure the proper physical and mental development of children and prevent juvenile delinquency by providing an alternative to the street for children’s recreation.¹⁷ A similar study in Scotland by the noted public health administrator Leslie Mackenzie found that time on the playground seemed to have direct medical benefits too. For one medical observer who contributed to the study, playgrounds helped to tackle runny noses and improved children’s nutrition, in addition to the more commonly ascribed physical benefits of open-air exercise and toning muscles. The Scottish study in particular noted the importance of providing both better working-class housing and better places to play, concluding that ‘the toddler’s playground is fundamentally essential to the health of the children that occupy the crowded quarters of every city. The open-air playground is the counteractive to the poisonous house.’¹⁸ Dedicated outdoor space would help to create healthier children and a more salubrious urban environment.

The notion that leisure time should be spent constructively, as park advocates had imagined in the nineteenth century, had not been superseded entirely. The 1919 National Conference on the Leisure of the People demonstrated increasing concern with the ‘possibilities for good or evil’ associated with increasing time for rest among the working-class: ‘if rightly used it will be in these hours the growing boy or girl will receive that wider education which is going to build character, make him an intelligent workman and a useful citizen’.¹⁹ At the same time, technology, commerce and democratisation also meant that leisure could be idly rather than constructively spent.²⁰ However, using these processes as a way of understanding the changing nature of children’s playgrounds is not straightforward. Leisure was largely constructed in opposition to work, and as social constructions of childhood no longer included work this meant that ideas about new forms of leisure were invariably adult-centric. Democratisation implies that people had an increased say in how and where they participated in leisure activities, but neither the principle of the playground nor the way that it was designed meant that this was the case for children. There is no evidence to suggest that children were given a say in where play spaces were located or how they were designed, nor whether they were the spaces where children preferred to play. While it is difficult to see playgrounds as spaces of democratisation for children, they were nonetheless affected by processes of commercialisation, although in different ways to other aspects of postwar leisure provision.

The historian Peter Borsay has concluded that there have been commercial aspects to leisure since early modern times, but that more recent commercialisation has been associated with increased demand driven by rising disposable incomes.²¹ This assumes that individual participants are directly purchasing leisure opportunities. In the case of a seemingly non-commercial space such as a playground, demand has been driven by social and cultural factors, while supply has been driven by commercial ones. The economic wealth of potential playground users did not create demand for playgrounds; from a commercialisation of leisure perspective, playgrounds are unusual in that they have been free to visitors at the point of use. Instead, demand for playgrounds was the result of evolving social ideas about childhood and public space and the associated targeting of philanthropic and municipal funding. Urban municipalities, for example, increased spending on parks and open spaces from £11,830 (£93) per thousand of population in 1920 to £25,270 (£131) by 1929.²² Commercialisation in this case was mediated through philanthropists, park superintendents and municipal administrators who purchased and created leisure spaces for children. As in other aspects of leisure provision, the creation of play spaces and the supply of appropriate apparatus had been shaped by technology, entrepreneurialism and professionalisation. For playgrounds in particular, a diverse range of manufacturing companies, including gymnastic outfitters, fencing companies and engineers, were entrepreneurial in applying and adapting their existing technologies and production lines to meet the requirements of an increasingly organised and specialised parks profession.

The historian Thomas Richards has argued that the increased availability of manufactured goods in the nineteenth century, along with new forms of marketing, fostered a national culture of consumerism.²³ While this saw a significant expansion in the use of retail catalogues to sell goods to the public, including plants and other gardening equipment, it was commercial catalogues that shaped the creation of playground spaces in the early twentieth century. Historian Claire Jones has shown how commercial catalogues helped to shape both knowledge and practice among medical professionals, mediating between the seemingly incompatible spheres of commerce and professionalism.²⁴ Although play equipment catalogues, and their professional and commercial context, were very different to medical ones, manufacturers and their marketing materials nonetheless made a significant contribution to the evolution of the playground ideal and shaped professional approaches to the design and creation of dedicated spaces for children’s leisure.

In 1923, a member of the public, Hubert Seligman, took the unusual step of writing to the royal parks, offering to purchase see-saws for installation in St James’s Park.²⁵ Seligman was from an Anglo-American merchant banking family with a commitment to philanthropic activity and lived close to Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.²⁶ In response, park administrators sought prices for see-saws from a number of manufacturers and received quotes and catalogues in reply. Seligman bought two see-saws, at a cost of £5,233 (£24 5s), and would go on to regularly offer specific items of play equipment for different London parks over the next ten years. This was an unusual example and playground provision was rarely driven by direct requests such as this, but the story does provide a useful insight into the processes, people and objects involved in the production of playground spaces in the early twentieth century.

Approaching commercial suppliers suggests that park superintendents could not call on inhouse skills or experiences to design and build their own gymnastic or playground apparatus. While the creation of new horticultural schemes each year meant that a plant nursery and the associated staff were a worthwhile investment, the infrequent need for new playground equipment meant there was little value in investing in inhouse manufacturing technology or infrastructure. With their professional background in horticulture, landscape design or public administration, park superintendents perhaps felt they lacked an understanding of the needs of children, let alone an awareness of contemporary educational or theoretical thinking about childhood and play.

In response, manufacturing companies attempted to present their catalogues as informative and educational documents, a source of expertise on children’s playgrounds. Spencer, Heath and George of London promoted the fact that they could send an ‘expert representative, free of charge’ to view a potential play space and would prepare a specific playground scheme for customers. The implication was that they knew what a playground should be, what children needed and also that their version of the playground was the norm. By using the adjective regulation when asserting that they supplied ‘regulation playground outfits’, they were presumably attempting to show that their products met with long-established ideas about the playground (Figure 2.1). Their catalogue included images of their apparatus installed in Newtongrange Public Park in Midlothian and listed the LCC parks where their products had been installed. In a similar way, the catalogue supplied by Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss of Wolverhampton included photos of their equipment in a City of Birmingham open space, as well as a list of apparatus that would create an ideal playground (Figure 2.2). By including images of their equipment in existing open spaces, both companies were attempting to legitimise and extend their particular version of the children’s playground.²⁷

The production of playground equipment seems to have been a by-product for these companies. Manufacturers drew upon their existing technological knowledge, adapting existing products and production lines to take advantage of the new business opportunities. Their playground creations seem to have been reconfigured versions of their other products, making use of familiar materials and manufacturing processes. Spencer, Heath and George described themselves as gymnastic outfitters and manufacturers of calisthenic gear, gymnasium buildings and boxing rings. While creating versions of their products for outdoor use was likely to be a logical and relatively straightforward step, it was also something that to an extent they made up as they went along; responding to a letter from the Regent’s Park superintendent in 1924, they were unable to provide a drawing or photo of their see-saw and instead sent a roughly drawn, free-hand sketch with somewhat clumsy annotations.²⁸

In a later, more professional-looking catalogue, Spencer, Heath and George also emphasised the technological superiority of their products – their plank swing included ‘self-aligning roller bearing fitments’ which meant they felt able to claim it was ‘mechanically perfect’.²⁹ Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss’s catalogue, Gymnasia for Parks and Recreation Grounds, clearly showed where the focus on their manufacturing business lay – nearly half of their catalogue is dedicated to the variety of fencing, guard rail and entrance gates they produced, while their sketch of the ideal playground includes significant lengths of fencing on all sides.³⁰ Even individual items of equipment appear to make use of the materials and forms of fencing components.

When manufacturers claimed to have ‘expert representatives’ it seems most likely that they were experts in the products that the companies sold, rather than anything else. Although this expertise was unlikely to be grounded in the emerging professional and academic ideas about child development of the time, it was able to deliver a particular version of the playground with its roots in contemporary attitudes towards age, gender and exercise. Fencing manufacturers could provide products to enclose dedicated spaces for children to play. Gymnastic outfitters could provide apparatus that could direct children to take part in particular forms of physical exercise that would have beneficial consequences for both individuals and society.

As well as building on manufacturers’ existing technological knowledge, the catalogues also emphasised the benefits that their products could offer to their customers (although rarely the benefits they might offer to children). As a result, they provide an insight into manufacturers’ perceptions of park superintendents’ concerns, values and assumptions, as well as wider social values about children and their use of public space. As well as emphasising the technological innovation of products, play equipment catalogues consistently played upon three key narratives – firstly, the risk of deliberate damage by children to the playground; secondly, the need for playgrounds to be safe for the children using them; and thirdly, the segregation of play spaces by age and gender.

The perceived threat of hooliganism and the associated nuisance, danger and moral consequences reflected an anxious mood in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.³¹ Equipment manufacturers were able to play on this anxiety when advertising their products. Catalogues presented a sanitised and choreographed version of children’s play, where text and images emphasised the robustness of equipment in the face of potential damage, as well as the beneficial effects of a properly equipped playground in maintaining order and respectable behaviour. The strength and durability of apparatus was emphasised, and in some cases explicitly guaranteed as hooligan-proof, while tree guards, strong seats and unclimbable railings would limit the opportunities for children to damage other features. The photos in Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss’s catalogue show clean, respectably dressed children, posing on stationary equipment or awaiting their turn in an orderly queue. A policeman is present in the background of all wider photos of the playground, providing added reassurance to potential customers that a Bayliss-equipped playground would be an orderly place, but also hinting at the disorder that was possible.³²

A second, interrelated rhetoric employed by manufacturers emphasised safety, primarily in relation to the way that children used playground equipment. For example, the term see-saw seems to have been applied to a physical structure, rather than just the associated up-and-down motion, as early as the 1820s.³³ By the late nineteenth century, there was increasing anxiety that the sudden bump of a see-saw onto the ground could hurt not only children’s feet but also damage their spines, leading several commentators to describe them as one of the most dangerous and accident-prone items on the playground.³⁴ This focus on the risk of spinal injury in particular echoed evolving ideas about the spine as a conduit for physical and mental health. In particular, the increasing number of people suffering from a condition known as railway spine, which saw some passengers involved in railway accidents suffering no physical injuries but subsequently developing debilitating nervous shock, and the high-profile coverage of associated court cases perhaps made spinal injuries particularly worrisome.³⁵ Whether the manufacturers’ emphasis on safety was born of anxiety for children’s physical and mental health or as a result of the financial compensation paid by the railway companies to injured passengers is not clear, but they did stress the safety of their equipment nonetheless. Each company emphasised the adaptations to their products that would help to ensure children’s wellbeing, from air cylinders that dampened see-saw impacts to safety tails on slides that prevented a sudden fall to the ground at the bottom. Despite manufacturers’ claims, park superintendents had to purchase and install equipment in playgrounds before they could assess for themselves its safety in use. For example, royal parks staff annotated Spencer, Heath and George’s promotional drawings, noting that both their version of the see-saw and the giant stride were still ‘found to be dangerous in practice’.³⁶

It was not only equipment that posed a risk to children in the playground; the inappropriate behaviour of adults was an issue that manufacturers also sought to address. In 1913, the Metropolitan Radical Federation highlighted the ‘frequent indecent offences towards children’ in the parks of London and called for more park keepers who could detect and prevent such offences.³⁷ A year later, the LCC education committee also emphasised ‘the evils which appear to arise owing to the lack of adequate supervision’.³⁸ Royal parks administrators empathised with the malevolence of the offences, but felt that the relatively small number of reported incidents – on average nine per year across all the royal parks in London – meant that they could not justify increasing the number of plain clothes staff on duty to detect such offences, and in any case doubted the effectiveness of such an action.³⁹ Commercial playground manufacturers attempted to provide a solution to the problem by supplying gates and fencing that could exclude undesirable adults from the playground, although the efficacy of such an approach was likely to be questionable.

In addition to attempts to separate children and adults, there were also efforts to segregate girls and boys when using the playground. Elizabeth Gagen has shown how early twentieth-century play spaces helped to reproduce conservative gender politics in the USA, a process that can be seen in the actions of both park authorities and equipment manufacturers in Britain too.⁴⁰ In 1904, the LCC provided separate gymnasiums for girls and boys in thirteen of the open spaces it managed, including Spa Fields and Meath Gardens, while Victoria Park, Battersea Park and a further eight green spaces included gymnasiums for exclusive use by girls.⁴¹ This physical segregation of play spaces was something that manufacturers were easily able to support. For example, Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss could provide fencing to divide playgrounds for boys and girls, while a number of catalogues also included gender-specific products. However, closer inspection shows marginal differences between such items. Bayliss’s swings for girls were thirteen feet high, cost £13,120 (£31 7s 6d), included seats and had a sign on top which said For Girls Only. Swings for boys were the same height, cost the same and also included seats. The main differences were that swings for boys could also be fitted with trapeze bars and rings and the sign on top which said For Boys Only. Similarly, Bayliss’s list of equipment for the ideal playground for girls was remarkably similar to that for boys, with the exception that a boys’ playground needed one of everything from the catalogue, at a cost of £45,540 (£108 17s 6d), while in an ideal girls’ playground the vaulting horse was replaced by three see-saws. Just in case the swing signage or loitering police officer proved ineffective, Bayliss were also able to supply 5-foot-high ‘wrought iron unclimbable railings’ for £139 (6s 8d) per yard to keep children apart.⁴² Just surrounding the swings, let alone the whole playground space, would add half again on top of the cost of the equipment; the perceived need to segregate girls and boys at play had direct economic, as well as political and personal consequences.

While early playground equipment manufacturers may have echoed wider social attitudes relating to the use of public space, they also seem to have been inspired, in part at least, by other types of amenity landscape which emphasised enjoyment and delight and incorporated technological innovation. As early as 1835, the noted garden designer John Claudius Loudon described in his Encyclopaedia of Gardening a number of European aristocratic estates that included temporary or permanent swings and roundabouts.⁴³ The great exhibitions and world fairs of the nineteenth century, while ostensibly educational, were often more commonly experienced by visitors as spaces of entertainment.⁴⁴ There had also long been an association between green space and commercial leisure provision, most notably in the eighteenth-century pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall.⁴⁵ However, the spectacular performances, nocturnal illuminations, notorious immorality, entry fees and most significantly the prohibition of children suggest significant differences between such spaces and the emerging children’s playground.⁴⁶

In contrast, there were more direct connections between the Edwardian amusement park landscape and the form of dedicated spaces for children. Alongside circus acts and novelties, swings were a regular feature of travelling and seasonal fairs and, as we saw in the previous chapter, privately operated fairground-style swings were located for a time in London’s Victoria Park.⁴⁷ Merry-go-rounds also seem to have been a regular feature of travelling fairs, in Turkey from the seventeenth century and in Britain from the eighteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century they were often steam powered and elaborately decorated.⁴⁸ But it would be the amusement park, rather than the public park, where such temporary fixtures would become permanent installations, inspired by a transatlantic exchange of ideas.⁴⁹

In the early twentieth century, P.G. Wodehouse associated the uncertain profits of the travelling showman with the motion of his fairground rides, so that any income lost on the swings might be made up on the roundabouts.⁵⁰ In doing so, Wodehouse also inadvertently connected the fluctuating fortunes of the playground ideal and circuitous themes in play space discourse with structures that would soon come to symbolise its presence in public space. The architectural historian Josephine Kane has described how an assortment of rides at Blackpool South Shore became an American-style amusement park in 1903 and prompted a surge of schemes elsewhere, particularly in seaside resorts such as Margate, Southend and Great Yarmouth. The characteristic combination of noise, bright colours and frenetic movement, plus modern architecture and technologically produced sensations, made the early twentieth-century amusement park landscape a unique whirl of wonders.⁵¹ And while such spaces legitimised childlike behaviour by adults, they also influenced the form of playground spaces too. The idealised bucolic city park was not transformed into the whirling landscape of the amusement park, but the technological innovation and sense of freedom that characterised the latter were influential in shaping a particular approach to play provision. As the next section shows, individual rides would be scaled down, simplified and introduced into the park playground, as would more accommodating attitudes towards the behaviour of both children and adults. One play equipment manufacturer in particular was at the forefront of these changing attitudes to public spaces for children and from the 1920s onwards promoted a particular vision for the children’s playground that was at odds with earlier attempts at regulation and segregation.

Charles Wicksteed, philanthropy and commerce

Following Mr Seligman’s offer to purchase a see-saw for St James’s Park in 1923, one other manufacturer responded to the royal parks’ request to supply information. Charles Wicksteed & Co., an engineering firm based in Kettering, sent a covering letter with information about the see-saw they could supply, along with a rudimentary catalogue. Like the other catalogues submitted, it included images of apparatus, prices and descriptions. In contrast, it also included a two-page preface, where Charles Wicksteed set out his personal vision for the ideal children’s playground. He stated that his vision was based on his own experiences of creating and managing a public park and playground in Kettering. While this could be seen as – and perhaps was to some extent – a refined sales pitch, it is useful to understand his motives and the impact they had on the playground ideal because elements of this vision soon spread across the UK and around the world.

The commercialisation of leisure has been well documented, but much less has been done to explore the role of voluntary action in interwar leisure provision.⁵² Although often associated primarily with nineteenth-century public parks, philanthropic involvement in the creation of civic green spaces remained important in the interwar period. For example, chocolatier Joseph Rowntree gifted a riverside park to the city of York in 1921 and as we have already seen Mr Seligman was donating individual playground structures throughout the 1920s.⁵³ The ideas and actions of Charles Wicksteed provide a noteworthy case study because they combine the processes of commercialisation and philanthropy within the public park. The creation of Wicksteed Park and its playground were characteristic of the voluntary action that sought to foster good citizenship through leisure, but at the same time the manufacture and sale of play equipment by Wicksteed & Co. was a commercial venture. Making sense of the philanthropic motives and political assumptions that underpinned Wicksteed’s actions, as well as the role of his manufacturing company, helps to shed light on the processes involved in shaping popular and professional notions of what constituted an appropriate play space for children in the interwar years and beyond.

Charles Wicksteed (1847–1931) was not a landscape designer, pedagogue or public health campaigner. He spent much of his life running his own businesses: initially steam ploughing in Suffolk and then a manufacturing company in Kettering. He married in 1877 and appears to have been a devoted parent to his three children. He was active in the Kettering and Northamptonshire Liberal Party, but even his daughter Hilda, who penned an otherwise ardent and diplomatic biography, felt that ‘his service on local bodies was not outstandingly successful’.⁵⁴ This was perhaps epitomised by his endorsement of unsuccessful attempts to create a Royal Jubilee People’s Park in Kettering in the 1880s.⁵⁵

The success of Wicksteed’s manufacturing business fluctuated in line with wider economic circumstances, as well as the success or otherwise of his products and inventions. His Stamford Road Works in Kettering was established in 1876 and manufactured a variety of goods at different times, from machine-tools and bicycles to motorcar gearboxes.⁵⁶ A small shed at the Works that had been making ‘strong and endurable’ wooden children’s toys was converted to munitions production during the First World War.⁵⁷ On the back of a period of business success in the early 1900s, Wicksteed sought to purchase some land on the edge of Kettering. In January 1914, he completed the purchase of the country estate that had previously been associated with Barton Seagrave Hall. As the public park and playground that he subsequently created have been the most obvious and accessible features since then, it is perhaps unsurprising that both contemporary and historical accounts have tended to focus on examining his motivations for creating a public open space.⁵⁸ But it seems likely that the creation of a park was, at least initially, only a small part of a wider scheme.

There was much local speculation about Wicksteed’s motives for purchasing the Barton Seagrave land, with opinions split over whether he was being foolish, eccentric or calculating.⁵⁹ Charitable donations had long provided a form of tax relief and putting the Barton Seagrave land into the charitable Wicksteed Village Trust would have avoided payment of income tax on the money involved, particularly at a time of significant wartime tax increases.⁶⁰ However, his religious and political values, as well as familial experiences seem to have been important motivating factors too. He had a powerful sense of moral responsibility, inspired in part by his Unitarian religious beliefs. In his book Bygone Days and Now: A Plea for Co-Operation between Labour, Brains and Capital, Wicksteed expressed the view that ‘the whole edifice of modern civilization would fall to the ground without a foundation of sound moral principle … all scientific inventions may come to nought, or even bring about evil, without moral guidance and inspiration’.⁶¹ As a long-time radical Liberal, he firmly believed in capitalism, but also felt that the freedom of a laissez-faire economy and the technology it generated needed to be underpinned by rigorous moral standards. He had secured reasonable financial resources through his business and had a keen sense of obligation to those less fortunate, something common to many philanthropists who had created rather than inherited their wealth. In addition, seeing his own children benefit from access to more open space may partly have motivated him too. He felt that his second son in particular benefitted significantly when they moved to a house with a garden for the first time and as a result had much more space to run about.⁶²

Not long after the land purchase, Wicksteed commissioned John Gotch, prominent architect and fellow Kettering Liberal Club member, to prepare a plan for the site.⁶³ The design was completed by June 1914 and showed a number of new roads, paths and, at the centre of the scheme, The Park. It included playing grounds for cricket, football and hockey, tennis courts, a large lake, tea pavilion and sunken garden. The plan set aside space for nurturing plants in hothouses, but at this stage there were no dedicated places to specifically cultivate children’s health and wellbeing. Work soon started on the creation of the park and the clearance of existing landscape features. A copse of trees was felled and ‘over 3,000 roots and stumps of one sort and another were uprooted by the aid of steam engines and dynamite’.⁶⁴ As was typical of the time, the playing grounds were created by levelling the landscape.

The plan that Gotch prepared for Wicksteed also included 150 building plots which bordered the park on three sides. At first glance, this plan could be seen as a direct descendant of nineteenth-century urban park projects, where property development and the establishment of green space went hand in hand. In the 1820s, John Nash had set out to create an appropriately salubrious and green environment for the wealthy residents of the large villas and terraces that were an integral part of the Regent’s Park scheme in west London. Twenty years later, James Pennethorne had hoped to replicate this approach further east at Victoria Park, using income from the sale of large houses on the park boundary to offset the cost of creating a public green space. The title of Gotch’s drawing provides a more salient clue as to the underlying assumptions and values that were to shape the estate for the next twenty years; Wicksteed was setting out to create the Barton Seagrave Garden Suburb Estate.⁶⁵

In the 1880s, Wicksteed had been inspired by the influential American economist Henry George and his book Progress and Poverty (1879). As a result, he became an active campaigner on the issue of land nationalisation and explored ways to make the economic benefits of land ownership more socially equitable. Wicksteed was a prominent member of the Land Nationalisation Society (LNS, 1882) and in 1885 had written The Land for the People, a detailed assessment and promotion of the economic measures necessary to make land nationalisation financially, and therefore politically, viable.⁶⁶ In 1892 he followed this with Our Mother Earth, a more mainstream appeal for land nationalisation, which apparently achieved a circulation of 100,000.⁶⁷ By the late 1890s, there were close links between the LNS and the fledgling Garden Cities Association (1899) which had been formed around a core of LNS members and made use of its office space and staff. Ebenezer Howard had established the Association as a way to bring about radical social reform, but the involvement of influential philanthropists such as George Cadbury and William Lever meant that it soon focused more narrowly on ameliorating the living conditions of the working poor by improving their housing. Despite Howard’s view that garden suburbs were antithetical to garden city ideals, the Garden City Association increasingly embraced green suburbs and town planning more generally.⁶⁸ Similarly, Wicksteed engaged with emerging ideas about town planning and was one of the opening speakers, along with noted planner Patrick Abercrombie, at the 1918 Leeds Civic Society House and Town Planning Exhibition, although the archives do not reveal the content of his address.⁶⁹

There were a number of similarities between Howard and Wicksteed. Both were from nonconformist backgrounds, opposed contemporary military conflicts and were radical Liberals for much of their lives. Howard had been able to put his garden city ideals into practice in 1903 at Letchworth and purchasing the Barton Seagrave estate gave Wicksteed an opportunity to do something similar. It is possible that Wicksteed visited Letchworth as he travelled extensively to visit business customers and other open spaces around the country. More compellingly, Joseph Hartley Wicksteed, Charles’s nephew and co-trustee of the Wicksteed Village Trust, lived in Letchworth and was an active member of the local community there on the eve of the First World War.⁷⁰

Robert Fishman’s description of Ebenezer Howard and the garden city could apply equally to Charles Wicksteed and the playground: ‘with the ingenuity and patience of an inventor putting together a useful new machine out of parts forged for other purposes, [he] created a coherent design for a new environment’.⁷¹ Wicksteed used staff, technology and skills ostensibly associated with his manufacturing business to shape the park environment and in time the playground too. In the postwar economic slump, Wicksteed put his underemployed staff to work excavating the park’s lake. Tube-bending machines were put to use manufacturing an increasingly wide range of playground equipment. He used his own inventiveness to design a bread-and-butter machine and a jet-injected hot water supply system that could deliver four thousand cups of tea a day, so that the increasing number of park visitors could be served refreshments in a timely manner. Furthermore, Wicksteed adopted aspects of the garden city ideal in a number of ways, attempting to combine the benefits of town and country that Howard had illustrated in Garden Cities of To-morrow.⁷² In practice this meant combining the beauty of nature, in an appropriately curated form, with the social opportunities and technologies of modern life. At Barton Seagrave there would be modern housing with private gardens and space for motorcars. The park would combine a picturesque landscape, large lake and mature trees, with modern recreational facilities and state-of-the-art canteen technology.

In terms of governance and ownership, the Barton Seagrave estate land was entrusted to the Wicksteed Village Trust in 1916, just as Howard had advocated and others had implemented, including the Cadbury family and the Bournville Village Trust (1900). Wicksteed also set out to pay higher wages to his employees and charged lower rents for the innovative prefabricated ‘concrete cottages’ he designed for local workers.⁷³ He disposed of building plots on 999-year leases as Howard had suggested, even though pressure from commercial investors meant that this had not been possible at Letchworth. Adherence to the garden city ideals was not simply a short-term impulse and did not end when the park became the increasing focus of Wicksteed’s attention. The minutes of Wicksteed Village Trust meetings suggest that the sale of land to facilitate the creation of the garden suburb continued well into the 1930s; between 1920 and 1935, almost every trustee meeting involved the approval of land sales to individuals and local builders.⁷⁴

In other ways, the Wicksteed Village Trust took a different path to Howard’s Garden City model. Unlike at Letchworth, there was no overarching architectural vision for the suburb. In addition, it would be hard to see the Wicksteed Village Trust as a model of the cooperative values that were a key element of Howard’s early thinking. At one of the first trustee meetings, a resolution was passed which stated that future meetings were only necessary once per year as Wicksteed had full control of the Trust. Furthermore, the trustees comprised family members and company employees, while meeting minutes show that money and land moved back and forth between the Trust, the company and individual trustees. The Objects of the Trust also hinted at Wicksteed’s broader interests. While partly established to ameliorate the living conditions of the working-classes, the Trust was also tasked with preventing cruelty to animals and opposing vaccination.

In Garden Cities of To-morrow, Howard had considered how schools and wider recreational facilities would be created and managed, but children’s recreation in particular was not explicitly mentioned. The term playground is used a number of times, but generally refers to a space for recreation – as in ‘cricket fields, lawn-tennis courts, and other playgrounds’ – rather than somewhere specifically for children.⁷⁵ Similarly, the Barton Seagrave Garden Suburb plan clearly showed large areas of parkland at the centre of the scheme and included ‘playing grounds’ for cricket, football, hockey and lawn tennis, but no dedicated space for children.

Excitement and freedom in Wicksteed Park

While the creation of the garden suburb continued well into the 1930s, the public profile of the park grew in prominence once the lake was completed in 1920. Local community organisations came together the following year to offer a tribute to Wicksteed, as a sign of public appreciation for the time and money he had invested in creating the park and lake. He explained in his acceptance speech that the initial impulse for the creation of play opportunities for children was accidental, rather than deliberate. ‘Primitive’ swings had been put up to coincide with a Sunday-school outing to the park, made of larch poles and chains. They proved so popular that he felt compelled to make them permanent and to provide more.⁷⁶ By 1923, a whole hockey pitch had been repurposed as a space to accommodate a remarkable number of ‘play things’, including sixty-two swings, fourteen see-saws and eight slides (Figures 2.3 and 2.4).

This interest in children’s leisure and wellbeing was not entirely new. In addition to his earlier production of children’s toys, Wicksteed’s wider family were also active in campaigns to improve the lives of poor urban children and to provide more progressive educational opportunities. Wicksteed’s older brother, Philip Henry Wicksteed, was a Unitarian minister, leading member of the Labour Church movement and a noted economist who produced one of the first critiques of Marx’s theories in English.⁷⁷ However, it was Philip’s role in the University Hall settlement where he encountered and sought to improve urban childhood.⁷⁸ The wider settlement movement had started in the 1880s and brought university graduates to poor urban areas to take part in voluntary social work, often with an emphasis on observing and organising children’s leisure activities.⁷⁹ Furthermore, by the 1920s, Joseph Hartley Wicksteed had moved from Letchworth to London and was headteacher at the progressive King Alfred’s School in Hampstead Garden Suburb, where considerable emphasis was placed on outdoor learning and individual freedom for pupils.⁸⁰ The wider impact of such progressive approaches to education on the children’s playground will be explored in more detail in the next chapter, but it seems likely that Charles Wicksteed would have been exposed to some of these ideas through his family connections. In practice, he certainly embodied some of the values associated with child study that had emerged from the settlement movement, even if there is no surviving evidence of direct links with the British Child Study Association or its key international proponents, such as G. Stanley Hall or Maria Montessori. Wicksteed seems to have been one of the enthusiastic amateurs who rallied to the Association’s cause to better understand the nature of childhood through observation.⁸¹ He watched children playing in Wicksteed Park and noted how they liked to play. He visited other parks to see how children used them, but invariably found little of interest, except for old-fashioned swings, dangerous giant strides and clumsy see-saws.⁸² No records remain that show where he went on his travels, but it seems likely that Wicksteed was visiting levelled and gravelled playgrounds and noting the type of gymnastic apparatus that had earlier been promoted by the MPGA and others.

Wicksteed’s disappointment at the spaces that he visited led him to propose an alternative vision for the playground. Writing in a number of pamphlets and catalogues during the late 1920s, Wicksteed set out his own version of the playground ideal. His firm belief in personal freedom seems to have strongly influenced his attitudes toward children and the play space and equipment he created. Perhaps the reason he found little of interest when visiting other spaces was because the prescriptive nature of gymnastic equipment would have been at odds with his emerging notion of a play space as somewhere that should promote individual autonomy and enjoyment. He reflected that: ‘the poor little gutter-children with all their hardships, playing with mud in freedom, are far happier than many well-to-do children under the perfect control and sad dullness and weariness of a too-much-ordered life’.⁸³ Freedom for children, rather than regulation, would be a consistent feature of his playground rhetoric and action.

At the same time, Wicksteed embraced established ideas about the creation and management of public parks and playgrounds. Just like other campaigners, he felt strongly that the street was an inappropriate place for play, that green space could have a refining influence and that investment in the next generation would reap future benefits for society. He also emphasised the threat from hooligans and the importance of safety. Wicksteed & Co. were able to state that all of their products had been tested and refined in the Wicksteed Park playground before being put on the market, although this was not promoted to the unsuspecting visitors to Wicksteed Park.⁸⁴ The latest technology would avoid entanglement, deter over-swinging and prevent bumps and collisions, providing a safer playground experience. Wicksteed concluded that ‘it has been my policy if anything is not safe and unbreakable to make it so, or cease to use it’, encapsulating in one sentence the possibility that children could break play equipment and that play equipment could break children.⁸⁵

It seems that contemporary play theories also informed Wicksteed’s thinking, to an extent at least. In particular, his writing suggests that he understood play as a way for children to expend surplus energy and direct their physical development. A playground would fulfil children’s natural urges to run, jump and play, as well as helping them to develop healthy bodies. In addition, open-air play would develop healthy tastes and a good temper, contributing to the appropriate development of their minds too. In some ways he would have agreed with Walter Wood’s claim in Children’s Play (1913) that municipal playgrounds could provide a healthy antidote to the unnatural urban environment.⁸⁶ At the same time, he would have disagreed strongly with Wood’s assertions that play spaces needed expert supervision and that girls and boys needed segregated play space due to inherent biological differences.

Instead, Wicksteed created a playground that was not physically segregated by gender and all children were instead encouraged to play together. While this was undoubtedly a progressive approach to play provision, Wicksteed was unlikely to be the first to have promoted or created shared play spaces. As early as 1915, the LCC’s park regulations listed thirty-one open spaces with facilities for children, but unlike earlier editions of the rules this version did not specify that facilities were segregated by gender.⁸⁷ While the revised regulations do not necessarily reflect changes to play spaces on the ground in London, they do suggest that attitudes towards prescribing specific areas for girls and boys had started to change, something that Wicksteed put into practice in Kettering. In addition, Wicksteed’s view that supervision was unnecessary was based on the idea that children needed more activities, fewer regulations and a more prominent location for the playground in the park. He felt that people in general, and children in particular, ‘want something doing’ and not just spaces for genteel strolls or bucolic vistas. He argued that if play spaces were ‘sufficient’, in other words they provided enough things to do, then children would invariably get on better without an official attendant. Supervision was also unnecessary if play spaces were located in prominent locations. He argued that ‘the Play Ground should not be put in a corner behind railings, but in a conspicuous and beautiful part of a Park, free to all, where people can enjoy the play and charming scenery at the same time; where mothers can sit, while they are looking on and caring for their children’.⁸⁸

The idea of a separate domestic sphere for women, which included responsibility for raising children, would have seemed entirely natural for many Victorians, most likely including Wicksteed too. While he soon dispensed with the idea that girls and boys needed separate spaces to play, his attitude to women’s place in the park and playground was more ambiguous.⁸⁹ In his earlier writing, Wicksteed focused on the benefits that a playground could offer mothers, presumably reflecting his personal experiences as well as contemporary ideas about the division of labour within families. Tea in the park canteen needed to be affordable so that housewives and their children could spend the day in the park for the least possible expense. Seating for mothers was ‘very useful and a necessary adjunct to a play ground’.⁹⁰ But even here his views changed over time. By 1928 he felt it important that everyone should be admitted to his playground and he pondered ‘why should you not let the father and mother come with the children of any age and enjoy the afternoon?’⁹¹ There is evidence that Wicksteed created opportunities for women to participate in leisure activities, through a wartime Wicksteed & Co. women’s football team and indirectly through the provision of a wide range of leisure facilities in Wicksteed Park.⁹² In addition, the lack of regulations meant that in theory women could make use of all the facilities that had been provided. But his significance in this regard should not be over-emphasised and wider social norms continued to limit leisure opportunities for many women.

Historian Claire Langhamer has argued that age was a significant factor in women’s access to leisure opportunities during the interwar period and evidence from Wicksteed Park and playground lends weight to this argument.⁹³ Generally, Wicksteed reinforced the notion that women who had children should primarily occupy the domestic sphere. He emphasised women’s domestic responsibilities as mothers, promoted the need for seating in the playground so that they could supervise their children, and provided affordable refreshments to make catering for their family easier. In a way, the Wicksteed playground could be seen as an extension of domestic life, a place where women were expected to continue fulfilling their domestic duties, supervising children and providing sustenance. However, the playground also potentially disrupted patterns of domesticity. Where children had traditionally played in the street within calling distance of home, supervising children at play had invariably been an informal, sociable and collective endeavour for working-class women.⁹⁴ In contrast, if the children of Kettering were encouraged to play in the Wicksteed Park playground, then mothers were expected to come too, potentially interrupting established patterns of social support and community life. Wicksteed imagined that a trip to the park provided a holiday for mothers and their children, but at the same time it created an expectation that mothers were responsible for transporting their children to a place where they could play, as well as directly supervising them while there.

The provision of affordable refreshments may have made a family visit to the playground easier, but it was also part of a wider attempt to make the park financially sustainable. Unlike municipal open spaces, Wicksteed Park did not have access to state funding. Wicksteed had considered the longer-term financial viability of the Wicksteed Village Trust from early on, but the difficulties it faced are evident from its annual accounts. One thousand two hundred Wicksteed & Co. shares were given to the Trust in 1920 to provide an ongoing source of income. Dividends were small and from 1916 to the early 1930s rental income and farm sales (including potatoes, wheat, oats and turf) far exceeded income from investments and park-related activities, including boat hire and the sale of refreshments. Despite a diverse range of income sources, the Trust spent far more than it earned and by 1931 had total debts of £4.7m (£23,452).⁹⁵ The sale of souvenir booklets was one of the ways in which the Trust attempted to generate income to reinvest in the park, but they also provide an insight into the way that the park and its landscape were presented to visitors.

The geographer David Matless has argued that both tradition and modernity were key characteristics of interwar conceptions of the rural landscape and the moral geographies imprinted on it.⁹⁶ Matless finds that these values were significant in organisations such as the Ramblers, the Youth Hostel Association and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England – but they also influenced the way that Wicksteed Park and children’s place in it were presented to visitors. In a souvenir booklet from the 1920s, an image of the strikingly modern park pavilion is combined with classical statues and urns. The sandpit in particular and the playground more generally are presented as bustling places where girls and boys play together, while more bucolic images of the wider park landscape bear similarities with the picturesque grounds of the country estate.⁹⁷ In a 1936 souvenir, aerial photography showcased park features from a novel, modern perspective, while at the same time emphasising the park’s rural surroundings.⁹⁸ This combination of modern urbanity and traditional rurality were even incorporated into the headed paper of the Trust: in the foreground are the sandpit, playground, pavilion and people, while in the background there are fields, hedgerows and trees all the way to the horizon.⁹⁹

As such, the park was not presented primarily as a retreat from the modern world as it had been in the earlier rhetoric of park advocates. Instead, Wicksteed Park built on a long tradition of manufactured items and industrial materials in park landscapes. It was presented as a place to engage with the benefits of modernity, including the use of engineering technology that promoted exciting leisure activities for both children and adults, but at the same time was framed by a rural backdrop, with the rolling landscape and mature trees providing a health-inducing dose of nature. In particular, the technological modernity of the amusement park landscape was increasingly influential on the form of Wicksteed Park. Perhaps the most notable example was the water chute, designed and installed by Wicksteed in 1926 and now Grade-II listed, but the installation of a miniature railway in the 1930s also reflected the influence of commercial amusement rides on the park landscape.¹⁰⁰ In the playground specifically, Wicksteed’s Joy Wheel seems to have been directly inspired by the similarly named mechanical roundabouts that were used at Great Yarmouth and Blackpool from around 1913.¹⁰¹ But while the fairground version was mechanised and attempted to displace its riders using high speed and centrifugal force for the amusement of onlookers, Wicksteed’s £7,000 (£40) version was self-propelled, smaller and included plenty of places to grip on.

The Ocean Wave, which cost £5,600 (£30), also appears to have been inspired by a circus ride. According to The Times, Hengler’s Circus in London installed an Ocean Wave for the first time in Britain in 1890. Inspired by a similar ride seen in Paris, it could accommodate over one hundred passengers and mimicked the motion of a sailing boat.¹⁰² But where the circus version had a circumference of 55m (180 ft) and included six small yachts, the playground version was less than half the size at 22m (75ft) and children stood or sat directly on the metal framework.¹⁰³ Although reduced in scale, such equipment and the souvenir booklets in which it was represented embodied notions of excitement and adrenaline, as well as the health benefits of a bucolic parkland setting. This combination of amusement-style rides and green landscape further highlights the complexities of early twentieth-century rural modernism that have been a feature of scholarship on interwar film, architecture and infrastructure.¹⁰⁴ But Wicksteed also challenged the traditional conceptions of the playground, as excitement replaced structured forms of exercise as the rationale for play space form.

Wicksteed also challenged established notions of appropriate park behaviour. In sharp contrast to the earlier attempts at regulation, the Wicksteed Park souvenirs emphasised an alternative attitude to park users and their conduct. One booklet enthused that

one of the charms of the place is perhaps the freedom that is everywhere. There are no notices to keep off the grass, or not to do anything else. All go into the park to do what they like and to go where they like. It has had a distinctly civilizing influence and gives much health and happiness. The freedom granted is seldom abused.¹⁰⁵

Facilities were provided in the park to support children’s autonomy in exploring both the park environment and their individual abilities. Children and adults were not only welcome to paddle in the lake but also to fall in and get soaked. A nurse attendant would help anyone that fell in by providing a temporary change of clothes, while their wet garments were quickly dried in a specially designed hot air cabinet.¹⁰⁶ Children’s playful activities were not frowned upon, nor constrained by regulations and railings. Instead Wicksteed set out to help mitigate the consequences of playfulness, rather than attempting to regulate and control it. In a similar way, Wicksteed set out to design and build play equipment that was strong enough to withstand the myriad ways that both children and adults would use it, rather than attempting to adjust users’ behaviour to accommodate the technical constraints of the equipment. Wicksteed repeatedly emphasised his sentiment that it was ‘easier for me, as an engineer, to make a swing strong enough to hold all who come than to keep park-keepers bawling at the youths all day long’.¹⁰⁷ In naming his new products, he also tended to focus on monikers that emphasised the playful nature of the playground – the Joy Wheel and Jazz Swing being early examples.

In practice, freedom was not absolute and Wicksteed was quick to express his displeasure at what he felt was inappropriate behaviour. Just as Matless has shown for the interwar countryside, objections to littering were a key component of the moral geography of Wicksteed Park. According to Wicksteed, littering disfigured the landscape and offended his idea of good citizenship. In a letter to the local paper, he emphasised the personal distress caused to him by both the littering and the potential need to increase the cost of a jug of tea to cover the wages of an additional attendant to pick up the litter.¹⁰⁸ Freedom came with individual responsibility, mirroring wider social processes that linked public parks and other green spaces with the construction of appropriate forms of citizenship.¹⁰⁹

The form of citizenship promoted at Wicksteed Park had much less to do with creating colonial identities than was the case in other parks, where architecture and pageants sought to instil the values of empire.¹¹⁰ Perhaps Wicksteed shared with his Liberal colleague Charles Masterman a sense that the empire represented a force for national self-indulgence rather than greatness, while Wicksteed certainly deplored the failures of statecraft that he felt resulted in the First World War.¹¹¹ Moreover, he imagined the playground as a space of enjoyment and freedom for individual children and their families, inspired by the healthiness of green space and the benefits of entertaining physical movement, rather than the prescriptions of the children’s gymnasium and its geopolitical assumptions. But at the same time Wicksteed was not averse to taking advantage of the business opportunities that both the First World War and empire created. During the war, his Stanford Road factory was converted to munitions production and in the 1920s and 1930s Wicksteed & Co. were able to take advantage of the commercial opportunities provided by imperial networks. Soon after Wicksteed Park opened, politicians from the parishes around Kettering saw the playground and requested similar facilities for their local communities.¹¹² Over time Wicksteed & Co. went on to equip thousands of playgrounds across the UK and beyond. In a 1936 advert the company claimed to have supplied over 3,000 playgrounds with their equipment, a figure that had increased to 4,000 only a year later.¹¹³ In the 1920s, Wicksteed & Co. exported playground equipment to South Africa. By the 1950s, a postwar export drive saw them provide equipment for play spaces in Canada, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Malta, the West Indies, North Borneo, Southern Rhodesia and St Helena, as well as the Belgian Congo, Venezuela and the USA.¹¹⁴

In establishing the children’s playground as an export template, Wicksteed & Co. contributed towards the increasing standardisation of the playground form. For example, the equipment sold to city authorities in South Africa was identical to that sold in Britain. The Joy Wheel pictured in Joubert Park, Johannesburg, is the same model displayed in Wicksteed’s brochures from the 1920s. While the playground form may have become increasingly standardised as a result, Wicksteed’s vision of the playground as a space where all children had freedom to play did not become the guiding principle of playground management. Instead, local cultural values shaped the way that children experienced playground spaces. For example, the provision of playgrounds in Johannesburg was likely to have been part of the city’s longstanding connection with the developments and cultural styles of other international cities, including London and New York, and Johannesburg Council’s concerted attempts at modernisation in the 1920s.¹¹⁵ Along with other imported trends, including modernist high-rise buildings, new retail stores and swimming pools, the playground was one expression of the enduring connection between the city’s white, middle-class councillors and British ideas and values. The creation of playground spaces also reinforced racial, cultural and class segregation. Few facilities were built in black neighbourhoods and black children were allowed to use the playground in Joubert Park just once a year.¹¹⁶ This tentative exposure of the connections between Kettering and Johannesburg and the racial politics of the playground undoubtedly demands further research and there is evidence that archive material exists elsewhere to inform a broader study, including in Cape Town.¹¹⁷

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the social, political and environmental problems of the city remained a powerful justification in the minds of advocates for greater playground provision. The ideal physical form of such spaces was far from settled, with levelled playgrounds, children’s gymnasiums and the US-inspired organised playground all in circulation. The First World War increased anxiety about children’s place in society and there were renewed calls for the provision of amenities for children, partly to promote positive behaviour but also to enhance children’s physical and mental wellbeing, especially close to home. An increasing number of commercial equipment suppliers offered products that reinforced normative assumptions about age, gender and exercise. But these prescriptive assumptions were challenged by Charles Wicksteed in the park he created and through the products that his company manufactured and sold. Rather than a bolster for wider imperial ambitions, Wicksteed imagined the playground as a space of excitement and freedom, with the equipment he created inspired by the fairground and amusement park, rather than solely the gymnasium. He also reacted against the segregation of play spaces by age and gender and instead created a playground in Wicksteed Park that children and adults were welcome to use together. The quantity of land available to Wicksteed at Barton Seagrave meant that playground technology and industrial materials could be situated within extensive green landscapes, combining aspects of traditional park rhetoric with the modernity of the amusement park, providing the benefits of both town and country. With Wicksteed Park as a proven testing ground, Wicksteed & Co. were able to sell their products in increasing numbers, along with a persuasive vision for the children’s playground, but only some of the values that shaped the management of Wicksteed Park travelled with these products. In Britain, the segregation of spaces for children by gender became increasingly uncommon, but elsewhere local social and cultural values shaped access to the playground. Just as others were adopting the standard Wicksteed version of the playground, with its swings, slides and roundabouts, the trustees of Wicksteed Park had to identify new sources of income, initiating a shift in emphasis away from the free-to-use playground and towards income-generating rides that characterise the park today.

Notes

1. 1.  Henry S. Curtis, Education Through Play (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 138.

2. 2.  Alicia Amherst, London Parks and Gardens (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1907); Jason Tomes, ‘Amherst, Alicia Margaret, Lady Rockley (1865–1941), Garden Historian’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

3. 3.  Annesley Kenealy, ‘Playgrounds in the Parks: A Plea for the Children’, The Daily Mail, 14 March 1907, p. 6.

4. 4.  ‘Children in Kensington Gardens’, The Times, 7 August 1909, p. 6.

5. 5.  A.J. Greene, ‘The Open Air School Movement, 1904–1912’, The Public Health Journal, 3.10 (1912), 547–52; David Pomfret, ‘The City of Evil and the Great Outdoors: The Modern Health Movement and the Urban Young, 1918–40’, Urban History, 28 (2001), 405–27.

6. 6.  Clare Hickman, ‘Care in the Countryside: The Theory and Practice of Therapeutic Landscapes in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700, ed. Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2018), pp. 160–85.

7. 7.  Helen Pussard, ‘Historicising the Spaces of Leisure: Open-Air Swimming and the Lido Movement in England’, World Leisure Journal, 49.4 (2007), 178–88.

8. 8.  ‘Physical Recreation, Manchester and Playing Fields’, The Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1913, p. 16.

9. 9.  Charles Masterman, ‘Realities at Home’, in The Heart of Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England, with an Essay on Imperialism, ed. Charles Masterman (London: Fisher Unwin, 1902), pp. 1–52 (p. 3); H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney (1873–1927), Politician and Author’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

10. 10.  Royal Parks, ‘Kensington Gardens Children’s Playground’, 1909, National Archives, WORKS/16/391.

11. 11.  Royal Parks, ‘Primrose Hill Children’s Playground, Gymnasium and Lavatories’, 1938, National Archives, WORKS/16/1670.

12. 12.  Ian Beckett, ‘The Nation in Arms, 1914–1918’, in A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War, ed. Ian Beckett and Keith Simpson (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2004), pp. 1–36.

13. 13.  ‘Juvenile Crime’, The Times, 13 May 1916, p. 3.

14. 14.  Robert Snape, ‘Juvenile Organizations Committees and the State Regulation of Youth Leisure in Britain, 1916–1939’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 13.2 (2020), 247–67.

15. 15.  ‘Young Offenders in War Time’, The Times, 13 March 1916, p. 5.

16. 16.  Margaret Hogarth, ‘Campbell, Dame Janet Mary (1877–1954), Medical Officer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

17. 17.  Janet M. Campbell, The Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children (Dunfermline: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1917).

18. 18.  W. Leslie Mackenzie, Scottish Mothers and Children (Dunfermline: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1917), pp. 335–7.

19. 19.  The Leisure of the People: A Handbook, Being the Report of the National Conference Held at Manchester, November 17th–20th, 1919. (Manchester: Conference Committee, 1919), p. 45.

20. 20.  Robert Snape and Helen Pussard, ‘Theorisations of Leisure in Inter-War Britain’, Leisure Studies, 32 (2013), 1–18.

21. 21.  Peter Borsay, A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

22. 22.  Stephen Jones, Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure 1918–39 (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 93 The proportional difference between historical and present-day amounts here is due to the impact of economic deflation in the intervening years.

23. 23.  Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991).

24. 24.  Claire L. Jones, The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870–1914 (London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).

25. 25.  Royal Parks, ‘Children’s Playgrounds: Gifts of Equipment Offers and Acceptances’, 1923, National Archives, WORKS/16/1705.

26. 26.  F.H.W. Sheppard, ‘The Crown Estate in Kensington Palace Gardens: Individual Buildings’, in Survey of London, Northern Kensington (London: London County Council, 1973), XXXVII, 162–93 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol37/pp162-193 [accessed 16 November 2023].

27. 27.  Spencer, Heath and George Ltd, ‘Playground Catalogue’, 1927, National Archives, WORKS/16/1705; Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss Ltd, ‘Gymnasia for Parks and Recreation Grounds, School Playgrounds, Etc.’, 1912, National Archives, WORKS/16/1705.

28. 28.  Spencer, Heath and George Ltd to D. Campbell, ‘Sketch for Regent’s Park Superintendent’, 1 May 1924, National Archives, WORKS/16/1705.

29. 29.  Spencer, Heath and George Ltd, ‘Playground Catalogue’.

30. 30.  Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss Ltd, ‘Gymnasia for Parks’.

31. 31.  Geoffrey Pearson, ‘ “A Jekyll in the Classroom, a Hyde in the Street”: Queen Victoria’s Hooligans’, in Crime and the City, ed. David Downes (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 10–35.

32. 32.  Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss Ltd, ‘Gymnasia for Parks’, p. 16.

33. 33.  ‘See-Saw, n. and Adj.’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

34. 34.  Curtis, Education Through Play, p. 143; Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Playground Equipment, Tennis Posts, Fencing and Park Seats’, 1926, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

35. 35.  Ralph Harrington, ‘On the Tracks of Trauma: Railway Spine Reconsidered’, Social History of Medicine, 16.2 (2003), 209–23.

36. 36.  Spencer, Heath and George Ltd, ‘Sketches of Regulation Swing Frame, Patent Safety Giant Stride & See-Saw’, n.d., National Archives, WORKS/16/1705.

37. 37.  E. Garrity, ‘Letter to Chief Commissioner of Works Regarding Indecent Offences towards Children Metropolitan Radical Federation’, 22 July 1913, National Archives, WORKS/16/532.

38. 38.  Deputy Education Officer to Board of Works, ‘Inadequate Supervision of Open Spaces’, 17 June 1914, National Archives, WORKS/16/532.

39. 39.  Royal Parks, ‘Prevention of Offences against Children (Various Minutes and Notes)’, 1913, National Archives, WORKS/16/532.

40. 40.  Elizabeth Gagen, ‘Playing the Part: Performing Gender in America’s Playgrounds’, in Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, ed. Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 213–29; Elizabeth Gagen, ‘An Example to Us All: Child Development and Identity Construction in Early 20th-Century Playgrounds’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 32.4 (2000), 599–616.

41. 41.  London County Council, ‘Regulations Relating to the Playing of Games at Parks and Open Spaces under the Control of the Council’, 1904, p. 12, LSE Library, 421 (129A).

42. 42.  Bayliss, Jones and Bayliss Ltd, ‘Gymnasia for Parks’, p. 16.

43. 43.  J.C. Loudon, An Encyclopædia of Gardening (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1835), pp. 40, 109, 158, 229.

44. 44.  Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 105.

45. 45.  Jonathan Conlin, ‘Vauxhall Revisited: The Afterlife of a London Pleasure Garden, 1770–1859’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 718–43; Jonathan Conlin, ‘Vauxhall on the Boulevard: Pleasure Gardens in London and Paris, 1764–1784’, Urban History, 35 (2008), 24–47.

46. 46.  Peter Borsay, ‘Pleasure Gardens and Urban Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall To Coney Island, ed. Jonathan Conlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 49–77.

47. 47.  ‘The Showman World’, The Era, 6 May 1899, p. 18.

48. 48.  Thomas Murphy, ‘The Evolution of Amusement Machines’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 99.4855 (1951), 791–806.

49. 49.  Gary Cross and John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

50. 50.  P.G. Wodehouse, Love among the Chickens (New York: Circle, 1909), p. 238.

51. 51.  Josephine Kane, The Architecture of Pleasure: British Amusement Parks 1900–1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

52. 52.  Robert Snape, ‘The New Leisure, Voluntarism and Social Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain’, Contemporary British History, 29 (2015), 51–83.

53. 53.  Rhodri Davies, Public Good by Private Means (London: Alliance Publishing Trust, 2015), p. 134; National Playing Fields Association, Second Annual Report (National Playing Fields Association, 1928), p. 13, National Archives, CB 4/1.

54. 54.  Hilda M. Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1933), pp. 70, 85–7.

55. 55.  Ian Addis, Out to Play in Kettering (Kettering: Bowden Publications, 2013), p. 5.

56. 56.  The Wicksteed Park Archive holds a number of uncatalogued papers including patent drawings, advertisements, instruction booklets.

57. 57.  Hilda M. Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed, p. 96.

58. 58.  Hilda M. Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed, p. 101.

59. 59.  ‘Wicksteed Park: Kettering Clubmen’s Appreciation of the Founder’, The Kettering Leader, 15 July 1921, p. 7.

60. 60.  Davies, Public Good by Private Means, p. 109; M.J. Daunton, ‘How to Pay for the War: State, Society and Taxation in Britain, 1917–24’, The English Historical Review, 111 (1996), 882–919.

61. 61.  Charles Wicksteed, Bygone Days and Now: A Plea for Co-Operation between Labour, Brains and Capital (London: Williams & Northgate, 1929), p. 150.

62. 62.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation after School Hours and after School Age (Kettering: Wicksteed Charitable Trust, 1928), p. 10.

63. 63.  Gotch also designed Charles Wicksteed’s home, Bryn Hafod, in 1898 and would later become President of the Royal Institute of British Architects from 1923 to 1925. Ian MacAlister and John Elliott, ‘Gotch, John Alfred (1852–1942)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

64. 64.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘An Account of the Wicksteed Park and Trust’, 1936, p. 7, Wicksteed Park Archive, BRC-1906.

65. 65.  Gotch & Saunders, ‘Barton Seagrave Garden Suburb Estate’, 1914, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

66. 66.  Charles Wicksteed, The Land for the People: How to Obtain It and How to Manage It (London: William Reeves, 1885); Land Nationalisation Society, Report 1885–6 (London: Land Nationalisation Society, 1886).

67. 67.  Charles Wicksteed, Our Mother Earth: A Short Statement of the Case for Land Nationalisation (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1892); Hilda M. Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed, p. 68; Charles later withdrew from the movement as it increasingly advocated industrial nationalisation too, something he opposed – see Charles Wicksteed, ‘National Coal: The Farce of Nationalisation Exposed’, n.d., Wicksteed Park Archive, MGA-3006.

68. 68.  Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 37, 71, 133.

69. 69.  Leeds Civic Society, ‘House and Town Planning Exhibition Programme’, 1918, Wicksteed Park Archive, PRG-3004.

70. 70.  National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, ‘Letchworth and District Society’, 1912, Garden City Collection, LBM2988; Letchworth Dramatic Society, ‘A Variety Entertainment’, 1914, Garden City Collection, LBM4007.18; W.H.G. Armytage, Heavens below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560–1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 398.

71. 71.  Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 28.

72. 72.  Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1902).

73. 73.  Charles Wicksteed, ‘Concrete Cottages’, The Machine Tool Review, 1920, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

74. 74.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘Minute Book, 1920–1935’, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

75. 75.  Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, p. 63.

76. 76.  ‘Mr. Chas. Wicksteed’s Generosity: Kettering Club’s Appreciation, Mr Wicksteed Silences His Critics’, The Kettering Guardian, 15 July 1921, p. 6.

77. 77.  Ian Steedman, ‘Wicksteed, Philip Henry (1844–1927), Unitarian Minister and Economist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Krista Cowman, ‘ “A Peculiarly English Institution”: Work, Rest, and Play in the Labour Church’, Studies in Church History, 37 (2002), 357–67.

78. 78.  University Hall Settlement, ‘Memorandum and Articles of Association’ (London, 1895), p. 11, LSE Library, FOLIO FHV/G60.

79. 79.  Kate Bradley, ‘Creating Local Elites: The University Settlement Movement, National Elites and Citizenship in London, 1884–1940’, in In Control of the City: Local Elites and the Dynamics of Urban Politics, 1800–1960, ed. Stefan Couperus, Christianne Smit, and Dirk Jan Wolffram, Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, 28 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), pp. 81–92.

80. 80.  W.A.C. Stewart, Progressives and Radicals in English Education 1750–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1972).

81. 81.  Kevin Brehony, ‘Transforming Theories of Childhood and Early Childhood Education: Child Study and the Empirical Assault on Froebelian Rationalism’, Paedagogica Historica, 45 (2009), 585–604 (p. 595).

82. 82.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation, pp. 6, 8.

83. 83.  Charles Wicksteed, Bygone Days and Now, p. 55.

84. 84.  Charles Wicksteed & Co. to City of Lincoln Surveyor, ‘Children’s Playground Equipment’, 21 November 1933, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued; ‘Swedish-Inspired Play Equipment Experiment’, Evening Telegraph, 29 July 1964, p. 6, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

85. 85.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation, p. 7.

86. 86.  Walter Wood, Children’s Play and Its Place in Education (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1913), p. 179.

87. 87.  London County Council, ‘Parks and Open Spaces: Regulations Relating to Games, Together with Particulars of the Facilities Afforded for General Recreation’, 1915, LSE Library, 421 (129D).

88. 88.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Playground Equipment’, 1926, p. 6.

89. 89.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation, p. 6.

90. 90.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Playground Equipment’, 1926, p. 7.

91. 91.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation, p. 24.

92. 92.  ‘Photo of Wicksteed’s Munition Girls F.C. Team’, n.d., Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

93. 93.  Claire Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England 1920–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

94. 94.  Krista Cowman, ‘Play Streets: Women, Children and the Problem of Urban Traffic, 1930–1970’, Social History, 42 (2017), 233–56 (p. 237).

95. 95.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Director Minute Book, 1920–1956’, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued; Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘Minute Book, 1920–1935’; Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘Annual Accounts 1916–48’, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

96. 96.  David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).

97. 97.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘The Wicksteed Park Souvenir’, n.d., London Metropolitan Archive, CLC/011/MS22290.

98. 98.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘An Account of the Wicksteed Park and Trust’.

99. 99.  Wicksteed Village Trust to J. Brandon-Jones, Letter, 4 October 1946, Wicksteed Park Archive, LET-1044.

100. 100.  Historic England, Water Chute at Wicksteed Park, National Heritage List for England, 1437706, 2016.

101. 101.  Kane, The Architecture of Pleasure, p. 55.

102. 102.  ‘The Ocean Wave’, The Times, 3 January 1890, p. 4.

103. 103.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Playground Equipment’, 1926.

104. 104.  Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey, eds., Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

105. 105.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘The Wicksteed Park Souvenir’, p. 1.

106. 106.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘The Wicksteed Park, Kettering’, n.d., Wicksteed Park Archive, BRC-1199.

107. 107.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation, p. 15; Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Playground Equipment’, 1926, p. 7.

108. 108.  Charles Wicksteed, ‘The Pity of It: Thoughtless Picnic Parties in the Wicksteed Park’, The Kettering Leader, 29 July 1921, p. 5.

109. 109.  Hazel Conway, ‘Everyday Landscapes: Public Parks from 1930 to 2000’, Garden History, 28 (2000), 117–34.

110. 110.  Ruth Colton, ‘Savage Instincts, Civilising Spaces: The Child, the Empire and the Public Park, c.1880–1914’, in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 255–70; Joanna Brück, ‘Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 17 (2013), 196–223.

111. 111.  Matthew, ‘Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney (1873–1927)’; Hilda M. Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed, p. 96.

112. 112.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Play Things as Used in the Wicksteed Park’, 1923, p. 3, National Archives, WORKS/16/1705.

113. 113.  ‘Advert for Wicksteed & Co. Playground Equipment’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 1.1 (1936), 1 (p. 1); W.W. Pettigrew, Municipal Parks: Layout, Management and Administration (London: Journal of Park Administration, 1937), p. xiv, RHS Lindley, 969.2 PET.

114. 114.  ‘The Children of St Helena’, Machinery Lloyd, 29 (1957), 1–2.

115. 115.  Louis Grundlingh, ‘Municipal Modernity: The Politics of Leisure and Johannesburg’s Swimming Baths, 1920s to 1930s’, Urban History, 49.4 (2022), 771–90.

116. 116.  Charles Wicksteed, A Plea for Children’s Recreation, p. 23.

117. 117.  ‘Playground Equipment (Charles Wicksteed)’, 1927, Cape Town Archives Repository, 3/CT 4/1/4/71 B410/4.