Chapter 1 Finding space for play: ‘playgrounds for poor children in populous places’
The children’s playground has its roots in philanthropic, voluntary and state responses to industrialisation and urban expansion during the nineteenth century. The idea that children required dedicated play space formed part of wider efforts to ameliorate the social and environmental impacts of rapidly expanding towns and cities. However, as we shall see, there was not a simple, parallel relationship between urbanisation and the provision of public play space – playground creation also relied upon shifting conceptions of childhood, particularly the idea that children might have opportunities for play. Similarly, while there is a close association between parks and playgrounds today, in the nineteenth century the creation of public green spaces was not necessarily a good indicator of expanding playground provision. Recent scholarship on the history of public parks has tended to position the children’s playground as a product of the early twentieth century, part of a wider expansion of open-air leisure amenities such as lidos and playing fields.1 Such assumptions fail to acknowledge earlier conversations about the relationship between the interconnected ideas of public space, education and health. To address this oversight, this chapter explores the nineteenth-century experience, a crucial period that forms the background to the remainder of the book. It represents a period when ideas about the need for dedicated public spaces for children’s recreation were defined, largely as an antidote to the perceived problems of urban life and the environmental consequences of industrialism, but only intermittently implemented.
The chapter builds on the work of historians and geographers interested in the imagined and material aspects of the nineteenth-century city and brings them into conversation with scholars who have examined shifting assumptions about age, education and children’s play across the same period.2 In doing so, the chapter explores the social and spatial consequences of changing attitudes towards education, exercise and urban infrastructure. It points to the intermittent and interconnected nature of philanthropic, voluntary and state action in this arena and highlights contemporary belief in the power of the urban landscape to shape the behaviour and health of individuals and communities. To make sense of these processes, the first part of the chapter focuses on the mid-nineteenth century and explores early, piecemeal attempts to create public amenities for children in Salford, Manchester and London. The second part shows how the creation of dedicated spaces for children became more widespread from the 1880s, as a remedy for the ills of the metropolitan environment and a prescription for improving the physical condition of the city’s inhabitants. In doing so, it highlights a transatlantic exchange of ideas about play space provision and examines the practical debates about the ideal playground form.
Education and exercise in the mid-nineteenth century
Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the early nineteenth century generated significant wealth and technological innovation, but also caused major social and environmental problems. In particular, the places where the urban poor lived were increasingly seen and experienced as crowded, disorientating, dangerous and unhealthy. Publications including Rookeries of London (1850), London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and Town Swamps and Social Bridges (1859) all depicted a highly problematic urban environment and described the dangers for society in general and children in particular.3 As a result, there was increasing debate about the merits of town and country, concern about the provision of spaces for recreation, and greater municipal and philanthropic efforts to tackle these problems. The playground would gradually become embroiled in these processes, but not before there was a shift in attitudes towards working-class childhood.
For many children from poor urban families, daily life was spent working and playing in the street. It had many advantages as a site for play, including proximity to home, easy sociability and space. However, in 1835 the Highway Act made street play illegal if it disrupted other traffic. The street was also increasingly imbued with negative connotations by writers such as John Ruskin, understood as a space that was both literally and symbolically dirty, diseased and dangerous.4 At the same time, the romantic ideals of Rousseau, Wordsworth and others were increasingly influential in creating an idealised, mythical figure of the child in nature.5 As a result, the lived experience of poor urban children was increasingly at odds with upper- and middle-class ambitions for childhood and assumptions about the city. Governments and philanthropists had long developed and implemented policies towards children, but this emerging romantic ideology began to influence public action from the middle of the nineteenth century. Legislation initially sought to limit the hours and improve the conditions in which children worked, but gradually an emphasis on a ‘natural’ childhood coincided with evolving ideas about education, particularly the education of young children.
The influence of progressive educational thinking on the origins of the playground can be seen in the interaction between pedagogical theory, playful practice, commerce and campaigning. In 1826, the influential German educator Friedrich Froebel had urged that ‘every town should have its own common playground for the boys’ so that they could learn civil and moral virtues through playing games.6 He developed an approach to children’s education that emphasised playful activities, made use of tools to support self-directed learning and included the use of materials such as bricks, sand and sawdust in the classroom. From the 1820s, British educators including Samuel Wilderspin and Robert Owen also promoted the place of play in children’s education, as part of a wider infant education movement that positioned schooling as a solution to criminality.7 An engraving of the playground at the Home and Colonial infant school in London shows a generously equipped, enclosed outdoor space with a variety of apparatus including see-saws, climbing ropes and bars (Figure 1.1). The playground appears to have been a key component of an outdoor, physically energetic education for young children. In addition, and significantly for the subsequent story of the public playground, both Wilderspin and Froebel combined their pedagogical theory and teaching practice with a commercial sideline supplying educational equipment, underlining the enduring connection between commerce and play.
For many in the infant education movement, including Wilderspin, it was the plight of children from poor families in particular that most needed the corrective influence of infant education. But while the school day helped to remove some poor children from the workplace, it did little to tackle the perceived problems of playing in the city street.8 For Wilderspin’s friend Charles Dickens it was the unsavoury streets that were particularly problematic. Writing in Household Words in 1850, Dickens described how poor children were ‘generally born in dark alleys and back courts, their playground has been the streets, where the wits of many have been prematurely sharpened at the expense of any morals they might have’.9 But he did more than write about these problems and, although overlooked in otherwise comprehensive biographies of his life, Dickens also sought to provide more salubrious places for poor children to play.
Figure 1.1: Gymnasia and playground of the Home and Colonial Infant School, London, wood engraving, c.1840, Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.
In January 1858, Dickens and the reforming politician Lord Shaftesbury launched the Playground and Recreation Society in an effort to create ‘playgrounds for poor children in populous places’, away from the ‘variety of temptations’ and ‘bodily evils’ to be found in the street.10 Later that year, a deputation from the Society that included Dickens and park advocate Robert Slaney MP met with government ministers to promote the cause.11 No doubt partly as a result of Dickens’s reputation, the Society received considerable publicity, including support from Henry Mayhew’s satirical magazine Punch. While it suggested that ‘ragged playgrounds’ would remove the annoyance of children playing on the street, Dickens emphasised that play spaces would benefit children’s physical and mental health and consequently the strength and status of the nation.12 These benefits were repeated in parliament, where Slaney promoted a bill that would enable the provision of public spaces for recreation. The subsequent Recreation Grounds Act (1859) specifically permitted the creation of playgrounds for children.13
Despite Slaney’s work in parliament and Dickens’s high-profile involvement in the campaign, the Playground and Recreation Society was short-lived. By May 1860, The Times reported that it had ‘lately died a natural death, obviously from the impossibility of creating spaces, or providing funds adequate to the enormous cost of purchasing ground in the metropolis’.14 While the high price of land and lack of funding undoubtedly presented problems for Dickens, these were issues which later campaigners were able to overcome. In mid-century London, it seems likely that wider society was not yet ready to embrace the children’s playground as a solution to the problems of the city. Neither celebrity endorsement, the nuisance and danger of street play, nor the future potential of a healthier working-class childhood were convincing enough to attract state support, philanthropic funding or the allocation of dedicated public spaces for children. Instead, the earliest spaces set aside specifically for children were seen in another response to the problems of the nineteenth-century city, the campaign to create public parks. Even here, however, the playground did not initially feature prominently.
The city park had long been understood as a space of health and recreation. But while there is a strong association today between the park and the children’s playground, they were not intimately connected from the outset. As a response to the problems of the industrial city, green space advocates envisaged the public park as a way to provide fresh air, a dose of nature, gentle recreation and cultural enrichment. Parks were imagined as green lungs, part of an urban respiratory system which supported the healthy functioning of the wider city. In adopting such bodily metaphor, park advocates imagined that green spaces would help to ventilate overcrowded streets, circulate clean air and disperse noxious miasmas.15 In addition to this ostensibly biological function, the park could also provide a cure for the social and moral problems of the city. The 1833 Select Committee on Public Walks endorsed green spaces as a solution to the ill health, poor hygiene and intemperance of working-class city dwellers. Motivated by civic pride and philanthropic charity, later proponents also saw them as a vehicle for educating and enriching the lives of the urban poor. By imagining the city as a living organism, whose physical and moral ills could be cured through medico-environmental interventions, early park advocates provided an important conceptual framework for later proponents of the children’s playground. Adapting the urban environment in this way would help to reshape the health and behaviour of its working-class population.
While the common refrain of ‘parks for the people’ may have implied a democratic purpose, green spaces were often shaped by gender- and class-based values, which invariably stressed purposeful and segregated forms of rational recreation, rather than energetic exercise. At People’s Park in Halifax, early by-laws prohibited dancing and games, while at Longton Park in Stoke-on-Trent, bicycles, tricycles and dogs were banned and the park superintendent advised against installing facilities for children or sport.16 Instead, gentle perambulation would allow visitors to interact with and learn from an ordered version of nature while fresh air would ward off disease, and the bandstand or tearoom provided an appropriately salubrious break from daily routines. Significantly for this story, parks were also shaped by assumptions about age. Children were expected to imitate adult behaviours, strolling on the paths or admiring fauna and flora from a distance. At a minority of green spaces, including Saltaire Park in Bradford and the Brewer’s Garden in Stepney, young people were barred from entering altogether.17
Instead, designers took their cues from English landscape parks, with picturesque lakes, groups of trees, expanses of grassland and serpentine walks. Many early public parks were created in this vision; the plans for Victoria Park (1845) and Birkenhead Park (1847) were both an expression of these aesthetics, as was an unrealised plan for an Albert Park in north London.18 Furthermore, while advocates imagined the park as a remedial space of natural beauty and healthy recreation, in practice there was considerable continuity in earlier patterns of behaviour. Regulation and supervision sought to manage the way that visitors used parks, but earlier activities such as picking flowers, intimacy between couples and most likely children’s play all challenged attempts to impose alternative, park-appropriate values and uses.19 With evidence that there was considerable consensus within the park community around what constituted ‘respectable’ behaviour, it is doubtful that the park keeper would be the only adult attempting to moderate children’s instinctive playfulness.20 At the same time, the early appropriation of the ornamental lakes in Victoria Park as a site for bathing, often by large numbers of children, highlights how the creation of norms relating to the use of such spaces was a negotiated process, one where designers’ intentions and administrators’ expectations were modified in practice by park users.
In one part of the country there was an apparent exception to the marginalisation of children in park landscapes. Manchester was an archetypal ‘shock city’ of the nineteenth century, where industrialisation created economic growth, but also resulted in social and environmental problems, particularly working-class poverty and ill health.21 For a local curate, William Marriott, children in particular suffered ‘the pain, the sickness, the filth, the disease, and the thousand gross immoralities, and brutish vices and degrading crimes’ that resulted from such conditions.22 For local reformers, the creation of new public parks was central to efforts to mitigate the physical and moral consequences. Largely paid for by local subscription, Peel Park in Salford and Queen’s Park and Philips Park in Manchester were opened to the public on the same day in 1846. Like contemporary parks elsewhere, they were designed in the landscape style, reinforced normative gender values and provided open space for the working-class to take part in moderate exercise and interact with nature. Unusually, the parks also included specific facilities for children, designed to encourage energetic exercise.
A plan of Peel Park from 1850 shows that space for children was provided in addition to an archery ground, skittles ground and gymnasium.23 A rectangular ‘Girls Play Ground’ and a circular clearing for a girl’s swing were tucked away in the shrubbery on the park boundary, while a boy’s swing was positioned close to the quoits ground, again hidden among the planting. In Philips Park, the ‘play grounds’ were laid out with a gravel surface and bordered by an earth bank planted with privet hedging.24 Contemporary accounts of the three parks described how the girls’ playgrounds provided space for skipping and shuttlecock, while the gymnasium provided boys and men with equipment for athletic exercise. Laid out with advice from the local Athenaeum Gymnastics Club, apparatus included a 7m frame which supported climbing ladders, poles, bars and ropes, a vaulting horse and a giant stride.25 The latter, also known as flying steps, was a tall, upright pole with a revolving top on which ropes were attached that allowed users to take giant steps around a circle (see Figure 1.2 for a later example). For its advocates, it provided ‘a most useful article in the muscular education’ and made the gymnast appear to be ‘endowed with wings’.26 In common with the wider provision of recreational facilities in parks, these were not facilities for instinctive and unstructured play that might otherwise have taken place in the street. Instead, the equipment represented an attempt to provide for rational exercise by children.
The new parks sought to civilise the natural world and children’s play within it, but this was not an unproblematic task. The inclusion of engineered gymnastic structures, for example, might seem at odds with the typical approach to park design that was grounded in a pastoral landscape aesthetic. However, industrial technology had long been a feature of green spaces. It underpinned the automata that featured in the parks and gardens of the European aristocracy, as well as the operation of fountains and construction of follies.27 Similarly, Victorian public parks and the people that used them were invariably influenced by industrial architecture, materials and technology. Iron, for example, was an essential material used to create seemingly bucolic green spaces and shape their use, an essential component of bridges, bandstands, railings and glasshouses.28 Early gymnastic apparatus for children was often similarly constructed from iron, and as we shall see in later chapters, this use of robust metals would inform both visions of the ideal playground and the companies that could supply such equipment.
Figure 1.2: Giant’s stride, Bayliss Jones and Bayliss Ltd, 1912, National Archives, WORKS/16/1705.
More problematic was the attempt to combine bucolic landscapes with recreational opportunities for children. Joshua Major, the designer of the Salford and Manchester parks, resolved this issue by prioritising the former, recommending caution in providing facilities for recreation and particular care in siting them. He emphasised that aesthetics should take priority over practical amenities such as playgrounds, arguing that such features should never ‘interfere with the composition and beauty of the general landscape’.29 Playgrounds that had initially been positioned in the centre of Philips Park were removed and consolidated on the boundary, so that the ‘unrestrained merriment of the factory girls who used the swings’ would no longer impinge on the view.30 As well as being secondary to aesthetic concerns, the provision of space for recreation could be trumped by economic considerations. In 1850, Peel Park administrators suggested closing the playgrounds for part of the year to preserve the quality of the grass.31 Protecting the turf in this way would enable more grass to be harvested for hay and then sold, raising around £26,630 in today’s money (£30 in 1850) to help offset park maintenance costs.32
Despite provisions in the 1859 Recreation Ground Act which legally permitted public authorities to create playgrounds for children, few did so. Joshua Major’s other notable landscape designs seem to have included no dedicated facilities for children.33 Elsewhere, plans for Sefton Park (1872) in Liverpool, Finsbury Park (1869) in London and Roundhay Park (1872) in Leeds did not initially include child-specific amenities. Stamford Park (1880) in Altrincham was unusual in providing a boys’ playground and girls’ playground, but again they were hidden from view on the park boundary, enclosed by trees and shrubs.34 At the opening of Victoria Park in Portsmouth in 1878, one commentator felt that the otherwise undesirable railway line, which divided the new space in two, did perform a useful function, separating the giant stride and spaces for recreation from the rest of the ornamental park landscape.35
As such, children were rarely a primary constituency in the mid-century park community and dedicated spaces for children were not common. When amenities for children were provided, they were invariably located on the marginal boundaries of the park, hidden from view and subservient to the wider landscape aesthetic, economic considerations and expectations of appropriate park behaviour. The children’s playground was not yet a defining characteristic of the public park.
Just as tentative steps were being taken to provide spaces for children in some towns and cities, there were also attempts to promote more energetic forms of activity in parks. For landscape historians, these interconnected processes have resulted in some uncertainty about whether amenities were intended for children or adults, particularly the provision of gymnasiums in public spaces. The garden historian Susan Lasdun has contended that the gymnasium installed in 1848 at Primrose Hill in London was the first children’s playground.36 Although the evidence from Manchester and Salford suggests this is an unsound assertion, it is a claim worth exploring in more detail as it points to an important influence on the form of the playground, one which focused less on the perceived benefits of green space and instead emphasised physical exertion. There had been attempts to provide space for open-air athletic exercises earlier in the century. In 1825 the German ‘professor of gymnastics’ Karl Voelker began offering lessons for military gentlemen close to Regent’s Park in London.37 A sketch of his gymnasium showed a range of apparatus including bars, ladders and poles, all positioned in an outdoor area enclosed by a high brick wall.38 By 1827, a cartoon published in Lady’s Magazine parodied the gymnasium with its high and giddy mast, risky javelin throwing and other exercises that seemed to provide as much amusement to onlookers as they did health to participants.39 Perhaps partially as a result, attempts to increase participation in gymnastics were not wholly successful and Voelker’s London Gymnastic Institution closed in 1827 due to lack of income.40
Despite the cynicism and setback, the perceived benefits of gymnastic exercise did become more widely acknowledged. Around the same time that Voelker was working in London, a Swiss professor of gymnastics, Peter Clias, organised gymnastic courses at military and naval colleges across Britain and published a general introduction to athletic exercise.41 Donald Walker’s British Manly Exercises promoted a similar approach and ran to ten editions between 1834 and 1860.42 As part of this mid-century enthusiasm for energetic exercise, an outdoor gymnasium was installed by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests at Primrose Hill (as Lasdun noted). Much like Voelker’s earlier enterprise, it included gymnastic apparatus such as ropes for swinging on, poles for climbing up, horizontal and parallel bars. Newspaper accounts suggested that exercising on the equipment would provide new vigour, improved health and a strengthening of the mind, while also making clear that this was not a space specifically for children. An engraving in the Illustrated London News provides an insight into the way the gymnasium was both perceived and represented to the public.43 Adults are seen exercising and spectating, many dressed as might be expected of the gentlemen that Voelker had earlier hoped to attract to his gymnastic lessons. Older boys are shown climbing, another playing with a hoop, but the size of the apparatus would have made it difficult for many younger children to use the gymnasium, while women and girls are relegated to the sidelines as spectators. The most notable child, in the foreground of the image, conforms to contemporary representations of working-class children, portrayed as a costermonger or street seller straight from the pages of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. For working-class children at least, the gymnasium seems to have been a site of work rather than play.
Providing public amenities for active recreation was far from straightforward. In 1863, regulations were introduced to manage demand for the equipment at Primrose Hill, limiting the length of time each piece could be used and noting that abusive language or wilful damage would result in exclusion or prosecution.44 At the same time, there was nothing inherently respectable about those responsible for supervising the gymnasium. The Standard reported that it had become both ‘a very disorderly place’ and a site of unscrupulous administration, with park constables demanding bribes before people could use the equipment.45 As such, this was not a space for playing freely as an end in itself. Neither the regulations nor newspaper accounts specifically mention children or play, and it seems highly unlikely that park staff, gymnasts or the wider public would have seen this as a space exclusively for children. But in creating a public, open-air facility for energetic exercise, the example at Primrose Hill serves as a useful reference for the justification and design of later spaces that were set aside for children in particular.
In summary, between the 1840s and 1870s there were only sporadic and localised attempts to create dedicated public spaces for children’s recreation, although many of the factors that would influence later advocacy had their roots in this period. Mid-century investigations had highlighted the deleterious effects of the urban environment on its poor inhabitants generally and children especially, while education, restorative exercise and interaction with nature were positioned as potential solutions. The vision of a universal, natural childhood contrasted sharply with the perceived reality of the poor urban child, in an overcrowded home and with nowhere to play except the street. However, attempts to provide playground spaces as a solution were either unsuccessful or at odds with the dominant landscape aesthetic of the public park movement. This would change in the 1880s as shifting conceptions of childhood stabilised and heightened anxiety about the consequences of urbanisation demanded more pragmatic solutions.
Childhood and urban anxieties in the late nineteenth century
If attempts to create spaces for play across the middle of the century had achieved decidedly mixed results, by the 1880s heightened concern about the problematic urban environment and changing conceptions of childhood meant that conditions were more conducive to playground creation. London in particular became a focus of concern, and the playground was increasingly promoted as a solution to at least some of the problems facing the capital. Utopian visions of a healthy city, pragmatic attempts to improve the housing of the poor and the work of open space advocates all promoted dedicated spaces for children. At the same time, a series of legislative interventions created ‘spare time’ for children beyond the school day. The 1880 Education Act made school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten, increasing to twelve in 1899, while the 1891 Elementary Education Act effectively made schooling free.46 At the same time, earlier park rhetoric, particularly ideas about the benefits of fresh air and interaction with nature, and the possibilities of energetic gymnastic exercise were brought together in the playground for significant political and social purposes.
The depiction of poverty-stricken working-class childhood by sensationalist journalism and more sober social science provided a particularly persuasive impetus to late nineteenth-century urban reform. In The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), congregational minister Andrew Mearns lamented that ‘the child-misery that one beholds is the most heart-rending and appalling element’, a tragedy made worse because ‘many of them have never seen a green field’.47 William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, visualised millions of poor urban children enduring a ‘miserable subsistence’, their ‘amusement curtailed to the running gutter’.48 These findings contrasted sharply with romantic notions of childhood, a life stage increasingly imagined as a time of natural progress, education and hope for the future. This idealised childhood was a long way from the perceived reality of most urban working-class children, providing an important motivation for many reformers and philanthropists in the 1880s.
For some, occupying children’s newly created leisure time with appropriate activities was the priority. The driving force behind such efforts was the novelist and social worker Mary Ward. Built upon accounts of the slums and descriptions of poverty, but mainly concerned with the behaviour of poor children, the organisers of the Children’s Happy Evening Association (1888), various Guilds of Play and other evening and holiday play schemes all attempted to divert children from the dangers of the street by occupying their leisure time. Supervised activities included drill and dancing, lantern talks and basketwork and generally took place inside. The Happy Evening Association, for example, made use of school premises to provide constructive, supervised play opportunities for young children outside of school hours, while the Guilds of Play focused particularly on dancing for girls.49 However, the schemes were only available one or two nights a week or during the school holidays and were primarily concerned with occupying children’s leisure time, rather than adapting the urban fabric to mitigate the impacts of the city on children’s health.
In contrast, there were philanthropic reformers who were more concerned about the spaces where public play should take place. In 1866, the housing reformer Octavia Hill described clearing some old stables to create a playground for poor girls at one of her model housing schemes at Freshwater Place, Marylebone. Fenced, gravelled, planted with small trees and equipped with swings, by 1869 ‘the playground never looked so pretty’, she wrote.50 As a member of the Kyrle Society, Hill also promoted the principle of the playground, stating in 1883 that ‘children want playgrounds’ and that when provided they ‘would not be obliged to play in alleys and in the street, learning their lessons of evil, in great danger of accident’.51 Beyond Freshwater Place and Hill’s advocacy, the playground also appeared in more radical visions of the future. In 1876, the noted sanitarian Benjamin Ward Richardson reimagined the city as a space of health, hygiene and cleanliness. In his highly detailed description of Hygeia: A City of Health, garden squares at the back of working-class housing would be ‘ornamented with flowers and trees and furnished with playgrounds for children’.52 Richardson’s writing and Hill’s advocacy both helped to ensure that the playground was firmly planted within both practical action and utopian visions for a more humane urban environment.
At the same time, free-to-use public play spaces were not the inevitable nor only response to the problem either. An 1873 sketch of Victoria Park in the Illustrated London News included expected park features such as the pagoda, cascade, lake and boat house, as well as a small detail showing the ‘swings and roundabouts’.53 But rather than a children’s gymnasium, the detail appears to show a covered carousel and swing boats, both more commonly associated with the fairground rather than contemporary ideas of the playground. A later London County Council (LCC) publication confirms that these playful features were only available on payment of a fee. Alongside regulations relating to the use of gymnasiums and other park amenities, the 1894 park by-laws included a separate prescription that ‘the charge for the use of swings erected by private persons in parks or on open spaces is to be one penny per person for five minutes’.54 The provision of private swings was presumably common enough to warrant a bylaw being created and significant enough that the council sought to control the cost. Ten years later, the revised LCC by-laws included no mention of privately operated swings. The influence of the fairground and amusement park on the form and function of the children’s playground are explored in more detail in the next chapter, but one reason for the shift from private to public swings was the advocacy of philanthropic organisations who promoted free-to-access and publicly maintained spaces for children’s recreation.
In the early 1880s Dickens’s unsuccessful Playground Society received some nostalgic publicity, but it was the formation of the Metropolitan Public Gardens, Boulevard and Playground Association in 1882 which marked the beginning of more determined efforts to provide poor children with dedicated space for recreation.55 Despite shortening its name to the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association (MPGA) in 1885, it remained concerned with the provision of spaces for children. The Association was founded by the aristocratic philanthropist and ardent imperialist Reginald Brabazon (Earl of Meath, Lord Chaworth, 1841–1929) and the surgeon and journalist Ernest Hart (1835–98).56 Brabazon had been a member of the Kyrle Society but became increasingly keen to focus more specifically on the practical creation of public spaces in poor neighbourhoods, in contrast to the somewhat abstract aesthetic ambitions of the Society. Ernest Hart was chair of the National Health Society, editor of the British Medical Journal, and his involvement in the MPGA was part of his wider interest in social, medical and environmental issues. This combination proved to be particularly significant in the story of the playground in that it brought together anxieties about the environmental problems of the city, medico-moral understandings of working-class poverty, public park rhetoric and concern about the status of empire – and presented the public garden and gymnasium as a pragmatic solution to all of these concerns.57 Unlike Benjamin Ward Richardson’s imagined city of health, the MPGA did not promote utopian visions and instead pursued more modest responses to the problems of the city. In doing so, the MPGA’s cause resonated with the politics and anxieties of the capital’s upper- and middle-classes, particularly the widely held concerns about social, biological, environmental and national degeneration.
Theories of degeneration grafted Darwinian ideas about evolution onto the city and its population, asserting that urban environmental maladies were leading directly to hereditary health problems and the social and biological regression of the nation. For Brabazon the ‘smoky and grimy city’ led directly to ‘pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power’ among the working-class population.58 However, he was less interested in the consequences for individuals and more concerned that a weak and unhealthy working population would threaten the nation’s place in the world. Brabazon’s commitment to Empire saw him play a leading role in nearly every campaign to promote the imperial cause to children, including the fabricated tradition of Empire Day (1904).59 He felt that open spaces could promote the health and subservience of the working-class, with beneficial consequences for Britain’s military, commercial and imperial status. This association between the urban environment, public health and the status of the empire held widespread appeal. For example, the president of the Manchester Medical Society, William Coates, emphasised the role of the medical profession in tackling national degeneration. Echoing Froebel’s assertion from a century earlier, he argued that ‘public gymnasiums should be provided by the municipality in all large towns’.60 As a result, the wellbeing of working-class children became a significant feature of medical and environmental debate. For one commentator, living in overcrowded conditions and playing in the street was resulting in the evolution of ‘strange creatures called the children of the town’.61 For the MPGA, such children could be ‘healthy neither mentally, morally, nor physically’.62
In speaking to such widespread concerns, the MPGA was able to attract members, donations and influence. Supporters included royalty, landed gentry, politicians, writers, physicians, scientists and clergy, and the organisation swiftly developed significant political leverage and accumulated considerable financial resources.63 The MPGA’s rapid prominence has attracted historical analysis but the scholarship has mainly focused on the Association’s efforts to create urban gardens for the working classes in general. However, from the outset the Association’s objectives included the provision of spaces specifically for children. Its second annual report made it clear that they were seeking to create three types of open space: gardens, playgrounds and gardens with playgrounds. Gardens would provide spaces of respite from the city, principally adult resting places with benches, grass, flowers, shrubs and trees. In contrast, playgrounds were intended for the exclusive use of children, a site for simple gymnastics. When garden and playground were combined, they would be laid out with ‘broad stretches of concrete pavement, interspersed with shrubs, and trees, and grass, and seats’.64
In promoting public gardens as a response to the problems of urban childhood, the MPGA’s rhetoric demonstrated considerable continuity with the ideas of earlier park advocates and their attempts to bring nature into the city. Urban green space was still understood as a restorative, educational and refining tonic. Ernest Hart wrote of the ‘alchemy of nature’ and its ability to tackle the evils of the urban environment.65 The MPGA also continued to associate open space with the biological wellbeing of the wider city organism, with new public gardens improving not just the local area but also providing the whole metropolis with ‘much more general lung power’.66 In common with parks elsewhere, nature also needed a degree of protection and images of gardens created by the MPGA show railings encircling lawns and flower beds, presumably in an effort to protect tender aspects of nature from the threat of destruction posed by both children and adults.67
In a modification to earlier park values, the MPGA argued that proximity and scale were key issues in open space provision and that earlier public parks had not delivered their anticipated benefits widely enough. Although large parks may have received thousands of visitors each day (a Whit Monday census in Victoria Park counted over three hundred thousand), these numbers seemed inconsequential when compared to the many more who lived in overcrowded neighbourhoods, unable to afford transport around the city.68 Such criticism was not new in the 1880s. As early as 1861 the lawyer and later MP William Marriot asserted that public parks were ‘too far apart to supply the lungs which a town like Manchester requires’ and too far away from children’s homes to provide a useful place for play.69 Such assertions were repeated more consistently from the 1880s. Walter Besant, author and MPGA member, felt that for ‘the children and the old people … of that vast region which lies north of the old London wall – a densely populated district inhabited almost entirely by the working classes – London might almost as well be without any parks at all’.70 For local councillor Reginald Bray, such far-off parks ‘containing soot-stained grass and a few dishevelled sparrows’ and lawns ‘on which no one must tread’ were no longer fit for purpose.71 For the MPGA and its supporters, the large, mid-century public parks that had been located on the edge of expanding cities had not delivered the benefits that had been expected.
As a result, rather than expect people to travel to large landscape parks, the MPGA sought to create smaller spaces within working-class neighbourhoods. Writing in 1887, Brabazon stated that ‘however important it may be to provide a few large and expensive parks for the people, it is of still greater importance to create small gardens and resting places within easy distance of their homes’, echoing Dickens’s earlier ambition to provide a daily source of healthy recreation.72 By 1893, Brabazon had refined this idea further, emphasising the need for smaller, equipped and segregated spaces. He called for the creation of ‘a children’s playground divided into two portions, one for boys and one for girls, both supplied with gymnastic apparatus’ within a quarter of a mile of every working-class home.73 This adaptation in the scale and siting of public green spaces was accompanied by a shift in ideas about their potential role in promoting healthiness, particularly the type of exercise that was best suited to tackling the problems of urban degeneration. Brabazon and the MPGA emphasised the importance of energetic physical activity rather than more genteel forms of public recreation, while also placing the provision of specific facilities for children more firmly within the park boundary. This emphasis on vigorous exercise had its roots in interconnected fields of thought and practical action, including the introduction of physical education in schools, high-profile debate about the merits of different systems of exercise, the respectability of physical exercise in public and the perceived shortcomings of military recruits.
The inadequacy of British troops in the South African War (1899–1902) is often cited as the main impetus for the provision of physical training facilities for adults in outdoor public spaces. But, while military setbacks may have contributed to turn-of-the-century anxiety about the status of the empire, there had long been concern about the physical strength of both military personnel and children, as well as competing theories about how to best address such concerns. The apparatus-based gymnastics promoted by Voelker and Clias gradually gained greater currency, so that by the late 1860s such exercise was a regular part of military training.74 At the same time, a competing system based on the theories of Pehr Henrik Ling from Sweden promoted ‘medical gymnastics’ performed largely without apparatus. Promoted energetically in Britain by the physician Mathias Roth, Ling-inspired gymnastics could seemingly provide both muscular strength and more general health benefits including better posture, improved deportment and even relief from chronic disease.75 The simple exercises and negligible equipment costs made it a favourable choice for the physical education of working-class children in state-funded elementary schools.
These two approaches to gymnastic exercise were played out in the rhetoric and practical work of the MPGA, which incorporated aspects of both. By the 1890s, Brabazon was increasingly convinced that physical training for working-class children in particular was of vital importance. He had previously worked in Germany at a time when advocates of apparatus-based gymnastics were publicly and enthusiastically promoting their ideas, including the use of the wooden vaulting horse and balance beams, along with structures made from scaffolding, ladders, poles and ropes.76 At the same time, the MPGA invested gymnastic exercise with advantages that went well beyond muscular development, subscribing to the wider sociomedical benefits that were associated with Ling, even paying for an instructor in Swedish gymnastics for the London School Board.77 This loosely defined association between gymnastic exercise and wider physical, medical and moral health echoed the correlation between parks as lungs and the wider healthy functioning of the city. When combined with the provision of amenities for children, they created a similarly evocative and malleable concept that would unite a broad range of constituents behind the principle of playgrounds for children.
Although the MPGA’s design ambitions were strongly shaped by leading members, the Association also employed landscape designers to apply and adapt these principles to individual sites and circumstances. At a time when the landscape sector was a male-dominated profession, the MPGA was unusual in employing female designers to lead its practical work. Fanny Wilkinson (1855–1951) had taken the unusual step of studying at the male-dominated Crystal Palace School of Landscape Gardening and Practical Horticulture, before starting work for the MPGA. Between 1884 and 1904 she designed and supervised the creation of over seventy-five open spaces for them, as well as planning the layout of Vauxhall Park for the Kyrle Society.78 Wilkinson resigned in 1904 to become the first female principal of the Swanley Horticultural College and Madeline Agar replaced her as the MPGA’s designer. Agar would go on to work for the MPGA for almost twenty-five years and published advice on the design of domestic gardens.79
In appointing female designers, the MPGA might seem like a progressive organisation. In reality, the appointment of Wilkinson and Agar highlights the conservative values that shaped the place of women in society and their apparent suitability for certain tasks and roles. In a House of Lords debate, Brabazon asserted that a ban on women being elected to the LCC should be lifted, not because equality was important, but rather because he felt women were better suited than men to dealing with aspects of the institution’s work. He stated that women’s natural ‘aptitude for details’ made them best placed to oversee the council’s care of children, ‘the housing of the working-classes, matters relating to the wellbeing of the poorer classes, and social reforms generally’.80 Hardly a radical suffragist, Brabazon expounded conservative social norms that linked women’s apparently inherent biological qualities with spheres of social, economic and environmental work. Alongside responsibility for raising children, domestic gardening in particular was seen as an appropriate activity for middle-class women. This presumably made the design of gardens for children a particularly suitable task, especially as playgrounds were understood in part as a remedy for the inadequacy of working-class homes. At the same time, Wilkinson and Agar forged highly influential careers, working on the design and construction of high-profile public spaces at a time when there were few women in the landscape profession. As such, they played a significant role in shaping the form of spaces set aside for children’s recreation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Despite this considerable continuity in designers and rhetoric, there was not a single dominant vision for the ideal form of a children’s playground, and three approaches were in circulation around the turn of the century. Firstly, the ‘levelled and gravelled’ ground for play, seen in Philips Park and Freshwater Place, remained an influential conception. Secondly, the outdoor gymnasium was increasingly associated specifically with children’s public recreation as a result of the MPGA’s high-profile advocacy. Thirdly, the comprehensive playgrounds that typified provision in the USA achieved notable publicity in Britain at this time. The next section explores these competing visions in more detail.
Despite the emphasis on gardens and greenery, the MPGA continued to create sombre playground spaces that resembled those from the middle of the century. In the 1840s and 1850s, fashioning a recreational space for either adults or children invariably involved creating a flat, level site and covering it with gravel. Letters between health boards, vestries, schools and central government often referred to works to level and gravel an area to make it suitable for recreation.81 In some instances, the MPGA continued this approach. Spa Fields in Clerkenwell had previously been a tea house and pleasure garden (1770) and then a burial ground (1777), notorious in the 1840s for its ‘pestilential condition’ and illicit exhumations.82 In 1885, the Association drained the site and imported a large amount of shingle to specifically create a ground for children, part of a wider process that saw over one hundred disused graveyards reclaimed as public spaces.83 At Spa Fields, the playground was primarily an open area for recreation, much like a parade ground provided an obstacle-free space for marching. Spa Fields in particular performed this dual role; once levelled and gravelled it provided a space for the 21st Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corp to drill and only at other times was it somewhere that children could use.84
Elsewhere, Little Dorrit’s Playground (1902) was similarly described as a levelled area specifically intended for use by children. It cost £2.4m (£5,600) to purchase the land and £196,000 (£450) to level, gravel and drain it.85 The Illustrated London News shared a sketch of the newly opened space (Figure 1.3), which provides an insight into the way that this type of playground, its aesthetics and its use were presented to the wider public. It was shown as a space to play active games, use outdoor toys and socialise, all activities that would have previously taken place in the street. It also represents gender- and age-specific ideas about the way that children and adults would behave in such a space. Girls are shown talking in pairs, carrying a small baby and playing with toys. Boys are shown pretending to be harnessed horses and a driver, galloping around the playground, while adults are seen in the background, close to the surrounding blocks of flats. Similar spaces and behavioural expectations were created beyond London too. In Cardiff, Loudoun Square was partially converted into a level playground and covered with gravel at a cost of over £110,000 (£257).86 Such spaces seem to have been primarily designed as substitutes for the street, sites where children could continue with existing play habits, away from dirt and danger.
At the same time, the MPGA used the term playground to describe a second, quite different spatial form. In 1884, it leased half of the old Horsemonger Lane Gaol site and converted it into a children’s playground, at a cost of £200,000 (£365). But rather than simply a levelled area set aside for children, the new Newington Recreation Ground also included apparatus. The playground was divided in two by low fencing, creating one part for girls with swings and see-saws and one part for boys with gymnastic apparatus and giant strides.87 This example typifies the MPGA’s approach to the acquisition, design and maintenance of public spaces. They secured access to the site, in this instance by leasing it from the landowner, designed the new playground and arranged for it to be laid out, and then sought to place responsibility for maintenance on the local vestry.88 It followed a similar process in Islington, north London, when it helped to create the children’s gymnasium at Norfolk Square Playground.89 This approach saw the provision of children’s gymnasiums expand considerably. Myatt’s Fields, laid out by Wilkinson and the MPGA, included two children’s gymnasiums, one for boys and one for girls. Finsbury Park included gymnasiums for both children and adults and a carpenter’s workshop to undertake repairs, while in Battersea Park a children’s gymnasium was planned to compliment the adult equivalent.90 Records from 1889 describe Victoria Park without specific facilities for children, but by 1892 an update from the superintendent reported that the new children’s gymnasium was in use.91
Figure 1.3: Little Dorrit’s playground by H. Seppings Wright in the Illustrated London News, 8 February 1902, p. 208, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.
A third vision for the playground asserted influence from across the Atlantic. But rather than simply a levelled and gravelled substitute for the street or an equipped children’s gymnasium, in the USA it was the ‘organised playground’ that increasingly dominated conceptions of recreational provision for poor city children. There had been links between US and British park advocates and designers since at least the 1840s, epitomised by Frederick Law Olmsted’s visit to Birkenhead Park and its influence on the design of Central Park (1858) in New York. In 1880, Olmsted argued that smaller parks located at regular intervals would be more effective than larger green spaces, and Brabazon later promoted this idea to the LCC parks committee and shared details of his conference attendances and park visits in the USA.92 Henry Curtis, founding member of the Playground Association of America, reported in his 1915 book, Education Through Play, on the ideas and actions of Brabazon and the MPGA.93 There was also an exchange of information and ideas at a governmental level too.
In 1917, the British Ministry of Reconstruction asked their ambassador in Washington to find out more about the playground movement in the USA, although it is not clear from the records what motivated the request. The State Department’s comprehensive response provided both a detailed bibliography and a range of pamphlets describing playgrounds across the country.94 The communiqué highlighted the extent to which the playground movement in the USA had relatively quickly shifted from a primary concern with ameliorating the physical conditions of children in the urban environment, to a wider notion of reforming the child, through appropriate physical, moral, spiritual and nationalistic instruction. Sand gardens and small parks were replaced in the early twentieth century by a comprehensive community service that included structured educational activities, including gardening, debating and sewing. As such, the US playground increasingly resembled a formal educational establishment whose purpose was to teach both young and old about progressive civic hygiene.95 This was seen in Olmsted’s 1891 design for the Charlestown Playground in Boston, which included a large open area for organised activities, avenues of trees on the perimeter and gymnastic equipment located on the southern boundary.96 The US playground incorporated the levelled and gravelled space for games, with the apparatus of the children’s gymnasium and the structured activities promoted in Britain by the Children’s Happy Evening Association and others. The resulting ‘organised playground’ received wider publicity in the UK, largely due to the work of play scheme advocate Mary Ward.97
These different visions for the playground – levelled and gravelled, equipped and organised – were all in circulation in the early twentieth century. While the latter did not become common in Britain, the idea that children needed guidance in their play did resonate with some. Contemporary theories about play conceptualised it as an activity where children either spent surplus energy or recuperated lost vigour, practised inherent survival skills or took steps in a journey from individual savagery to civilisation.98 There seems to be little explicit reference to these notions of play in the rhetoric of the MPGA, concerned as it was with the redemptive possibility of nature and exercise, rather than necessarily with children’s instinctively playful behaviour. However, in the eyes of some observers, many poor urban children did not know how to properly make use of playgrounds. For one commentator, ‘the poor little creatures sit or stand listlessly about, idle and bewildered, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to play’.99 While this points most significantly to the disconnect between the reformers’ ideas about childhood recreation and children’s instinctive, playful preferences, for some playground advocates it meant that children needed to be taught how to play if they were to become model citizens of the future.
As Carole O’Reilly has shown, public parks played a role in promoting active urban citizenship and a sense of communal responsibility. In spaces such as Heaton Park in Manchester, Victorian moralism was gradually replaced by Edwardian pragmatism, with parks increasingly imagined as spaces of shared social responsibility for health, where individual exercise could contribute to a collective, colonial future.100 As a result, the playground might seem like an obvious site for teaching future generations the codes of normative citizenship. But beyond the provision of apparatus for strengthening exercise, there was rarely any instruction or guidance for children using such spaces. Whereas the US model required adults to organise the playground and to teach children how to play, this was generally not the approach adopted in Britain. While some advocates emphasised that a playground worker of the right background and temperament could help children to play properly, there is little evidence that adult play workers were a consistent feature of British public playgrounds at the turn of the century. As we will see in later chapters, it was only in the mid-twentieth century that such involvement became more commonplace. Instead, delivering Brabazon’s geopolitical ambitions through the playground would instead rely on something like osmosis. The ‘supervision of a judicious caretaker’ would prevent ‘tyranny and misconduct’ but achieving broader objectives would not rely on the direct intervention of trained play workers – instead it would be achieved through self-directed exercise and a suitably green environment.101
As a short-term solution, Brabazon argued that vacant building plots could be turned into temporary spaces for children, equipped by the MPGA with simple gymnastic equipment until such time as the land was sold for development.102 Despite raising the issue in parliament and organising well-attended local public meetings, the MPGA was largely unsuccessful in securing such short-term spaces for play. In contrast, efforts to create more permanent sites for children’s recreation were considerably more successful, in part due to Brabazon’s direct political influence. He was appointed as an Alderman of the LCC for a period of eight years in the 1890s and was also the first chair of its parks committee.103 This helped to ensure not only a cooperative working relationship between the MPGA and local government officials but also the continued influence of Brabazon’s vision for the playground. By 1892, the MPGA had made a direct financial contribution of over £14m (£27,991) towards the protection, acquisition or laying out of over fifty open spaces (in comparison, the figure for the Kyrle Society was eight).104 Over the next decade the MPGA made significant further progress. By 1900 it had been involved in over one hundred sites and more than twenty included dedicated space for children. For example, the Association contributed over £1.4m (£3,000) towards the creation of Meath Gardens in Bethnal Green, which opened in 1894 and included two large playgrounds and a sandpit. Bartholomew Square (1895), near Old Street, had been ‘asphalted for children especially’ by the MPGA, who contributed £87,830 (£182) towards the cost.105 In 1889 only two LCC parks, Myatt’s Field and Finsbury Park, included specific facilities for children, but by 1915 thirty parks included children’s gymnasiums.106
Beyond London, municipalities and philanthropic organisations were creating dedicated spaces for children in increasing numbers. In Manchester, the Prussia Street Recreation Ground opened in 1884 with see-saws and swings, and by the early twentieth century the provision of children’s playgrounds in ‘congested areas’ such as Ancoats and Angel Meadow had become municipal policy.107 Birmingham’s Burbury Street Recreation Ground was covered with gravel by the borough surveyor in 1877 to make it suitable for use as a playground.108 In 1914, the superintendent of parks in Edinburgh reported that fifteen children’s gymnasiums had been provided in the city, while in Dublin four garden playgrounds equipped with apparatus had been established.109
This apparent progress conceals the difficulties sometimes associated with playground creation. St Paul’s Churchyard and Playground on Rotherhithe Street in London was asphalted, equipped with gymnastic apparatus and set aside for children. It was opened by the MPGA in 1885, closed in 1888 only to be reopened in 1890 by the LCC. At St Leonard’s Churchyard in Shoreditch ‘the conduct of children was very bad’, while in Dublin and London authorities established comprehensive regulations in an attempt to govern the use of playground spaces.110 Even if they could be regulated, such play spaces did not always live up to campaigners’ expectations, particularly those who were most interested in the benefits of nature and aesthetics. MPGA member Isabella Holmes felt that the new play space at Spa Fields provided a pale imitation of the pastoral version of nature that was most needed in the city. Even after the considerable money and effort, the playground was ‘about as different from an ordinary village green, where country boys and girls romp and shout, as two things with the same purpose can well be’.111 For Holmes, the green grass, cackling geese and picturesque cottages that surrounded the village green were replaced in the urban playground by gritty gravel and stray cats, encircled by dirty and monotonous housing.
Holmes’s impression of the reworked Spa Fields demonstrates how bucolic landscape ideals were often more difficult to implement in the smaller spaces created by the MPGA. Reformers may have clung on to the potential of nature in the city, but those creating playgrounds were increasingly focused on the provision of natural features at a more manageable scale. Rather than expansive lawns, the MPGA promoted trees and shrubs as a pragmatic response, and it provided lists of specimens suitable for smoke-laden urban environments. Park authorities in Manchester went further in maximising room for play and ‘very little attempt’ was made to plant greenery in playgrounds located in the poor central districts of the city.112 This tension between space for play and space for nature would be evident in playground discourse throughout the twentieth century. Despite the apparent disconnect between the imagined ideal and the reality on the ground, playgrounds were invariably popular and busy. After school hours and at the weekends, Spa Fields was full of children ‘running about all over the open part of the ground’, while further east the children’s gymnasium in Victoria Park was described as popular, greatly used and often very crowded.113
In summarising the mid-nineteenth-century experience, we find that dedicated spaces for children’s recreation had appeared in a small number of places intended to improve the lives of the urban poor. In Manchester and Salford, some of the earliest public parks included specific amenities for children, but these facilities were hardly central to the design or function of such spaces. In general, children were not a central constituent of the mid-century public park. Grounds for children’s recreation were occasionally a feature of attempts to improve working-class housing, including Freshwater Place in London, but Charles Dickens’s high-profile attempt to create more dedicated spaces for poor city children met with little success. Furthermore, children’s place in the playground was far from certain as the term was still widely used to represent a range of spaces intended for adult recreation. The mid-century experience highlights the provisional nature of state, voluntary and philanthropic efforts to shape children’s play through adaptations to the urban environments.
By the 1880s, changing attitudes to childhood, particularly the impact of compulsory education in conversely shaping time for recreation, created a wider social milieu that was more receptive to the need for dedicated public spaces for children. At the same time, wider anxiety about the social and political consequences of poverty and a burgeoning interest among philanthropic reformers in the problems of the urban environment focused attention on the pragmatic possibilities of the playground as part of wider efforts to reform the city and its inhabitants. Within this context, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association combined urban anxieties and concern for the future of the empire with a commitment to the naturalistic public park and a belief in the positive potential of healthy and strong working-class children. Achieving this promise required a modification to earlier park ideals, particularly in relation to the location and size of green spaces and a greater emphasis on energetic, gymnastic exercise as the best route to health. Brabazon’s role in both the MPGA and London County Council ensured that this vision for the playground featured in the thinking and action of both state and philanthropic actors in the capital. At the same time, delivering these objectives on the ground was rarely straightforward. The public spaces created by the MPGA often required significant work to provide a suitably level and hardwearing surface and the installation of gymnastic equipment to promote regenerative energetic exercise. Although sometimes supervised, adult involvement was primarily limited to caretaking, in contrast to US playgrounds and despite considerable transatlantic exchange.
But while the provision of dedicated recreational spaces for children gained credibility, particularly among increasingly confident municipal authorities, the influence, financial resources and effectiveness of the MPGA gradually declined. In part this was because Brabazon withdrew from public activities during the interwar period, but it might also be a product of the Association’s apparent success in putting green space provision on the municipal map. Indeed, the principle of the children’s playground was widely adopted by progressive local authorities after the First World War. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, while the ‘idea’ of the playground became more firmly embedded in the minds of park superintendents and urban reformers, its particular form in public parks and on housing estates was far from settled.
Notes
1. David A. Reeder, ‘The Social Construction of Green Space in London Prior to the Second World War’, in The European City and Green Space: London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St. Petersburg, 1850–2000, ed. Peter Clark (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 41–67; Matti O. Hannikainen, The Greening of London 1920–2000 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016).
2. Felix Driver, ‘Moral Geographies: Social Science and the Urban Environment in Mid-Nineteenth Century England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 13 (1988), 275–87; Peter Thorsheim, ‘Green Space and Class in Imperial London’, in The Nature of Cities, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), pp. 24–37; Karen R. Jones, ‘ “The Lungs of the City”: Green Space, Public Health and Bodily Metaphor in the Landscape of Urban Park History’, Environment and History, 24 (2018), 39–58; Kevin Brehony, ‘A “Socially Civilising Influence”? Play and the Urban “Degenerate”’, Paedagogica Historica, 39 (2003), 87–106; Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London: Routledge, 2005); Harry Hendrick, ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present’, in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 29–53.
3. Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective (London: Thomas Bosworth, 1850); Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London, 1851), I; George Godwin, Town Swamps and Social Bridges (London: Routledge, Warnes and Routledge, 1859).
4. Highway Act, 1835, http://
www .legislation .gov .uk /ukpga /Will4 /5 -6 /50 /section /LXXII /enacted [accessed 10 January 2022]; Sabine Schulting, Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture: Writing Materiality (London: Routledge, 2016). 5. Linda M. Austin, ‘Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy’, Studies in Romanticism, 42.1 (2003), 75–98.
6. Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man, trans. by W.N. Hailmann (Norderstedt: Vero Verlag, 2015).
7. Samuel Wilderspin, A System of Education for the Young (London: Hodson, 1840).
8. Jane Read, ‘Gutter to Garden: Historical Discourses of Risk in Interventions in Working Class Children’s Street Play’, Children and Society, 25 (2011), 421–34.
9. Charles Dickens, ‘London Pauper Children’, Household Words, 1850, p. 551.
10. ‘A Want of the Age’, Bell’s Life in London, 17 January 1858, p. 7.
11. ‘Playground and Recreation Society’, Lloyd’s Illustrated, 22 May 1859, p. 7.
12. Henry Silver, ‘Ragged Playgrounds’, Punch, 1 May 1858, 181; ‘The Advantage of Taking a Short Cut through a Court’, Punch, 4 June 1859, 233; ‘Playground and General Recreation Society’, Daily News, 3 June 1858, p. 3.
13. Recreation Grounds Act, 1859 https://
www .legislation .gov .uk /ukpga /Vict /22 /27 /contents /enacted [accessed 9 January 2023]. 14. ‘The Gardens of Lincoln’s Inn Fields’, The Times, 22 May 1860, p. 12.
15. Jones, ‘The Lungs of the City’, p. 56.
16. David Lambert, ‘Rituals of Transgression in Public Parks in Britain, 1846 to the Present’, in Performance and Appropriation: Profane Rituals in Gardens and Landscapes, ed. Michel Conan (Dumbarton Oaks: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 195–210 (p. 197).
17. Lambert, ‘Rituals of Transgression’, p. 204; Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Eighteenth Annual Report (London, 1900), p. 53.
18. Thomas Chawner and James Pennethorne, ‘Plan for Laying out the Proposed Eastern Park to Be Called Victoria Park’, 1841, British Library, Maps.Crace XIX 43a; ‘Albert Park’, 1851, National Archives, WORK 32/424.
19. Lambert, ‘Rituals of Transgression’.
20. Nan Dreher, ‘The Virtuous and Verminous: Turn of the Century Moral Panics in London’s Public Parks’, Albion, 29 (1997), 246–67.
21. Tom Hulme, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019).
22. W.T. Marriott, The Necessity of Open Spaces and Public Playgrounds in Large Towns (Manchester: Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, 1862), p. 4, Wellcome Collection.
23. Ordnance Survey, ‘Manchester and Salford Town Plan Sheet 21’, 1850.
24. Allan Ruff, The Biography of Philips Park, Manchester 1846–1996, School of Planning and Landscape Occasional Paper 56 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2000).
25. ‘Official Inspection of the Manchester Public Parks’, Manchester Guardian, 19 August 1846, p. 6; A Few Pages about Manchester (Manchester: Love and Barton, 1850).
26. George Forrest, ‘The Giant Stride, or Flying Steps, and Its Capabilities’, Every Boy’s Magazine, 1 March 1862, pp. 122–7 (p. 122).
27. Jessica Riskin, ‘Machines in the Garden’, Republics of Letters, 1.2 (2010), 16–43.
28. Katy Layton-Jones, ‘Manufactured Landscapes: Victorian Public Parks and the Industrial Imagination’, in Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700, ed. Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2018), pp. 120–37.
29. Joshua Major, The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852), p. 196.
30. A Few Pages about Manchester, p. 31.
31. ‘Salford Town Council Park’, Manchester Examiner and Times, 13 November 1850, p. 6.
32. In presenting financial amounts, this book adopts the same approach as Roderick Floud’s Economic History of the English Garden. Based on a methodology developed by an international team of economic historians, Floud uses an index of average earnings, given the significance of labour in landscape projects, to translate historical financial values into present-day amounts. Using the Measuring Worth online calculator and assuming that creating a playground similarly represents a labour-intensive construction project, here financial amounts are quoted at 2021 values followed by the historical amount in brackets, enabling a straightforward comparison across time. Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden (London: Allen Lane, 2019); Measuring Worth, ‘Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.K. Pound Amount, 1270 to Present’, 2023, www
.measuringworth .com /ukcompare [accessed 6 June 2023]. 33. David Baldwin, ‘Major, Joshua (1786–1866), Landscape Gardener and Designer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
34. ‘Opening of Stamford Park, Altrincham’, Manchester Times, 30 October 1880, p. 7.
35. ‘Opening of the Portsmouth Public Park’, Hampshire Telegraph, 29 May 1878, p. 3.
36. Susan Lasdun, The English Park: Royal, Private and Public (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991).
37. ‘Newspaper Chat’, Examiner, 12 June 1825, p. 745; ‘Advertisements’, La Belle Assemblée, 1 July 1825.
38. ‘Voelker’s Gymnastics’, Examiner, 11 December 1825, p. 787.
39. ‘Prof. Voelker Pentonville Gymnasium’, The Lady’s Magazine, 31 July 1827, 392.
40. ‘The London Gymnastic Institution’, The Times, 5 January 1827, p. 4.
41. Peter Henry Clias, An Elementary Course of Gymnastic Exercises (London: Sherwood, Jones & Co., 1823), p. v.
42. Donald Walker, British Manly Exercises (London: Hurst, 1834).
43. ‘Government Gymnasium’, Illustrated London News, 29 April 1848, p. 283.
44. ‘The Gymnasium, Primrose Hill’, The Penny Illustrated Paper, 2 May 1863, p. 4.
45. ‘The Regent’s Park Gymnasium’, The Standard, 21 August 1878, p. 2.
46. The British Academy, Reframing Childhood Past and Present: Chronologies (London: The British Academy, 2019).
47. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor (1883) (London: Frank Cass, 1970), p. 16.
48. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London: Salvation Army, 1890), pp. xxi and 295.
49. Robert Henderson, ‘Things Made by Children’, Strand Magazine, 1897, 752–62; Brehony.
50. Octavia Hill, Letters to Fellow-Workers 1864 to 1911, ed. Elinor Southwood Ouvry (London: Adelphi, 1933), p. 5.
51. Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor (London: Macmillan, 1883), pp. 90–92.
52. Benjamin Ward Richardson, Hygeia: A City of Health (London: Macmillan, 1876), p. 27.
53. W.H. Prior, ‘The Queen in Victoria Park’, Illustrated London News, 12 April 1873, p. 349.
54. London County Council, ‘Parks and Open Spaces, Descriptions, By-Laws, Acts of Parliament, Regulations’, 1894, p. 152, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/104.
55. ‘The Trifler’, The Sunday Times, 11 April 1880, p. 7; Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans Green, 1882).
56. John Springhall, ‘Brabazon, Reginald, Twelfth Earl of Meath (1841–1929), Politician and Philanthropist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); P.W.J. Bartrip, ‘Hart, Ernest Abraham (1835–1898), Medical Journalist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
57. Clare Hickman, ‘To Brighten the Aspect of Our Streets and Increase the Health and Enjoyment of Our City’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 118 (2013), 112–19.
58. Reginald Brabazon, Social Arrows, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1887), p. 13.
59. Jim English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 247–76.
60. William Coates, ‘The Duty of the Medical Profession in the Prevention of National Deterioration’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1909), 1045–50.
61. Reginald Bray, ‘The Children of the Town’, 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. 111–64 (p. 126).
62. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Eighteenth Annual Report, p. 31.
63. H.L. Malchow, ‘Public Gardens and Social Action in Late Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1985), 97–124 (pp. 109–14).
64. Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard, and Playground Association, Second Annual Report (London, 1884), p. 9, US National Library of Medicine, archive.org, 101200449.
65. Ernest Hart, ‘Graveyards as Recreation Grounds’, The Times, 20 August 1885, p. 8.
66. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Eighteenth Annual Report, p. 32.
67. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Twenty Second Annual Report, 1904, The Guildhall Library, ST 317.
68. W.J. Gordon, ‘The London County Council and the Recreation of the People’, The Leisure Hour, 1894, pp. 112–15.
69. Marriott, The Necessity of Open Spaces, p. 7.
70. Walter Besant, ‘The Social Wants of London: IV Gardens and Playgrounds’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 18 March 1884, pp. 1–2 (p. 1).
71. Bray, ‘The Children of the Town’, pp. 116–18.
72. Brabazon, Social Arrows, p. 54.
73. Earl of Meath, ‘Public Playgrounds for Children’, The Nineteenth Century, 34 (1893), 267–71.
74. Archibald Maclaren, A Military System of Gymnastic Exercises (London: HMSO, 1868).
75. Mathias Roth, Gymnastic Exercises without Apparatus According to Ling’s System, 7th edn (London: A.N. Myers & Co., 1887).
76. Gertrud Pfister, ‘Cultural Confrontations: German Turnen, Swedish Gymnastics and English Sport – European Diversity in Physical Activities from a Historical Perspective’, Culture, Sport, Society, 6 (2003), 61–91.
77. Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard, and Playground Association, Second Annual Report, p. 23.
78. Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Wilkinson, Fanny Rollo (1855–1951), Landscape Gardener’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
79. Madeline Agar, Garden Design in Theory and Practice, 2nd edn (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1913), p. 200.
80. Earl of Meath, House of Lords Debate, 9 June 1890, Vol. 345, Col.264–267 (Hansard, 1890).
81. See, for example, Thomas Firmin to Poor Law Board, Letter, 22 August 1854, National Archives, MH 12/11000/243, fo.449–50; Charles Hart to Poor Law Commission, Letter, 14 November 1845, National Archives, MH 12/5967/153, fo.300.
82. Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1896).
83. Peter Thorsheim, ‘The Corpse in the Garden: Burial, Health, and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century London’, Environmental History, 16 (2011), 38–68.
84. John James Sexby, The Municipal Parks, Gardens, and Open Spaces of London: Their History and Associations (London: Elliot Stock, 1898).
85. London County Council, ‘Ceremony of Opening Little Dorrit’s Playground, Southwark’, 1902, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/CER/03.
86. W.W. Pettigrew, ‘Park Superintendent’s Report Book’, trans. by Anne Bell and Andrew Bell, 1908, Cardiff Council Parks Service, uncatalogued.
87. ‘Children’s Playground in South London’, Illustrated London News, 10 May 1884, p. 443; Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard, and Playground Association, Second Annual Report, p. 19.
88. An almost identical approach was followed by the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association (1859) in its efforts to provide public drinking fountains (see Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association, Annual Report, 1865, London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/3168/017).
89. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Annual Report, 1932, London Metropolitan Archive, CLC/011/MS22290.
90. London County Council, ‘Return of the Names and Wages of and Work Performed by All Persons Employed in the Council’s Parks and Also of the Respective Areas Devoted to Gardens, Lawns, Fields and Playgrounds and the Extent of Conservatories in Such Parks’, 1889, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/104.
91. London County Council, ‘Report of the Parks and Open Spaces Committee, 16 May’, 1893, p. 5, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/104.
92. Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks (Brookline, MA, 1902), p. 107; Earl of Meath, Public Parks of America, Report to the Parks and Open Space Committee, London County Council, 1890, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/PUB/02/01/066; John Lucas, ‘A Centennial Retrospective: The 1889 Boston Conference on Physical Training’, Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 60.9 (1989), 30–33.
93. Henry S. Curtis, Education Through Play (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 85.
94. Rowland Hayes to Paul C. Wilson, ‘Papers from New York Committee on Recreation to the New York City Mayor’s Office’, 29 October 1917, National Archives, RECO 1/694.
95. Everett B. Mero, American Playgrounds: Their Construction, Equipment, Maintenance and Utility (Boston: School of Education, Harvard University, 1908), p. 23.
96. Frederick Law Olmsted, ‘Boston: Charleston Playground: General Plan’, 1891, Artstor/University of California, San Diego.
97. ‘An Organized Playground’, The Times, 8 July 1909, p. 9.
98. Walter Wood, Children’s Play and Its Place in Education (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1913).
99. B. Holland, ‘London Playgrounds’, Macmillan’s Magazine (London, 1882), XLVI edition, pp. 321–4.
100. Carole O’Reilly, ‘From “The People” to “The Citizen”: The Emergence of the Edwardian Municipal Park in Manchester, 1902–1912’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 136–55.
101. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Eighteenth Annual Report, p. 31.
102. Brabazon, Social Arrows, p. 40.
103. ‘London County Council’, The Times, 6 February 1889, p. 11; ‘London County Council’, The Times, 30 March 1898, p. 15; ‘Opening of Clissold Park’, The Standard, 25 July 1889, p. 3; ‘Lord Meath’s Memories’, The Times Literary Supplement, 10 May 1923, p. 317.
104. London County Council, ‘County of London Parks, Open Spaces and Commons’, 1892, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/104.
105. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Eighteenth Annual Report, pp. 39 and 57, see appendices for a full list of sites and the MPGA’s contribution.
106. London County Council, ‘Return of the Names and Wages’; 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).
107. Hazel Conway, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); W.W. Pettigrew, Handbook of Manchester Parks and Recreation Grounds (Manchester: Manchester City Council, 1929), p. 8.
108. ‘Opening of Burbury Street Recreation Ground’, Birmingham Daily Post, 3 December 1877, p. 8.
109. John W. McHattie, Report on Public Parks, Gardens and Open Spaces (Edinburgh: City of Edinburgh, 1914), RHS Lindley, 999 4C EDI; Vanessa Rutherford, ‘Muscles and Morals: Children’s Playground Culture in Ireland, 1836–1918’, in Leisure and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leeann Lane and William Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 61–79.
110. Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, Eighteenth Annual Report, p. 45; Rutherford, ‘Muscles and Morals’; London County Council, ‘Parks and Open Spaces, Descriptions, By-Laws, Acts of Parliament, Regulations’.
111. Isabella M. Holmes, The London Burial Grounds: Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: T.F. Unwin, 1896), p. 277.
112. Pettigrew, Handbook of Manchester Parks, p. 22.
113. Holmes, The London Burial Grounds, p. 276; London County Council, ‘Report as to the Condition of Victoria Park’, 1893, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/104.