Chapter 4 Orthodoxy and adventure: ‘playgrounds are often as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring’
By the mid-twentieth century, playgrounds had been created in considerable numbers, while advocates and manufacturers had established an increasingly standardised playground ideal. Children’s playgrounds were imagined as exciting and healthy spaces of leisure, as well as a refuge from the life-threatening dangers of the street. Whether in green spaces or on housing estates, the parks profession was largely responsible for providing and laying out play spaces. Used to purchasing specialist technical equipment like mowers or greenhouses, they quickly adopted a similar approach with the playground, procuring manufactured equipment from commercial suppliers. As a result, the equipped playground with its swings, slides and roundabouts became the orthodox image of the place where children should play. As we shall see, children’s playgrounds, like public spaces in general, were affected by the Second World War, but the fundamental assumption that playgrounds were necessary remained powerful. The creation of the postwar welfare state set the context for developments in mid-century playground thinking and helped to embed the playground more firmly into visions of both urban childhood and the urban environment. As town planners sought to create more rational and hopeful urban landscapes, dedicated spaces for play proved to be an important component of renewed neighbourhoods and new towns. In exploring these issues, this chapter addresses the general omission of the playground from otherwise comprehensive accounts of child welfare and the architecture of the welfare state.1 But while the principle of the playground became more firmly established after the war, the orthodox form was seen as increasingly problematic. For its critics, the asphalt surface and metal equipment meant there was little room for nature, while the provision of apparatus that solely facilitated physical activity was seen as inadequate in meeting the holistic developmental needs of children.
In some ways, postwar campaigners displayed considerable continuity with the rhetoric of earlier playground advocates. They emphasised the detrimental social consequences of street play, particularly the perceived relationship between the street and delinquency, and the educational and health benefits that interaction with appropriate forms of nature offered for urban children. In other ways, their campaign rhetoric differed significantly and amplified the conceptions of childhood and playground critiques that had first appeared in the 1930s. The playground was still imagined as a space of childhood health, but rather than simply focus on the promotion of physical exercise in the open air, campaigners expected the playground to support children’s cognitive and emotional development and provide a wider range of ‘natural’ experiences. Greenery and planting remained one aspect of the natural world that they sought to recreate, but opportunities to interact with mud and sand, water and wood also became increasingly significant. The fun and excitement that Charles Wicksteed felt his playground equipment represented was replaced among postwar campaigners by an emphasis on the need for the playground to facilitate children’s freedom, creativity and self-expression.
This chapter shows how the National Playing Fields Association (NPFA) continued to play a significant role in coordinating playground advocacy and sharing knowledge. But at the same time, it highlights the increasing influence of a wider range of individuals and professions on play space design and provision. In particular, the chapter shows how town planners routinely allocated specific sites for play in their visions for a modern urban environment and the playground became an essential and everyday feature of both imagined and realised new urban communities. At the same time, child welfare campaigners and sociologists increasingly emphasised the need for a greater sensitivity to the diverse play interests of children and their perceived developmental needs. Campaigners, architects and artists imagined new playground forms which promoted children’s cognitive, emotional, physical and social development. Marjory Allen (Lady Allen of Hurtwood, 1897–1976) in particular became a figurehead for alternative visions of the playground. In considering these wider influences on the playground form and function, this chapter expands the spatial and temporal scope of existing historiography on the postwar adventure playground movement.
Orthodoxy consolidated: postwar planners and the playground
During the Second World War, the themes and practices that had dominated interwar playground discourse continued to be important. The NPFA sustained a close working relationship with the government, loaning money to the war effort and promoting the playground as a way to address child fatalities on the roads.2 On a practical level, the Association continued to acquire or partially fund a small number of new play spaces, including in Ferryhill in County Durham and King’s Somborne in Hampshire.3 At the same time, the fear of substantial casualties as a result of wartime bombing prompted far-reaching responses and had implications for the playground. Plans had been developed in the 1930s, particularly by London County Council (LCC) in London, to remove children from large cities in the event of Britain’s involvement in a looming conflict.4 During the war, over a million children moved intermittently back and forth between urban centres and rural evacuation areas, apparently leaving city swings idle and play streets empty.5
But, at the same time, children who remained in the city often made use of damaged buildings and bomb sites as informal places for play. Often remembered fondly by adults who spent their childhood playing in the war-torn city, such activities also inadvertently created a powerful contrast of childhood innocence and wartime devastation, one that would have a lasting impact.6 A number of scholars have charted the simultaneously unsettling and inspiring terrain of the bombsite and its influence on contemporary writers, filmmakers, artists and architects, a significance that is explored later in this chapter. But, more immediately, anxiety about play on bomb-damaged sites further fuelled calls to remove children from the city and provide better places to play. Commentators complained of children’s use of bomb-damaged buildings and looting of empty homes, while Ministry of Health propaganda posters urged children away from bombsites and encouraged their families to leave the city altogether.7 Save the Children Fund created air raid shelter play centres in large cities, while playground advocates promoted the need for appropriate play facilities in evacuation areas, where relationships between evacuees and host communities were often strained.8 Some disgruntled rural residents drew on earlier notions of degeneration to complain of the ‘stunted, misshapen creatures’ being sent from poor urban neighbourhoods into clean homes in the country, the city children seemingly beyond redemption even when relocated to more bucolic surroundings.9 Others were slightly more sympathetic and felt that providing playgrounds in the green spaces of reception areas would help to tackle the inappropriate behaviour of evacuee children, as well as contributing to the future health and fitness of the nation.10
In February 1940, a contributor to the Journal of Park Administration felt that the ‘beauties of Nature leave [evacuee children] stone cold’, resulting in mischief and damage in the green spaces of reception areas, and that playgrounds would provide a distraction that would help to prevent such hooliganism.11 However, only a few months later, manufacturers such as Wicksteed & Co. had to adapt their production lines to war work and could no longer supply new equipment.12 Parks were turned over to military installations and food growing, while children’s playgrounds were impacted by the war too. In 1940, the Salford parks committee decided to remove iron railings and playground swings for war purposes, while the playground in Ardwick Green Park in Manchester was summarily requisitioned by the military, to the consternation of local open space advocates.13 In London, Paddington Recreation Ground was repurposed as a municipal piggery, with pens made from bombed timber and food waste used as feed. In two years, the recreation ground supplied over 300 tonnes of pig meat and generated an annual net profit of over £320,000 (£2,250).14
The recreation ground was re-opened in May 1948 by Field Marshal Montgomery as a children’s playground with manufactured equipment, paddling pool and sandpit.15 In recreating a playground in this form, Paddington borough council’s parks department drew upon a vision of the ideal playground that had been largely settled in the minds and practices of park administrators since the 1930s. Writing in 1946, the director of the Institute of Park Administration demonstrated the ongoing influence of this ideal type, suggesting that ‘a children’s paradise’ should include manufactured equipment, unclimbable fencing and asphalt surfacing.16 The images that he used to support his article demonstrate a rather sombre and sanitised vision of a childhood utopia, devoid of the garden planting seen in nineteenth-century children’s gymnasiums or the apparent excitement of the Wicksteed Park playground. This certainty among park managers about the ideal form of the playground continued for at least the next ten years. During the late 1940s and early 1950s contributors to parks trade journals rarely mentioned children’s playgrounds, other than to note their existence in accounts of public parks in cities such as Cardiff and Portsmouth. Postwar shortages of raw materials and skilled labour, as well as high inflation and a thirty-three per cent purchase tax, made the supply of playground equipment more problematic, but it did not dent the stability of the equipped playground ideal type.17 Nor did it seem to affect the provision of play spaces on the ground. The NPFA provided funding for 1,313 playground projects in the ten years after the war, compared to the 1,017 in the fifteen years before the war.18 The ‘orthodox’ playground had become a well-established and familiar part of the mid-century park superintendent’s responsibilities, alongside nursing plants and mowing lawns.
With childhood wellbeing as a central tenet of the postwar welfare state, the place of the playground in wider social policy perhaps seemed even more secure. But while the health and wellbeing of children and their families were an important feature, the playground was not an explicit component of national welfare policies. The purported benefits of open-air schools and the curative power of open-air treatments for tuberculosis were increasingly being questioned, as cold and windswept conditions hindered children’s education and clinical approaches to the treatment of TB evolved.19 And while the playground ideal had long been premised on broader notions of health and education, playgrounds did not feature in legislation that created a national health service, provided financial support for the family or sought to maintain full employment. The 1944 Education Act imposed a duty on Local Education Authorities to provide adequate facilities for children’s recreation, but it did not make the creation of public play spaces compulsory.20
Instead, postwar playground provision took place within a wider collectivist and universalist atmosphere in which there was a broad political consensus about the role of government in delivering social democratic policies and practical interventions in the urban environment.21 Within this context, the egalitarian potential of the park and the social possibilities of the playground meant that spaces for play were given a boost by the values and objectives of the wider welfare state. At the same time, children’s playgrounds remained the discretionary responsibility of local authorities, and municipal parks departments continued to provide playgrounds much as they had done since the 1920s, with emphasis remaining on the provision of manufactured play equipment. The creation of new spaces for play was meanwhile taken up by the planning profession, representing a major intervention in the story of the playground. In exploring the position of the children’s playground in the postwar planning landscape, this section offers an important new account of town planners’ role in consistently championing play space provision when imagining and creating new urban environments. Planners’ involvement in advocating for and designating space for play was not new in 1945 and it represented an expansion of earlier efforts to solve the problem of playing in the city.
Attempts to rationally plan the urban environment had their roots in nineteenth-century efforts to tackle the chaotic and unhealthy consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation. Interested in the distribution of green space within towns and cities, planners and play space advocates had long sought to develop a more rational approach to the location of parks generally and playgrounds in particular. Since the 1890s, when Reginald Brabazon had called for children’s playgrounds every half a mile in London’s working-class neighbourhoods, prescribing the right amount and frequency of play space had been a consistent concern. The eminent town planner Sir George Pepler (1882–1959) similarly stressed the need for town planning to include the rational provision of dedicated spaces for children. In 1923 he proposed a standard requirement of one third of an acre of play space per thousand residents (he would later become an influential member of the NPFA, serving on its Council and several committees).22 Later attempts to develop a standard for playground provision would emphasise an amount of play space per child, for example twenty-five square feet per young child, eighty square feet per older child.23 Despite the attempts to establish standards for provision, a nationwide investigation overseen by Pepler in 1951 found that many local authorities provided less than 0.05 acres of dedicated play space per thousand residents, well short of the 0.3 acres Pepler had called for in 1923. At the same time, seventy-four per cent had no plans to increase play space provision. The investigation did not establish why so many had no intention to provide more playgrounds, but postwar austerity was perhaps a significant factor.24
The provision of public spaces, including playgrounds, had also been associated with attempts to address poor-quality housing. Nineteenth-century campaigners, such as Octavia Hill, had included space for play in experimental housing schemes, while one of the earliest council housing projects in London, the Boundary Estate (1900) in Bethnal Green, included a raised ornamental garden at the centre of its radiating streets. By the 1920s, several government committees had endorsed the need for play spaces close to new council houses.25 Over time the state gradually assumed a greater role in the provision of housing, first in the 1930s and then again from the 1950s on a far larger scale following wartime damage.26 In the 1930s there was considerable and highly politicised debate about what form such council housing should take.27 Garden city advocates promoted low-rise, low-density housing with public and private gardens on the edge or beyond the city boundary, as we saw with Charles Wicksteed and his garden suburb. Others, often inspired by European modernism, promoted multi-storey blocks of flats as a direct in-situ replacement for slum clearance areas within towns and cities. Most authorities and the public came down on the side of low-rise houses with gardens, but in practice that did not solve the problem of providing space for play.
Between the wars, over four million new suburban homes were built by local authorities as council housing and by private developers for sale.28 But the associated increase in the provision of private gardens did not eliminate the need for public play spaces. For many middle-class families, the popular gardening press promoted order, taste and decorum in the back garden with few concessions to children’s play, other than the suitably cautious use of the lawn.29 For many working-class families moving into new suburban council estates, the garden often provided a practical space where food could be grown, rather than somewhere for children to play.30 As a result, even though the domestic garden was sometimes seen as the ideal place for play, in practice there was still a need to dedicate public spaces for children’s recreation.
Although the suburban house and garden may have been the preferred solution for many, multi-storey blocks of flats were also built in the centre of some cities. With little private open space, these developments often included communal play provision. At Kensal House (1937) in west London, the housing specialist Elizabeth Denby and architect Maxwell Fry designed a modern block of flats for the Gas Light and Coke Company and included a children’s playground as a central feature of the wider ‘urban village’ amenities.31 At White City (1939) the LCC housed 11,000 residents in five-storey blocks and the plans included two ‘fitted playgrounds’ but this time squeezed in on the periphery of the estate.32 Elsewhere in London, playgrounds also featured in slum clearance schemes in Poplar and Deptford.33
The layout of play spaces on housing estates repeated that seen in public parks at the time, closely fitting the orthodox playground ideal. In 1939, Manchester’s director of parks felt that the ideal play space for clearance schemes should comprise modern playground apparatus and a border of trees, shrubs and flowers.34 Contemporary photos suggest that the former appeared more regularly than the latter. In Leeds, the strikingly modern Quarry Hill estate (1938) included a playground in the central courtyards created by the blocks of flats. Surrounded by fencing, the slide and other items of play equipment represented a good example of the interwar orthodox playground, while the substitution of grass lawns with asphalt further enhanced the modernist aesthetic.35 In Liverpool, the Caryl Gardens tenement scheme (1937), built under the auspices of the city’s director of housing Lancelot Keay, provided another good example. Keay was a distinguished municipal architect and later president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and a member of the Ministry of Health’s housing advisory committee.36 Strongly influenced by the ideas and aesthetic of European architectural modernism, he was a firm advocate of multi-storey housing and the children’s playground formed a central feature of several of his schemes. At Caryl Gardens, the central play space matched the orthodox ideal, with plenty of swings installed on an asphalt surface, surrounded by fencing (Figure 4.1). Elsewhere in Liverpool, the St Andrew’s Gardens scheme also included a courtyard playground, with manufactured equipment and seating made from ship’s timbers.37 The division of responsibility seen in these examples, with architect-planners designating space for play and park managers directing its form, would be a consistent feature of subsequent town planning too.
From inclusion in a handful of interwar housing schemes, the playground became a regular feature of more comprehensive planning that took place during the war. In 1941, the Picture Post ran a special edition entitled ‘A Plan for Britain’, promoting alternative ideas for postwar social welfare, housing, education and health. The children’s playground could have featured in any of these spheres of public life, but it was in an article by architect Maxwell Fry that the potential of the playground was stressed. Fry asserted that postwar Britain ‘must be planned’ and that one of the many urban evils that proper planning could tackle was the lack of children’s playgrounds.38 Fry’s emphasis on play space provision can perhaps be ascribed in part to his earlier experience of working with Elizabeth Denby at Kensal House, as well as his business partner, Thomas Adams, who had written PlayParks in 1937. Just two years later, play space provision was a specific requirement set out in several official and unofficial planning documents which considered postwar reconstruction. In London, the Royal Academy’s advisory plan mentioned a general need for children’s play spaces, while the official County of London Plan (1943) set standards for the ideal distribution of green space and included Pepler’s prewar recommendation for a third of an acre of play space for children.39 The prominent town planner Patrick Abercrombie, who had shared the stage with Charles Wicksteed at the Leeds town planning conference in 1918, prepared the County of London Plan, along with J.H. Forshaw, architect to the LCC and formerly of the Miners’ Welfare Committee.
Figure 4.1: Children’s playground, Caryl Garden Flats, Liverpool by J.E. Marsh, 1940, RIBA Collections, RIBA14445.
Abercrombie would also include play space in planning proposals for other cities too. A Plan for Plymouth (1943), prepared with city engineer James Paton Watson, ‘intended to cover the whole of its existence from the comfort and convenience of the smallest house and children’s playground to the magnificence of its civic centre’.40 The plan called for a system of playgrounds every quarter of a mile, located in public parks or on the sites of demolished housing, and suggested that an additional eighty-seven play spaces were needed on top of the existing eighteen. Paton Watson was responsible for the implementation of the plan and a commentator would later conclude that he had successfully created children’s playgrounds on a scale not equalled by any other city in the country.41 The implementation of the London plan also increased the amount of space allocated for play. For example, at Spa Fields playground in Finsbury a combination of wartime bomb damage, compulsory purchase of poor-quality buildings and the appropriation of road space allowed the play area to be doubled in size and the setting of the earlier Finsbury Health Centre (1938) improved.42 These planning schemes sought to impose a modern order on the seemingly chaotic and war-torn city. Narrow streets and overcrowded homes would be replaced with modern commerce and housing, while purpose-built playgrounds would provide cleaner, safer and more salubrious alternatives to the informal play spaces of the street and bombsite.
This sense that playgrounds had become an essential part of modern town planning and modern communities was best demonstrated by the place of the playground in the 1951 Festival of Britain. As both a tonic for the nation after the war and an expression of what it meant to be modern and British, the festival is perhaps best known for the iconic attractions on London’s South Bank, including the Skylon Tower and Royal Festival Hall, the graphic design of the ‘Festival Style’ and the Pleasure Gardens at Battersea.43 George Pepler was a member of the festival’s Council for Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research, one of two advisory councils established to guide festival planning (the other dealt with science).44 And while the NPFA had hoped that its work might ‘form a conspicuous feature of the Festival’, the 1951 exhibitions did more to show that the playground had become a standard and, in many ways, unremarkable part of visions of the modern urban environment.45
Children were well catered for, particularly in the Pleasure Gardens, which included the Nestlé-sponsored crèche, Peter Pan railway and Punch and Judy shows. However, it was at the Live Architecture Exhibition in east London that the children’s playground would be most conspicuously on display. Identified as an area for comprehensive redevelopment in the County of London Plan, the Architecture Exhibition encompassed the newly built Lansbury Estate (named after George Lansbury, former local MP and royal parks commissioner who had promoted playgrounds in the 1930s). The exhibition was intended as a demonstration of the transformative potential of building science and town planning and, alongside the modern low-rise housing, several children’s playgrounds were created on the estate.46
While Pepler’s involvement in the planning of the festival may have ensured the presence of estate playgrounds, they were hardly central to the design showcase. In the exhibition visitor guide, the key for the site map listed over thirty other features including demonstration homes, shopping precincts, churches, schools and an old people’s home before mentioning the children’s playgrounds, just before the lavatories and main exit.47 The playground was presented as an uncontroversial, everyday necessity in a vision of the city that was both idealistic and pragmatic.48 Optimistically, the Lansbury playgrounds demonstrated that a rationally planned version of the city could provide a better place for children to play. Pragmatically, they assumed an orthodox form based on that found in many public parks. The playground had become one component of what urban historian Simon Gunn has described as a banal urban modernism, one that emphasised functionality rather than the iconic.49 This functionalism saw planners attempt to organise the city into areas for industry, transport, living and at a micro-scale playing, while also making use of conventional assumptions about play space form.
This approach was replicated in the planning and layout of many postwar new towns, where the children’s playground was an essential but unremarkable feature, much like roads, homes and shopping precincts. In proposals for Crawley in Sussex, each neighbourhood was planned to have a children’s playground alongside other community facilities such as allotments and public gardens, day nurseries and maternity clinics.50 The children’s playgrounds proposed for Knutsford in Cheshire were to be located on a footpath system that was physically separated from roads and motor vehicles, while the plans for the creation of a new town at Rainhill in Merseyside included among its ‘community equipment’ a playground at the centre of each new housing area.51 In 1951, Harlow New Town saw the completion of The Lawn; at ten storeys it was Britain’s first residential tower block, and as the height of new housing increased elsewhere, so did concern among campaigners and the government about the provision of playgrounds around blocks of flats.
In the late 1940s, central government acknowledged the value of dedicated play spaces but hardly in emphatic terms. Its 1949 Housing Manual recognised that redevelopment provided an opportunity to improve play space provision, but simply suggested that ‘reasonably accessible playgrounds’ might be provided.52 A few years later it sought evidence to support a standardised approach in new social housing developments. In 1952, the Ministry of Housing contacted the NPFA to request information on the issue of play provision for multi-storey housing, with a view to establishing a national play space standard specifically for high-rise residential buildings.53 In response, George Pepler chaired a newly formed Children’s Playground Technical Subcommittee, which quizzed the city architects of Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and the LCC and studied some of the existing playgrounds provided for flats in London. The subcommittee’s research led the NPFA to publish Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats in 1953.54 It reiterated earlier rhetoric about the dangers of the streets and presented children-without-a-playground as a threat to ornamental lawns, a menace to motorists and prone to juvenile delinquency. The report’s researchers found that a considerable number of blocks had no playground provision and where space had been set aside it was inadequate – unimaginative, poorly designed and badly maintained. Of the ninety-six play spaces studied, seventy-three were surfaced with asphalt, eighty-nine were enclosed by fencing, fifty had equipment and only nine had any plants or trees. This was an explicit critique of the playgrounds that had been provided at Quarry Hill, Caryl Gardens and elsewhere.
These findings did not mean that the principle of the playground needed to be revisited, but rather that the playground form needed a new approach. In many ways Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats demonstrated a considerable degree of continuity in the criticisms of the orthodox, equipped playground first levelled in 1937 by Thomas Adams’s PlayParks. Both encouraged the involvement of specialists with knowledge of children and garden design. Both called for more nature, in curated forms at least, in the shape of hills and valleys, trees and shrubs. The most significant difference that had occurred in the time between the two publications was that by the 1950s, Marjory Allen was leading an increasingly high-profile public campaign to improve play space provision, something explored in more detail later in this chapter.
Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats also laid bare the class, age and gender assumptions of the playground movement of the time. While blocks of flats were primarily being built as working-class social housing, the publication suggested that, along with other amenities, courts should be provided for the game ‘fives’, which was played almost exclusively at fee-paying public schools.55 It also demonstrated particular expectations of the mothers who lived on estates, both in terms of assigning responsibility for the safety of children to them and the expectation that their work would be primarily based in the home. Play spaces for the youngest children, aged between two and five, were to be ‘within sight of mothers in the flats’ and enclosed with a self-closing gate, so that ‘toddlers can be left on their own for short periods while their mothers get on with their work’.56 Once children were older than five, their playgrounds no longer needed to be within sight of the flats, and by the time children were nine or older, the report suggested that playgrounds should be well away from dwellings. First published in 1953, Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats presciently pre-empted the rapid increase in the construction of tall blocks facilitated by the 1956 Housing Act. High-rise construction boomed in the late 1950s and 1960s, so that schemes of ten or more floors were increasingly common across Britain. However, the publication’s recommendations were dismissed as too costly in central government’s 1957 Housing Handbook and subsequently ignored in the design and development of many high-rise housing schemes.57 As a result, the provision of play spaces for children living specifically in flats remained an ongoing issue for campaigners well into the 1970s.58
During the 1940s and early 1950s, both the principle and ideal form of the playground were consolidated in planning documents and subsequent redevelopment schemes. Planners emphasised the place of the playground in creating modern, functional and humane communities, while the orthodox, equipped playground was well established among parks professionals as the ideal form for both public parks and new housing estates. In addition, the wider, child-centred welfare consensus prioritised the health, education and general wellbeing of children. At the same time, it was these changing conceptions of childhood and new urban environments that would fuel increasingly high-profile criticism of the orthodox playground. Popular acceptance of the creative and emotional needs of children contrasted sharply with playgrounds that were still designed and laid out to promote physical exercise and were regularly devoid of any ‘natural’ features. This orthodoxy would be increasingly challenged during the 1950s and 1960s.
Marjory Allen and the challenge of adventure
From the mid-1950s, the purpose and form of the playground were being questioned with increasing urgency. On the one hand, campaigners emphasised the need to support greater creativity and self-expression among children, promoting less rigid and more adventurous play opportunities, where adults designated space for play but children were able to shape the detailed form. On the other hand, a number of professional designers were increasingly interested in creating play spaces for children, bringing adult creativity and imagination to bear on the playground. This section considers the centrality of Marjory Allen to these processes, her widely credited association with the junk playground movement and the seldom-acknowledged significance of her environmental consciousness. It goes on to explore the contribution made by professional designers to both the imagined and physical form of dedicated play spaces for children.
From the late 1940s through to the late 1960s, Marjory Allen was the most high-profile figure associated with attempts to reinvigorate the playground. As the next section shows, she is popularly associated with the introduction of ‘junk playgrounds’ to the UK in 1946, while scholarly accounts have rightly emphasised the effectiveness of her campaigning and her role in shaping postwar attitudes to childhood. Here, however, Allen is situated within the longer history and geography of playground thought and her unacknowledged environmental biography is considered.
Allen spent much of her early childhood on her family’s rural smallholding. She subsequently attended the progressive Bedales school, worked as a gardener, studied horticulture and later married Clifford Allen, the Independent Labour Party politician, peace campaigner and from 1932 Lord Allen of Hurtwood.59 Their daughter Polly attended a progressive nursery school, prompting Allen’s interest in infant education and membership of the Nursery School Association.60 She later became chair and then president of the Association, emulating Margaret McMillan who was the organisation’s first president.61 Allen felt that nursery education provided children with ‘free space, fresh air, sunlight, companionship, and engrossing occupation’, all formative features of her own rural childhood.62 She was also profoundly influenced by the thinking of her close friend Elizabeth Denby. In 1938, Denby had concluded that when playgrounds were ‘merely an expanse of tarmac or concrete, the damage to the children is almost criminal. All sensibility must be stifled in the ugly atmosphere of such barrack yards’.63 This sentiment would be repeated by Allen in a later letter to The Times when she stated that ‘municipal playgrounds are often as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring’.64 Perhaps surprisingly, Allen’s first high-profile intervention in public discourse was not related to the playground and instead focused on the plight of children in care.
In the early 1940s she was the figurehead for a campaign seeking better standards for children living in residential care homes. In her letter to The Times that brought this issue vividly into the public imagination, she described how ‘children are being brought up under repressive conditions that are generations out of date’ and argued that the needs of individual children were being ignored.65 Allen’s profile and contacts with politicians and the media meant that the campaign was highly effective and influential in shaping the 1948 Children’s Act. She became a ‘public placeholder’ for critiques of the care system, a high-profile embodiment of ideas that had largely been previously developed and publicly expressed by others.66 Allen’s approach to campaigning and her unintentional position as public placeholder would be repeated in her subsequent playground advocacy work. Several scholars have argued that it was this public and persistent campaigning, political and social contacts, organisational skills and strong sense of purpose – rather than detailed technical knowledge – that was most significant in explaining her profile within the postwar playground movement.67 In her memoirs, Allen recalled that her ‘mania for keeping things moving’ had been highly effective.68 However, none of these accounts consider the importance of Allen’s assumptions about nature and the way they interacted with her ideas about childhood, nor how this in turn shaped her approach to play provision.
Allen’s interest in nature preceded her involvement in child welfare campaigns. After leaving school, Allen worked as a gardener and then studied horticulture at the University of Reading, at a time when only twenty per cent of university students were women and there was considerable opposition to greater equality at Reading in particular.69 In time, Allen became a founding Fellow of the Institute of Landscape Architects (1929), along with the noted designers Thomas Mawson, Brenda Colvin and Richard Sudell.70 Although she initially worked mainly on private commissions, she also had a wider interest in public green spaces and from 1937 to 1939 she chaired the Coronation Planting Committee which among its other activities published Thomas Adams’s PlayParks. In addition to her professional influences, Allen would later recall her own childhood interactions with nature and contrast them with the lives of city children. Just like earlier campaigners, her commitment to recreating a version of her own bucolic childhood and her perception of the problems of the city are clear from her writing. In her autobiography, written in 1975, she recalled a romantic vision of her rural upbringing, close to nature and with freedom to be creative and imaginative:
The wonderful and simple life of haymaking, milking cows, growing flowers and vegetables and learning the craft of making butter and cheese, and all the lovely sights and scents of the country, remain for me the most enduring memories of my life. When, later, I worked among children condemned to live in barbaric and sub-human city surroundings, my thoughts always returned to my early good fortune. The remembrance has made me more determined than ever to restore to these children some part of their lost childhood: gardens where they can keep their pets and enjoy their hobbies and perhaps watch their fathers working with real tools; secret places where they can create their own worlds; the shadow and mystery that lend enchantment to play … Our active life in the Kentish countryside gave us these moments of wonder and awe.71
This emphasis on restoring nature to the city initially extended beyond childhood and Allen sought to provide ‘moments of wonder’ for adults too. Her early landscape design work focused on greening city buildings, including roof-top gardens for Selfridges department store and a block of flats for the St Pancras Housing Improvement Society, while as author of the Manchester Guardian’s Country Diary column she brought accounts of the country into the homes of urban readers. In addition, she promoted physical forms of nature close to the homes of working-class city dwellers. Flowerboxes incorporated into ‘cheerful outside balconies’ on new blocks of flats would provide space ‘where the young baby can sleep … the small child may rest in the air and the sun’ and bring brightness and cheer to adult residents and the wider community.72 In some ways, Allen’s work echoed earlier efforts to bring aspects of nature into the city, where fresh air and interaction with curated forms of flora and fauna would provide an uplifting physical and moral influence on city dwellers.
Despite Allen’s commitment to recreating an urban version of the nature she experienced in the countryside of southern England, her environmental consciousness has rarely featured in popular or scholarly accounts of her work. This is probably due to the timing of her first and most high-profile intervention into playground discourse (shortly after her successful campaigning for the Children’s Act) and because the form of her intervention – a photo essay in the Picture Post magazine – displayed little evidence of the natural world. Instead, the essay took advantage of the opportunity offered by bomb-damaged sites to reimagine spaces for play and spoke more to changing conceptions of childhood than to ideas about the country in the city. And rather than emphasise the need for greener places to play, Allen focused on the features that she felt comprised a ‘natural’ childhood – self-expression, freedom, creativity, shadow and mystery – in contrast to ‘unnatural’ urban childhoods. Allen emphasised the qualities that she had experienced in her rural upbringing, including independence and imagination, rather than necessarily interaction with the sights and sounds of the country. While these qualities have seldom been emphasised in recent accounts of her campaigning work, they did have a considerable influence on her conception of the playground and her subsequent activism. Making sense of this requires an examination of her Picture Post essay and its position within the longer and wider history of playground thought.
Allen’s most public contribution to playground discourse came in 1946. On a trip to Norway, Allen’s flight stopped to refuel in Copenhagen, and she briefly visited a junk playground that had been created during the war on the Emdrup housing estate. Later that year, she published her much celebrated photo essay in the Picture Post, including striking photos and a vivid description of the Emdrup playground, titled ‘Why Not Use Our Bombsites Like This?’ The compelling images showed children building with scrap wood, digging in the mud, tending handmade structures and nursing a fire. The playground did not include manufactured equipment, but instead had a variety of loose materials, including bricks, timber, earth and water, and a skilled adult play leader who could support children in their play.73 Allen described what she saw at Emdrup as ‘something quite new and full of possibilities’.74 For Allen, it seemed to represent a radical new form of play space provision, a profound break from the asphalt and equipment of the orthodox playgrounds found in British parks and housing estates. However, while the photos that accompanied Allen’s article presented a strikingly different approach to play space provision, the idea of playing with junk and the need for adult involvement in children’s play had been circulating for many years, both in Britain and beyond.
In Denmark, the Emdrup playground represented a long-standing intellectual and practical collaboration between landscape architects and pedagogues. In fact, rather than using an area of waste ground as Allen suggested in her essay, the site had been specifically designated as a playground in line with local building regulations and at least in part designed and laid out by a landscape architect. Allen (and, based on her assertion, many others since then) credited the Danish landscape architect Carl Theodore Sørensen (1893–1979) with the invention of the junk playground. Through his writing, teaching and practice, Sørensen had a profound impact on landscape design in Denmark, although his work remains virtually unknown elsewhere.75 As a result, it is useful to explore in more depth the background to Sørensen’s junk playground idea and the cultural context that produced this apparently revolutionary design.
As its largest city, Copenhagen was a focus for early playground advocacy in Denmark. The first children’s playground was created in 1881, the city’s Playground Association was formed in 1891, and early play space tended to be ‘rectangular and surrounded by shady trees’ with gymnastic apparatus and sandboxes introduced from London and Berlin in 1908.76 Sand became an essential and regular feature of public play space and was particularly associated with the pedagogue Hans Dragehjelm. He founded the Froebel Society in Demark (1902) and among other work published a scientific study on Children’s Play in Sand in 1909, emphasising its value in the physical, emotional and imaginative development of children.77
By the 1930s, the average Copenhagen playground was an enclosed asphalt or gravel space with a sandbox, water tap, a few swings and seating for mothers. Sørensen and Dragehjelm cooperated on a number of play space designs in this period and reacted against this apparently austere play environment. Their writing emphasised the need for more nature in the playground, particularly in the form of adapted features of the Danish cultural landscape such as fields and meadows, forests and beaches, and they designed spaces with a greater emphasis on the needs and interests of individual children.78 In many ways this echoed the earlier writing of the US play space advocate G. Stanley Hall, who felt that the field, forest, hill and shoreline were important spaces for both play education, while also highlighting the international exchange of ideas among European and north American playground advocates at this time.79 This emphasis on national cultural landscapes also chimes with Allen’s idealisation of the aesthetic and cultural values associated with the English countryside and the potential benefits for urban children.
More broadly, the children’s playground was a significant feature of Danish city planning discourse, culminating in the 1939 Copenhagen Building Act which made playgrounds mandatory for new housing schemes in the capital, a requirement extended to other parts of the country in 1961.80 Sørensen had previously asserted that ‘children’s playgrounds are the city’s most important form of public plantation’.81 But rather than list the equipment needed to furnish such a space, he emphasised the importance of its location close to the homes of children and its function as a site for independent play and self-education. He went on to ask whether ‘we could try to design a kind of junk playground in suitable and fairly large areas, where the children would be allowed to use old cars, cardboard boxes, branches and such’.82 In 1943, Sørensen and Dragehjelm were given an opportunity to do just that, being commissioned to create such a space on the new workers housing estate at Emdrup. The design for Emdrup partially resembled earlier versions of the Danish playground, rectangular in shape and surrounded by dense hedging on top of an earth embankment, with fencing hidden in the planting. But rather than gymnastic equipment or a defined sandbox, the central space is shown with few permanent installations. Instead of fixed equipment the design shows log piles and fallen trees, a replica sailing boat, caves dug into the perimeter embankment and stylised figures digging and camping. The designers assumed that such a space might not need adult supervision, but once opened the Emdrup housing association that managed the playground employed a play worker to supervise its use. The collaboration between Dragehjelm and Sørensen meant that the Froebel-inspired outdoor classroom had been transported into the public realm.
Another notable feature of the sketch design is the tipi, stockade and games of Cowboys and Indians, a seemingly incongruous presence in the suburbs of the Danish capital. But from the late eighteenth century both representations of native Americans and indigenous people themselves had invoked a mix of both fear and fascination among British, European and North American fairground audiences.83 In 1899, the pioneering cinematographers Mitchell and Kenyon of Blackburn dramatised playing at Indians in a short film.84 By the early twentieth century, social discourse in the USA increasingly associated native Americans with wilderness, natural purity and authenticity, particularly for Ernest Seaton and the Boy Scout movement. Seaton’s Handbook of Woodcraft Scouting (1910), written with Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts in Britain, popularised the long-standing associations between social constructs of native Americans and children, with both often characterised as more closely connected to the natural world than modern adults.85 The shift within the Scouting movement from inward-looking militarism to an international liberalism, and specifically the staging of the Second World Scout Jamboree in Demark in 1924, perhaps helped to inspire the work of Sørensen and Dragehjelm at Emdrup.86
There were also much earlier examples of similar approaches to children’s play provision elsewhere in the world and even Sørensen rejected the idea that he invented the junk playground, instead suggesting it was a loosely articulated concept. Over twenty years earlier, an experimental play space in the USA had made use of junk and waste materials in children’s play. In 1918, the Bureau of Educational Experiments in New York sought to recreate in the city the play opportunities that were understood to be available to country children (the Bureau had been established by the educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, after a visit to innovative schools in London in 1912).87 Bringing rural play opportunities into the city would help to ensure both the ‘muscle development of little people’ and provide for their creative and dramatic play, progressive ideas for the time. The resulting outdoor laboratory created by the Bureau included bricks, lumber, tools and a packing-box village, in addition to a sandbox and rudimentary gymnastic equipment. Unlike Emdrup, this was a private, educational setting rather than a public, park-like environment.88
Similar suggestions for children’s play existed in Britain too. In 1915, the sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes had expressed the view that wigwam building, cave digging and stream damming were the natural activities of boys (girls were more naturally inclined to sit on the grass in Geddes’s view).89 A few years later, Raymond Unwin, the prominent architect and town planner, suggested that the design of play spaces could make more of existing landscape features and loose materials: ‘any bit of unevenness in the ground, a hole or a mound, an old fallen tree, a few bricks, or such accessories are very helpful for little children’s play’.90 And the progressive educationalist Margaret McMillan suggested in 1921 that a wild corner of the garden, including stones, scrap metal and old pots, was an important feature of spaces for children, giving them freedom to play as they wished.91 Even Allen had previously made use of junk. She coordinated a wartime project in which conscientious objectors made over three million toys and items of furniture from salvaged timber for children’s nurseries.92 The need for more flexible spaces that supported imaginative and creative play with loose materials had been circulating for thirty years before the Emdrup junk playground was created.
The appointment of an adult to support children’s play was not a revolutionary suggestion in 1946 either. In 1919, Mabel Reaney had called for a director of play and since 1928 the NPFA had been coordinating the campaign work of play leadership advocates. Throughout the 1930s, the NPFA publicised the need for play leadership in Playing Fields, organised conferences and training courses and held practical demonstrations. In April 1946, eight months before Allen’s Picture Post essay, Stockport had introduced adult games wardens to help organise children’s play in its parks.93 Not only was the idea of play leadership not new, but far from being revolutionary, its practical implementation often reinforced conservative social values. Historian Krista Cowman has shown how the postwar junk playground movement – and the appointment of heroic male playleaders in particular – did much to maintain traditional gender assumptions about both children’s play and the role that adults had in supervising it.94
In emphasising the revolutionary nature of what she saw, it might seem that Allen either failed to acknowledge or was not aware of earlier alternative visions of the playground. The equipped and asphalted playground had been criticised in the 1930s, campaigners had been calling for the involvement of play leaders in children’s play for over twenty years and ideas about playing with junk had been circulating for even longer. Two years before Allen’s Picture Post essay, the Conservative MP Edward Keeling had suggested in the House of Commons that bombed sites could be repurposed and designated as playgrounds while public parks remained commandeered for military purposes.95 Furthermore, Save the Children Fund had successfully operated a number of play centres during the war, including in and around the former Camel pub in Bethnal Green, where children were given considerable autonomy in organising their activities and sympathetic adults were largely in the background.96
Although Allen’s 1946 essay may not have presented entirely new ideas, it did resonate with wider public debate about the impact of the war on childhood and the involvement of children in urban reconstruction. Images of children in a ruined landscape chimed with iconic representations of the poor urban child playing in the war-damaged city that had a compelling (and complex) place in the British postwar imagination. In some ways, the images represented society’s hopes for the future and emphasised the child’s role as an agent in the spatial and cultural reconstruction of postwar cities. Children could figuratively and literally help to rebuild the city. At the same time, play had assumed a therapeutic function. Based on the theories of psychologists such as Anna Freud and the practical, wartime experience of Marie Paneth at the Branch Street play centre, play could operate as an antidote to children’s experiences of violence and destruction. In the junk playground, the city could help to rebuild a childhood affected by war.97
At the same time, such spaces could represent dystopian visions of destruction and chaos, or even the realisation of these visions for those living nearby. Marcus Lipton, MP for Brixton, received a ‘constant stream of letters coming in from people who unfortunately live very near these small bombed sites, complaining of the filthy garbage, rotting mattresses, dead cats and all sorts of other things’.98 In York, Alderman Buckton, chair of the city’s housing committee, stated that ‘tenants on our estates do not want these types of playgrounds’.99 The borough council in Bethnal Green went further and reversed its decision to establish a junk playground, applying instead to the NPFA for funding to surface and lay out an orthodox play space.100
Despite the dystopian connotations, Allen’s Picture Post essay and the approach to play space that it represented was influential. The essay brought together the benefits of playing with junk, the potential of play leadership and critiques of orthodox play spaces, linked them to the opportunities presented by bombed sites and presented them in a highly visible and accessible form. Before Allen’s essay was published, these ideas had not challenged the dominance of the unsupervised, orthodox playground ideal. Afterwards a number of organisations were inspired to formalise children’s use of bombed sites for play, most notably in London. The International Voluntary Service for Peace, University Settlement movement, Save the Children Fund and local community groups were all involved in early efforts to create junk playgrounds. The first opened in Morden in London in 1948 and the idea spread to other towns and cities, including Liverpool, Crawley, Bristol and Grimsby. Thanks to Allen’s advocacy, in time the NPFA provided a degree of national coordination and the sharing of knowledge and experience through conferences, publications and committees.101 Junk playgrounds gradually received more widespread attention, even if their number did not increase significantly. The thousands of orthodox playgrounds created in cities, towns and villages across Britain far outnumbered the seventeen junk playgrounds that were opened between 1948 and 1960. Many of the initial experimental spaces were only open for a few years, reclaimed by landowners as temporary leases expired, including the Camberwell (1948–51), Clydesdale Road (1952–5) and Lollard Street (1955–9) playgrounds.
The apparent chaos and destruction of the junk playground contrasted sharply with the ideal vision of the public park and goes some way in explaining why the junk playground did not become more widespread. Despite Allen’s high-profile Picture Post article, the junk playground received little coverage in the parks trade press for instance. After a single image of a tree house in 1948, which was captioned as a junk playground, it would be another five years before experimental play spaces received greater publicity among green space professionals. In addition, Allen had transported the junk playground idea from a particular social and cultural context and dropped it into postwar Britain. In Denmark, playgrounds were a mandatory part of new urban landscapes, designers and pedagogues had long worked together, and child-centred notions of play, particularly in the form of the sandpit as a tool for children’s self-expression, had long been seen in public play spaces. In contrast, there was no legislative compulsion to provide playgrounds in Britain, the orthodox image of the playground was one dominated by manufactured equipment, and there tended to be little communication, let alone active collaboration, between local authority parks and education committees or professional practitioners.
The British and Danish spaces were noticeably different in their implementation too. The Emdrup site had been specifically designated for play, deliberately designed with its earth embankment, planting and a purpose-built building with toilets and other facilities. In Britain, early junk playgrounds opened on bomb-damaged sites that were temporarily available, they had little infrastructure beyond a boundary fence, rarely had planting or other natural features and usually managed with scavenged huts or sheds. Even the term ‘junk’ was problematic – Allen and George Pepler apparently decided over a lunch that ‘adventure’ was a better term to use, and it first appeared in her pamphlet Adventure Playgrounds published by the NPFA in 1953. In addition to short leases, funding was also a practical problem for British junk playgrounds. Lollard Street was managed by a diverse supervisory committee, including Allen, the LCC, NPFA and Lambeth borough council. By insisting on ‘the utmost economy in capital expenditure’ the committee made it very difficult to replicate the Emdrup playground with its purpose-built building, sturdy boundary and planting.102
In addition, the absence of an agreed-upon definition for junk or adventure playgrounds meant that coverage could include a wide range of play spaces. For Allen, this was not entirely positive, as largely conventional play spaces were inappropriately labelled adventure playgrounds. A 1960 account of two new adventure playgrounds in Liverpool, one at Whitley Gardens and another at Kirkdale Recreation Ground, seemed to justify Allen’s concerns. The features listed included conventional play equipment, putting green, ornamental planting and a play lawn for babies.103 This was very different from both the experimental spaces created on bombsites in the years after the war and Allen’s hopes for more naturalistic play opportunities.
Given Allen’s earlier landscape work, her focus on bombsites and junk at the expense of nature might seem out of character. However, it seems likely that Allen temporarily put nature to one side to take advantage of the opportunity presented by bomb-damaged sites and evolving notions of childhood. But in doing so, Allen did not abandon nature altogether and instead she expressed reservations about the lack of natural features on many junk playgrounds. In a later, veiled criticism, she was ‘delighted to see trees and a stream’ at the Southmead adventure playground in Bristol, as natural features were missing from similar spaces elsewhere.104 In acknowledging such a presence, Allen seems to have overlooked uncultivated bombsite plants and animals. From accounts in the 1950s, as well as more recent scholarship, we get a sense that bombsites were often rapidly colonised once the dust had settled. In a 1953 ‘note on new ruins’ the writer Rose Macaulay poetically described how bombed buildings soon had trees sprouting through empty window sockets, while rose-bay and fennel blossomed in broken walls.105 More recently, the archaeologist Gabriel Moshenska has shown how the untamed ecology of postwar bombsites was a consistent feature of first-hand accounts of wartime childhood. Within a few weeks of an air raid there was invariably a healthy crop of weeds, including the rose-bay willowherb, while ponds provided habitat for dragonflies and other aquatic insects. The director of Kew Gardens even gave a public lecture on wildflowers on bombed sites, identifying over 150 different species.106 Nature was present but not in the form that Allen valued or appreciated.
Much of Allen’s later writing on children’s playgrounds would emphasise the disconnect between children and nature evident in the orthodox playground. The assault on the natural environment triggered by playground creation meant that ‘streams are hidden in the sewers, the hills and mounds are levelled out, the good earth is buried under concrete and the trees are certainly not for climbing’.107 In creating orthodox playgrounds, the ruthless bulldozer, unrelenting asphalt machine and the expensive ironmonger destroyed all the natural landscape features, creating a sense of imprisonment and doom. Without opportunities to interact with the fundamental elements of nature, including water, earth and fire, Allen felt it was unsurprising that children would express their primitive instincts in ways that were problematic for individuals and wider society. Allen would go on to position more naturalistic play spaces as the best solution to this problem in a number of subsequent publications.
Following a trip to Sweden in 1954, Allen published an article in the trade press and a booklet entitled Play Parks as a way to promote alternative visions of the playground.108 She praised various aspects of Swedish play space design, but the presence of nature is the most notable feature of the booklet. Alongside play leaders and a variety of moveable materials, she found hedges of flowering shrubs, undulating grass meadow areas, roughly constructed wooden animals, birchwood building blocks and generous sandpits where the sun, rain and air helped to keep the sand clean and wholesome. Echoing Adams’s PlayParks from 1937, she concluded that ‘every playground should have some of the characteristics of a park or garden. Planting is not a mere decoration, it is a part of the necessary equipment of a modern playground’.109 Some features of the Emdrup playground were present in Allen’s Play Parks, including a supportive adult and facilities to support children’s self-expression. However, her description of the ‘natural’ elements of the play park contrasted starkly with early accounts and images of bombsite playgrounds, with piles of debris, little greenery and the only infrastructure a tall wire fence.
Beyond the bombsite
While some adventure playgrounds were short-lived and they were never commonplace, both Allen and her values came to influence wider playground thought. This impact is often underemphasised in accounts of her work and in narratives associated with the adventure playground movement, perhaps because it is less iconic than images of children playing in rubble and because it took a little longer to have an effect. Allen later recalled that ‘in the public mind, I was identified with adventure playgrounds. In fact, my interests had always been broader’.110
Perhaps as a result of her long-standing professional relationship with the landscape architect Richard Sudell, Allen became increasingly involved in the NPFA and its playground campaigning work. Like Allen, Richard Sudell (1892–1968) was a founding member of the Institute of Landscape Architects and for three years in the 1930s Allen and Sudell worked together, most notably on the roof garden at Selfridges.111 In 1937, Sudell promoted Wicksteed Park as an exemplar children’s playground, but by the 1950s he had moved away from providing manufactured equipment in the spaces he designed.112 In the early 1950s, he prepared designs for St Chads Park and Central Park in Dagenham and included felled trees as climbing structures in place of a steel climbing frame.113 As gardening editor for Ideal Home magazine he promoted modernist and child-friendly domestic garden design.114 Sudell became involved in the NPFA in 1950, and from 1952 was a member of both its children’s playground committee and technical subcommittee, which coordinated the publication of Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats.115 By 1954, Allen was also a member of the children’s playground committee but its March 1954 meeting was dominated by discussions about pin badges, Harrods sports week and a gala dinner fundraiser; the only mention of adventure playgrounds was to note that Bethnal Green borough council had decided not to open one.116 Allen found such meetings highly conservative, with an atmosphere that was hierarchical and deferential, rather than experimental or dynamic, but the NPFA’s organisational structures and resources did help Allen to raise awareness of alternative playground ideas.117
The initial conservatism of the NPFA also extended to the park profession. Junk playgrounds were rarely mentioned in trade journals in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Even in an account of Copenhagen’s open spaces, written by the city’s director of parks in 1948, the Emdrup playground did not receive a mention.118 A 1955 editorial in the Journal of Park Administration seemingly idealised a nineteenth-century conception of the children’s playground, where spaces were ‘fenced, levelled and drained, with a semi-permanent dry surface and restricted to the use of infants’.119 Adverts in the same issue hint at the enduring sensibilities of park administrators at this time. A metalwork company based in Thetford, IRS Ltd, promoted its finest enamel ‘keep off the grass’ and ‘no cycling’ signs, while Wicksteed & Co. and its equipment remained on the front cover. In a letter to The Times in 1957, Manchester’s director of parks and cemeteries felt that ‘old-fashioned swings are still the most popular type of playthings for children’, while sandpits and adventure playgrounds were apparently both unpopular and dangerous.120
Allen’s aspiration to introduce unkempt and creative spaces for play was often at odds with park superintendents’ simultaneous efforts to keep both children and ‘nature’ under control. Reginald Wesley, director of parks and cemeteries in Belfast, was indicative of wider values when he emphasised the significant benefits associated with new chemical weedkillers, fungicides and pesticides, while at the same time complaining about the behaviour of children.121 For A. Dodds, fellow of the Institute of Park Administration, the appearance of the adventure playground and its ‘deplorable collection of rubbish’ was a major obstacle to its wider uptake. Dodds suggested that a new title – the ‘unorthodox play area’ – combined with new building materials, rather than debris, and more hygienic surroundings would appeal more to the wider parks profession and the politicians who governed their work.122 However, for park administrators, the orthodox children’s playground remained an item of equipment that could be purchased from commercial suppliers. In trade journals during the 1950s and 1960s, adverts for play equipment were positioned next to those for other day-to-day necessities of the parks department, including mowers, glasshouses, wirework litter bins, teak seats, seeds and chemical pesticides. A similar pattern could be found at trade events and exhibitions.123
Some in the profession – and beyond – were starting to feel that parks administrators were not moving with the times. There were repeated calls in the trade press to give up on nineteenth-century conceptions of the park, focused on lavish horticultural displays, and to instead adopt new approaches to leisure.124 Even the government’s 1960 Albemarle inquiry into the provision of services for young people felt that ‘park committees often work jointly with cemetery committees, and they become dedicated only too easily to the task of keeping people off or under the grass’.125 Despite the apparent impenetrability of the profession to new playground ideas, Allen was influencing play space thinking in Britain and beyond.
The conservative tendencies of the park profession were at odds with increasing evidence that children were not using the playgrounds that had been provided for them. A sociological study of the Lansbury Estate in 1954 found that while early residents felt it was a good place to live, most children played in the streets rather than the playgrounds.126 Research for Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats echoed these findings; during 104 visits to 96 sites, playgrounds were only being used by children on 44 occasions. For Allen, this meant that playgrounds needed to provide a greater variety of play opportunities, something that could be achieved through the provision of play leaders and features that were more flexible and creative.
As we have already seen, play leadership was discussed and promoted before Allen became involved in playground advocacy, but her emphasis on the role of the play leader in junk playgrounds helped to legitimise wider efforts to promote adult involvement in children’s play. In 1956, the NPFA produced a film on play leadership and from the late 1950s there were play leadership schemes operating in many towns and cities, including Ramsgate, Belfast and London.127 By 1965, there were sixty schemes operating across the country, the NPFA provided grants to cover play leader salaries and worked with the Institute of Park Administration to offer an annual play leadership summer school.128 However, park-based play leadership was often socially conservative in the activities offered, echoing Krista Cowman’s findings in the adventure playground movement. Folk dancing for girls and sport for boys echoed nineteenth-century efforts to promote rational recreation, rather than Allen’s notion of child-centred play supported by inconspicuous adults. By 1970, a separate Institute of Playleadership was established and included Allen and other notable play workers and advocates, including Drummond Abernethy, Joe Benjamin and Donne Buck.129 Despite these efforts, most playgrounds remained unsupervised.
Allen’s calls for greater flexibility and creativity in playground provision, as well as her emphasis on providing more ‘natural’ play opportunities, were increasingly evident in contemporary playground discourse. In 1954, a public exhibition and conference on children’s playgrounds demonstrated the shift towards more diversity in playground thought and form. The week-long Children’s Playground Conference and Exhibition was organised by the London branch of the NPFA to promote the urgent need for more dedicated spaces for children ‘on the grounds of health as well as keeping them out of danger and mischief’.130 In doing so, it combined traditional ideas about the role of the playground as a site of safety, health and social good, with modern communication technology, international networks and a greater emphasis on public engagement. Opened by the duke of Edinburgh, the conference was free to enter, welcomed the public and included exhibits from over thirty local authorities, landscape architects and equipment manufacturers.131 The event introduced the general public to existing and new notions of the playground and highlighted the wider range of professionals interested in the design and layout of play spaces for children.
A specially commissioned film, Come out to Play, sought to showcase the development of innovative ideas in play space design.132 The film provides an insight into the ongoing problem of children’s place in public space, as well as the increasing diversity in playground thinking. The film’s opening sequence shows a police officer discouraging a group of children from playing in a park, hinting at the ongoing tension between public parks as communal spaces of health and recreation and the perceived problems of unsupervised children and their behaviour. Evicted from the park, the children are shown playing in the street, at risk from motor traffic and a threat to nearby private property, while the narrator emphasises the need for proper playgrounds close to every home. Having set the scene, the film moves on to tentatively highlight the latest ideas in playground design. It did not reject the orthodox playground out of hand and includes extensive footage of the US film star Betty Hutton opening a new orthodox playground on Bermondsey council’s Arnold housing estate.133 According to the film’s narrator, at £580,000 (£7,250) it was more than usually expensive, while the images showed conventional playground equipment, including swings, slides and rocking horses. The film also included footage from Clydesdale Road adventure playground, showing children around a fire, using makeshift swings, playing war games and being organised by a play leader. Unlike Emdrup, with its purpose-built boundary, building and planting, the Clydesdale site seems to have been little adapted since it was cleared of bomb debris. A chain link fence and small wooden shed seem to be the main adaptations. The segment of the film that aligns most closely with Allen’s wider vision for children’s play is set in Holland Park in London. Parts of the wild and overgrown wood were designated as a space where children could climb, dig and make dens.
In addition to the film, the accompanying conference papers and exhibition spoke to the increasingly diverse interest in the form and function of children’s play spaces. Nottingham’s director of parks, W.G. Ayres, felt the need for playgrounds was primarily a road safety matter and he expressed doubt about experimental ideas in playground design.134 Equipment manufacturers, including Hirst, Hunt, Spencer Heath and George, and Wicksteed promoted their projects. Magistrate and youth club advocate, Basil Henriques, emphasised the playground’s role in reducing juvenile delinquency, while the director of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents highlighted the ongoing dangers of the street.135 In contrast, a number of speakers and exhibits emphasised alternative approaches to the playground and its form. Richard Sudell spoke on children’s playgrounds in the modern landscape, while Marjory Allen discussed adventure playgrounds. The accompanying exhibition was designed by the LCC’s architects under the supervision of chief architect Leslie Martin, noted designer of London’s Royal Festival Hall. The exhibition included plans and photographs from the landscape architect Sylvia Crowe on her play-related work for Harlow New Town Development Corporation and photos of Emdrup from the Danish Embassy. The increasing role of professional designers in play space creation will be explored later, but here it is interesting to note the variety of play spaces on display.
To make sense of both existing and emerging ideas, the exhibition designers established and presented a playground typology, and in doing so attempted to make sense of contemporary playground discourse. The first category in their typology was equipped playgrounds. This type was further subdivided into ‘orthodox’ spaces with swings and slides to promote physical movement; ‘feature’ play spaces with sandpits, concrete boats and decommissioned steam rollers to inspire fantasy and make believe; and ‘commando’ playgrounds incorporating tree trunks, suspended tyres and concrete pipes to provide ‘not only a free and varied outlet for energy but a spur to imagination and invention’. A second category was unequipped playgrounds, comprising a flat area for ball games. The third category was natural playgrounds with undulations, banks, trees and bushes as an environment for creative play. Adventure playgrounds were the fourth typology, a space where ‘destruction and vandalism are transmuted into creative effort, team spirit is fostered and leaders emerge’. The fifth and final category was the traffic playground, which would simultaneously ‘provide amusement and teach road safety’.136 The typologies and their descriptions show how the playground was now expected to provide a wider range of benefits to children and society. Playgrounds would provide space for both physical exercise and cerebral creativity, an outlet for excess energy and site for semi-structured games, a space to both interact with nature and learn to cope with the hazards of the modern world. By providing these benefits, the antisocial child could be transformed into a well-rounded leader and team player. Playgrounds were not to be segregated by age or gender, while greater freedom in play was meant to be a feature of such spaces.
But these assumptions masked more conservative approaches to understanding the way that children should play. Normative assumptions about how girls and boys should play were clear in the way spaces were described and despite the rhetoric around freedom, girls were largely missing from these accounts of the ideal playground. Cowboys, supermen and other male heroes were the ideal characters who would be embodied in imaginary play, while ball games areas provided space to play male-dominated sports such as football and cricket. Girls were not explicitly excluded from these spaces, but the terminology used to frame them was heavily dependent on forms of play most strongly associated with boys, echoing the wider provision of outdoor recreational facilities, which supported sports that were played by and seen as appropriate for men. If implemented and used in the way imagined by the exhibition curators, the playground would reinforce and perpetuate an inequitable presence in public space for girls and boys.
The 1954 exhibition was not the first time that these ideas were expressed, but it was the first time that they were brought together in one place. It is not clear how many people attended the exhibition, nor how widely Come out to Play was distributed. Nevertheless, with the publication of the prosaically titled guidance note Selection and Layout of Land for Playing Fields and Playgrounds (1956), the NPFA brought these discussions to a wider audience.137 Prepared by R.B. Gooch, the NPFA’s technical advisor, it was reprinted several times over the next decade. Gooch welcomed the move away from the ‘monotony’ of playgrounds dominated by orthodox tubular steel equipment, something made possible in part because the booklet did not include nor rely on adverts from play equipment manufacturers. Instead, he echoed Allen’s call for greater diversity in play provision, a sensitivity to children’s expectations and opportunities to interact with nature.
The most notable break with earlier NPFA guidance was an apparent recognition that children should be given ‘the opportunity of doing what they want to, rather than what grown-ups think they ought to do’.138 However, this was still meant to take place in the playground, rather than in the wider urban environment. As a result, Selection and Layout proposed the ideal comprehensive playground as one which still provided space for physical movements such as swinging, sliding, jumping and climbing, but also room for creative activities, making things, imaginary games, playing with sand and water, and even less energetic pursuits such as reading or playing dominoes. It acknowledged that children had diverse personalities and interests, that child development relied on more than just steel swings and slides, and that the playground should help to meet children’s creative and cognitive growth. It also marked a renewal of efforts to reintroduce nature into the playground and encouraged improvisation on the part of adult playground designers. A small, single-page sketch included in Selection and Layout was reproduced and distributed by the NPFA as a larger drawing. Sketch Suggestions of Improvised Equipment for Children’s Play showed how more naturalistic materials such as trees, logs, grass mounds, sand and rocks could all help to make good places to play, while other materials and forms, such as concrete tunnels, brick walls and replica trains and boats could all promote imaginary play (Figure 4.2).139 An added benefit was that this type of play space could potentially be created for little cost, using local materials and voluntary labour.
This ideal type would be restated in many of Marjory Allen’s later publications, including Design for Play, Play Parks and Planning for Play, and in her evidence to the Parker Morris inquiry into housing standards.140 Although best remembered for establishing domestic space requirements, the latter also made recommendations for play provision. In calling for sand, water, rough ground and tools, along with an emphasis on imaginative and creative play, it was clearly influenced by Allen’s ideas. At the same time, by acknowledging that estate landscapes needed to accommodate both space for play and space for car parking, it highlighted wider tensions about how public space should be distributed and used. The problem of securing space for play in the face of urban redevelopment, increased car ownership and anxiety about juvenile delinquency was not confined to Britain, and an increasingly connected international network of play space campaigners, including Allen, shared ideas and experiences during the 1950s and beyond.
Allen’s promotion of alternative visions for the playground in Britain coincided with her advocacy role with UNICEF in Europe and a wider renewed enthusiasm for international play networks. There had long been an exchange of ideas about dedicated public spaces for play, including links between British and US playground advocates from the 1890s, while the international diplomatic community had adopted the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1924. But after 1945 there was a significant increase in international cooperation. Landscape historian Jan Woudstra has suggested that Scandinavian countries in particular led a move away from equipment-dominated playgrounds towards a greater emphasis on nature, fantasy and personal creativity.141 While Sweden and Denmark were often held up as exemplars in play space provision and design, the exchange of ideas and information took place far beyond northern Europe.
Figure 4.2: Sketch Suggestions of Improvised Equipment for Children’s Play by R.B. Gooch, National Playing Fields Association, 1956, London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/011/MS22287.
British trade journals included international case studies, exploring play spaces in Europe and the US, and park departments hosted overseas visitors.142 The first International Conference in Park Administration took place in London in 1957 and included, alongside exhibition materials from Colwyn Bay, Copenhagen and China, a presentation on children’s playgrounds by Allen and a trade exhibition that included Hunt and Wicksteed.143 The conference led to the formation of the International Federation of Park Administrators (1957) and was followed by a United Nations seminar on playgrounds in 1958, a second world congress in 1962, attended by over a thousand delegates from twenty-six countries, and a third world congress in 1967.144 One commentator concluded that ‘when so much attractively designed playground equipment is being produced – especially on the Continent – it is somewhat melancholy to see new playgrounds in Britain fitted out with equipment that was probably designed around the turn of the century’.145 Even in other countries playground equipment was not meeting the expectations of some. Arvid Bengtsson, the director of parks in Helsingborg, Sweden, felt that ‘playground equipment which is on sale in this country is somewhat unimaginative and conservative. We in the Parks Office try therefore to design and construct the equipment which is needed’.146
In moving away from standardised manufactured equipment, Bengtsson was one example of a wider shift in international thought, perhaps best demonstrated by the publication of Spielplatz und Gemeinschaftszentrum (Playgrounds and Recreation Spaces, 1959) in Stuttgart and London.147 In addition to examples from Britain and Germany, it included creative play space designs from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, France and Italy, India and Japan, Brazil and the USA. In his introduction, the Swiss play space advocate Alfred Ledermann linked the need for dedicated children’s play spaces to the problems of the modern city, including its impact on the nerves and health of urban inhabitants and the lack of wild space for children to play. Inspired by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens (1938) and its emphasis on the central place of play in human culture, Ledermann argued that urban life needed more opportunities for playfulness, from the design of homes and gardens to open space on housing estates and in the public parks. Examples of progressive play space designs from around the world showed how town planners, designers and educationalists could work together to reclaim spaces for play in the city. Although Allen seems not to have been involved in preparing Playgrounds and Recreation Spaces, she would use some of the examples in her later publications and many of the case studies undoubtedly matched Allen’s idea of the ideal play space.
In summary, from the late 1940s, Allen sought to rejuvenate the imagined playground so that it corresponded more closely to contemporary notions of childhood and provided opportunities for more naturalistic play. Although popularly associated with adventure playgrounds, she had a far wider influence on play space thinking. The rhetoric that emphasised the need for playgrounds endured and the critiques she expressed had largely been initiated and developed by others, often in the interwar years. However, in bringing them together and making them more widely and publicly accessible, she had a significant impact on visions of the ideal playground. She exposed the tension between orthodox playground design and evolving ideas about the developmental needs of children. Although often overlooked, providing more ‘natural’ play opportunities was also an important motivation for Allen. But just like other attempts to introduce elements of nature into the city, her ideas about a natural childhood and naturalistic play spaces were a product of her particular experiences and values, rooted in a rural nostalgia, horticultural training and practical work experience. Operating at a variety of scales, she contributed to local playground committees, campaigned nationally on play space provision and was connected with and contributed to international discourse through multinational conferences and networks. Through her campaigning, Allen challenged conventional playground thinking and encouraged experimentation in play space design, something that professional designers would progressively replicate in urban reconstruction schemes and on new housing estates.
Reimagining the playground: artists and architects
If postwar planners routinely designated space for children’s play in modern urban environments, those tasked with imagining and designing the buildings and landscapes that gave form to such settings increasingly engaged with the detailed form of the playground and its contents. This was not new in 1945 and artists and designers had been involved in shaping modern versions of childhood during the first half of the twentieth century. From Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s role in Glasgow’s turn-of-the-century school building programme, through Bauhaus toys in Germany, to Tecton’s Finsbury Health Centre, designers were addressing children’s education, entertainment and health.148 The playground did not escape this attention either. In 1934, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi imagined a radical play space for Central Park in New York, but his Play Mountain was never realised.149 Instead, it was after the Second World War that the playground became even more firmly embedded into creative responses to the city. From late 1940s to the early 1960s, designers created infrastructure for the welfare state, including schools, hospitals and play spaces, influenced by utopian ideas, social planning and modernist aesthetics. In 1954, the Museum of Modern Art in New York ran a Playground Sculpture exhibition, which one critic described as a ‘strange and wonderful world of colour and shapes’.150 However, this did not mean that the principle of architectural experiment in the realms of play space design was widely accepted across the Atlantic in Britain. A 1957 article in The Architect, for instance, promoted the ideal play space as one that closely resembled the orthodox playground, where swings, slides and other apparatus predominated.151 Another architectural commentator concurred, suggesting that ‘British finances and the British temperament are vaguely against the planned playground, except in its most conventional form as a collection of swings and seesaws’.152
Despite mainstream support for conventional play equipment, there was increasing criticism of the orthodox playground from within the design profession. In an idiosyncratic conference paper in 1947, Clough Williams-Ellis welcomed the gradually improving provision of public spaces for children, but reacted against the use of ‘frightful’ railings which invariably surrounded them (he also found the ‘shrubbery-pokery’ of many parks distressing and most garden decoration ‘debased and repulsive’).153 The architect Archie McNab found that play equipment manufacturers produced ‘a range of products which on the whole is pretty dismal and unimaginative … often more suited to a gymnasium than to helping small children to enjoy themselves’.154 As well as summing up the previous seventy years of playground thought, he provided numerous examples of what he felt was more imaginative and creative but still industrially produced play equipment. In contrast, a small number of designers moved away from commercial play equipment to redefine play space forms in far more creative ways.
The historian Elain Harwood has emphasised the significant role played by the architects of postwar council housing schemes in designing the surrounding landscapes.155 The large-scale redevelopment schemes made possible by comprehensive planning and wartime bomb damage meant that architects were presented with an almost blank canvas when designing new housing estates. Existing streets and buildings were often cleared entirely, and designers were tasked with creating new urban environments, within the site boundary at least, where homes, open spaces and playgrounds could be carefully integrated. One of the earliest and most notable postwar examples was the Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico, Westminster. Designed and laid out by Philip Powell (1921–2003) and John Hidalgo Moya (1920–94), the estate provided a high-density mix of homes in blocks of different heights and was one of the first large-scale housing schemes after the war. In addition to the buildings and road layout, Powell and Moya also carefully planned the landscaping in between, including the provision of open spaces and the design of structures for play. However, this was not part of their initial commission. Instead, it was a personal decision to consider play provision in this way and Powell’s particular sense of childlike fun is evident from his letters to the building contractor, seeking an old steamroller for one of the play spaces.156 The associated play structures made use of materials that were similar to those used for the estate buildings, including brick and concrete, as well as more irreverent forms, such as a flying saucer, and some items of conventional play equipment (Figure 4.3).
This emphasis on the play value of architectural details and building materials was echoed within the LCC architects’ department, considered one of the foremost architectural practices in the world at the time. Finding that children were more interested in the steps, slopes, seats and bollards of estate landscapes than the unsatisfactory and often actively dangerous specialist playground equipment, the department set out to design its own play structures.157 Architects produced sketches of playhouses, dodge walls, bollard seats and wooden tents that could be created by the same building contractors who would build the new homes (Figure 4.4). The drawings were inserted into the department’s design guidance in 1959 and several of these structures, along with a water tray and sandpit, were installed in four experimental play spaces, including on the Barnsbury estate in Islington and Woodberry Down estate in Hackney.158
Having produced bespoke play structures, architects turned to the wider estate landscape. Future phases of the Churchill Gardens scheme attempted to create an urban environment where ‘children charge straight from indoors to play on the grass between the maisonettes, and their parents sit out in deck-chairs in the summer’.159 This romantic image of the council estate, with children playing and parents freed from work and childcare responsibilities, might say more about the expectations of the author than the realities of life on the estate, but it did represent a significant shift in thinking. Rather than enclose equipment within a designated playground, the whole estate environment needed to be considered when providing spaces for children to play.
Figure 4.3: Children’s playground, Churchill Gardens estate by J. Maltby, 1963, John Maltby/RIBA Collections, RIBA34960.
One response was a logical extension of earlier attempts to segregate children and motor vehicles. But rather than encourage children into specific playgrounds, cars would be restricted to roads, while children had greater freedom within the estate. As Powell and Moya worked on Churchill Gardens, the sociologist Charles Madge argued for new urban environments where children could play more freely, but in the very different setting of low-rise, low-density Stevenage new town. Without motor traffic nearby, footpaths could become the ‘natural patrolling ground for tricycles and other children’s wheeled vehicles’, while ‘garden commons’ provided space for sandpits and games.160 Eleanor Mitchell, the designer of the Notting Hill adventure playground, also argued that play opportunities should be widely distributed in small quantities throughout the urban landscape, to create spaces for children to play or talk to friends while parents did their shopping.161 There were practical experiments with this approach to play provision. In the new town of Basildon, sculptural play equipment was scattered in car-free streets and squares, but when set in hard paved areas they seemed a long way from Madge’s vision of a green garden common.
Figure 4.4: Experimental play equipment by LCC Architects Department, 1959, © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London), GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.
An alternative response came from the Netherlands, where architect Aldo van Eyck sought to create a more playful urban environment by reintegrating rather than segregating children from the city. Between 1947 and the 1970s, van Eyck created over 700 playable spaces in Amsterdam, mostly using bespoke sculptural installations that encouraged children to be creative and stimulated community life.162 Invariably located close to homes but within the street setting, they tended to have little or no physical segregation from motor traffic.163 Several of van Eyck’s designs appeared in the 1959 English translation of Playgrounds and Recreation Spaces, but there seems to have been little wider acknowledgment of his radical approach among British play space advocates. The proximity of play to the perils of the street in van Eyck’s schemes was too close for campaigners who had long emphasised that the street was not a place for play.
Instead, the involvement of architects in British play space design was most often associated with Brutalist housing estates in this period. In Sheffield, the city architect’s department included concrete play structures on the Park Hill estate, while Erno Goldfinger produced sketches of alternative play forms and included Brutalist play spaces at the Balfron tower in Poplar, east London.164 This form of experimentation – and in particular, the emphasis on architectural aesthetics rather than play function – was not welcomed by Marjory Allen. In fact, she was extremely critical of architectural involvement in play space provision. She argued that the orthodox playground, ‘with fixed equipment chosen from an ironmonger’s catalogue’, represented one end of a dark spectrum and that at the other extreme were ‘over-elaborate, over-clever, too slick’ spaces designed by architects.165 Neither swings and slides nor painted steamrollers and unalterable sculptural forms provided children with the freedom to play as they wished. In contrast, a few landscape designers were creating spaces that supported the free, creative and naturalistic play that Allen idealised.
A review of the contents of the Institute of Landscape Architects’ journal from the 1930s to the 1970s found few contributions relating to the design of children’s play space.166 Despite this lack of coverage in the journal, there were landscape designers interested in play provision. As early as 1936, Thomas Adams had called for experts to be involved in shaping the modern city and specifically that landscape architects should be responsible for the creation of parks, playgrounds and promenades.167 After the war, it was the landscape architect Brenda Colvin (1897–1981) who most clearly elucidated a vision for children’s play that combined Allen’s explicit promotion of the potential of bombsites and her implicit appreciation of the natural environment and its benefits for children. In Land and Landscapes (1948), Colvin argued that designers should be promoting properly interconnected urban park systems, to bring fresh air and natural beauty within easy reach of all urban inhabitants. She shared Allen’s assumptions about the playful needs of children, the playfulness of the rural landscape and the opportunities presented by the consequences of war. Colvin felt that children needed imaginative and adventurous play and that ‘a good bomb crater, a tank trap, or a Home Guard dug out’ all provided useful places were urban children could play.168 She also suggested that these features represented an urban imitation of the play opportunities that were consistently available to children in the countryside. In an example from the open downs near Luton, she found children gathering to play on a steep chalk escarpment, with its gnarled tree roots, ropes and swings, mud slides, shrubs and trees. For Colvin, this environment provided freedom from the grown-up world and a haven for children’s imagination. She suggested that when attempting to recreate similar play opportunities in the city, designers needed to provide irregularity, steep slopes, uneven ground, trees for climbing and swings, rough grass, water and surroundings that evoked a forest setting. Colvin worked on hundreds of schemes, from small gardens to industrial and institutional landscapes, but did not become known for creating children’s play spaces. Instead, one of the most notable exponents of the naturalistic play spaces promoted by Colvin and Allen was Mary Mitchell.
Mary Mitchell (1923–88) qualified as a landscape architect in 1955 and briefly worked in Richard Sudell’s practice and for the Stevenage New Town Development Corporation. But it was in her later work for Birmingham Corporation and in private practice that she established a reputation as a pioneering designer of children’s playgrounds. Her work featured in a number of influential publications in Britain and overseas, including Marjory Allen’s Planning for Play (1968) and Arvid Bengtsson’s Environmental Planning for Children’s Play (1970). Mitchell’s designs were in stark contrast to the orthodox playground, with its levelled asphalt, metal fencing and standardised equipment, and instead were developed specifically for each site, making use of existing and new landscape features and responding to the character of the surrounding urban environment.169 She felt that play areas needed to be imaginative and functional, active and sociable, creative and intimate, and free from pollution, all with a view to promoting frequent use by children.170
In Birmingham, her designs for the Kingshurst Hall estate, Pool Farm estate and Chamberlain Gardens play spaces incorporated mature and new trees to create a woodland-like setting, while undulating landforms included bespoke slides and climbing structures, and there were open, grassy areas for both active and imaginative play. On the Lyndhurst estate, a single row of granite setts embedded into the grass delineated only a nominal boundary between the play area and the wider estate landscape. In Nuneaton and Blackburn, Mitchell created spaces with similar characteristics, even if the individual designs were unique to each location. They included steep-sided slopes, water, trees, slides integrated into small hills and other bespoke play structures in a naturalistic setting. In the Lee Valley Regional Park in London, Mitchell combined the reclamation of an industrial landscape with new play opportunities, adapting a disused sewage works to create the Markfield Action Playground.171
As well as adapting the landscape to make it more playful, from 1959 Mitchell introduced sculpture to the playgrounds she designed. In particular, she worked with the artist John Bridgeman to create abstract, often animalistic forms in a number of Birmingham open spaces, including the Nechells Green Redevelopment Area and Hawkesley Farm Moat estate. It is interesting to note that even when experimental and creative approaches to the playground were implemented there was still a tendency towards standardisation and repetition, even if only on a small scale. The formwork for Bridgeman’s concrete and brass slide sculpture at Nechells Green was designed to be reused at least four times.172 Few of the sculptures now survive, although the installation at Curtis Gardens in Birmingham is now Grade-II listed. That Allen and others showcased Mitchell’s play space designs in their books and publications is not surprising. With their organic aesthetic, landscaping and planting, diverse play opportunities and site-specific layouts, in many ways Mitchell’s projects represented the ideal play spaces that Allen had long called for.
Another landscape architect who created play spaces that would receive wider acclaim at the time was Michael Brown (1923–96). From the mid-1960s, he designed a number of play areas in London, High Wycombe and Redditch, mainly on social housing estates. Although less naturalistic than Mitchell’s play space designs, Brown used a simple palette of hard materials, often brick, to create incidental and durable opportunities for play. Brown felt that regular features of the urban landscape, such as steps, railings, walls and benches, were preferable to manufactured play equipment and that opportunities for creative and imaginative play should be a feature of all outside space.173 At the Brunel estate in Paddington, Brown created a monumental slide structure out of brick as part of his wider landscape scheme, a feature that was Grade-II listed by Historic England in 2020 (Figure 4.5). For Marjory Allen it was not the individual play structures that were his most notable achievement, but rather the approach to the wider estate grounds. Allen commended Brown’s design for the Winstanley estate in Battersea because ‘the entire landscape scheme has been conceived in terms of children’s play activities’, so that the ‘total environment’ was available for play.174
Figure 4.5: Brick slide on the Brunel estate, London, c.1974, Landscape Institute / Michael Brown, Museum of English Rural Life, AR BRO PH5/1/524B.
This approach to providing for children’s play was not new in 1962 when Brown designed the Winstanley estate. In his wide-ranging review of public housing schemes in 1958, the noted architect A.W. Cleeve Barr concluded that ‘inadequate facilities for children’s play have constituted one of the most miserable features of British postwar housing schemes’.175 And while he repeated many of the recommendations in other publications about the details of play provision, perhaps his most radical assertion was that the designers of a new housing estate needed to consider the total design of its communal environment. In many ways this was the antithesis of the playground. Rather than accept that the urban landscape was a hostile place for children and respond by providing dedicated places to play, these calls for total design represented a new way of thinking about the child in the city. Children had long experienced the wider city as a place to play, but now play advocates and designers were starting to appreciate that too. In 1965, the landscape architect Bill Gillespie concluded that ‘we need to get away from this isolated idea of the parks towards an open space system fully integrated with the other elements of the city’.176 Anarchists and urbanists, such as Colin Ward and Jane Jacobs, would develop this notion further in the late 1960s and 1970s, arguing that the functional segregation of the city, including the creation of dedicated places to play, not only failed to recognise the lived reality of urban life, but also contributed to the increasing hostility of the wider environment for children and adults alike. This shift from criticism of the playground form to condemnation of the entire playground principle is explored further in the next chapter.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, the children’s playground provided a public space where social and environmental assumptions about childhood, child development, nature and the city could be played out and challenged. Long-standing rhetoric that was used to justify the need for playgrounds, including road danger, a lack of urban nature and protection against delinquency, remained central to continued efforts by town planners and play space campaigners to promote the need for dedicated play spaces for children. In numerical terms, the National Playing Fields Association distributed more financial support for municipal playground projects in the decade after the war than in the fifteen years before the war. At the same time, there was far greater experimentation in the playground form in response to new ideas about children’s developmental needs, new forms of housing and the centrality of childhood to the new welfare state. Marjory Allen’s promotion of the Emdrup junk playground was not a radical break with earlier thinking, even if it appeared very different to the traditional orthodox playground. Instead, Allen fused earlier critiques of the playground with changing constructions of childhood and her own conceptions of nature to spur high-profile and public discussion about the ideal playground. This in turn provided the critical space for advocates, designers and in a small number of cases children to experiment with play space form. This period of experimentation would be short-lived as commercial suppliers adapted their products and there were new concerns about playground safety. When combined with reductions in local authority funding and changing leisure habits in the later twentieth century, the playground ideal would face an existential threat.
Notes
1. Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare, England 1872–1989 (London: Routledge, 1994); Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds., Architecture and the Welfare State (London: Routledge, 2015).
2. Sir John Anderson to Lawrence Chubb, Letter, 25 April 1944, National Archives, CB 1/76.
3. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Memorandum on the Recent Work of the Association’, 1942, Museum of English Rural Life, SR CPRE C/1/73/1.
4. ‘Bomb on East End School’, The Times, 14 June 1917, p. 8; Niko Gärtner, ‘Administering “Operation Pied Piper”: How the London County Council Prepared for the Evacuation of Its Schoolchildren 1938–1939’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 42.1 (2010), 17–32.
5. ‘The Childless City’, The Observer, 10 September 1939, p. 11.
6. Peter Bruce Saunders, ‘Oral History Interview, Reference to Playing in Damaged Buildings at 00:08:00’, 1999, Imperial War Museum, Sound 18748; Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
7. Dudley S. Cowes, ‘Leave This to Us, Sonny – You Ought to Be out of London’, n.d., Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM PST 15093; ‘Children in Towns’, The Times, 11 March 1944, p. 5.
8. ‘Shelter Play-Centres’, The Guardian, 18 October 1941, p. 8.
9. F. Tennyson Jesse, ‘Evacuation’, The Times, 22 September 1939, p. 6.
10. ‘Recreation for Evacuees’, The Guardian, 18 December 1939, p. 10; ‘Evacuated Children’s Holidays’, The Times, 27 July 1940, p. 7.
11. ‘Are Our Child Exiles Happy? A Plea for Play in Reception Areas’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 4.9 (1940), 213–15.
12. ‘Wicksteed: Our Works Are Now Fully Occupied on 100% War Work’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 5.11 (1941), front cover.
13. ‘In Brief’, The Guardian, 15 June 1940, p. 8; ‘An Open Space’, The Guardian, 26 April 1940, p. 4.
14. J. Lovatt and others, ‘The Fattening of Pigs on Swill Alone: A Municipal Enterprise’, Empire Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 11 (1943), 182–90; ‘Paddington’s Municipal Piggery: Two Years of Remarkable Progress’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 8.3 (1943), 35.
15. ‘A Great Day for Paddington: Montgomery of Alamein Opens Rebuilt Recreation Ground’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 13.1 (1948), 29–30.
16. Alf T. Harrison, ‘A Children’s Paradise: The Children’s Playground’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 11.7 (1946), 167–71.
17. B. Hirst & Sons to W.J. Hepburn, ‘Ne Plus Ultra Playground Equipment Catalogue to Hyde Park Superintendent’, 23 September 1949, National Archives, WORKS/16/391; Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Price List for Playground Equipment’, 1949, London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/RA/D2G/04/091.
18. ‘Facilities Provided as a Result of Financial Assistance from the NPFA’, Playing Fields Journal, 17.1 (1957), 12.
19. Marjorie Cruickshank, ‘The Open-Air School Movement in English Education’, Paedagogica Historica, 17.1 (1977), 62–74.
20. Lynn Cook, ‘The 1944 Education Act and Outdoor Education: From Policy to Practice’, History of Education, 28.2 (1999), 157–72.
21. Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
22. F.J. Osborn, ‘Pepler, Sir George Lionel (1882–1959)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); George L. Pepler, ‘Open Spaces’, The Town Planning Review, 10.1 (1923), 11–24; National Playing Fields Association, Third Annual Report (National Playing Fields Association, 1929), National Archives, CB 4/1.
23. G.T. Eagleton, ‘Wanted – a Standard for Small Playgrounds’, Playing Fields Journal, 13.2 (1953), 48–50.
24. National Playing Fields Association, Survey of Urban Playing Facilities (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1951); ‘Urban Areas Need More Games Facilities’, Playing Fields Journal, 11.2 (1951), 32–5.
25. Local Government Board for Scotland, Report of the Women’s House-Planning Committee (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1918); Ministry of Reconstruction Advisory Council, Women’s Housing Sub-Committee Final Report (London: HMSO, 1919), National Archives, RECO 1/629.
26. John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London: Verso, 2019).
27. Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond, ‘Upward or Outward? Politics, Planning and Council Flats, 1919–1939’, The Journal of Architecture, 13.1 (2008), 53–90.
28. Mark Swenarton, ‘Tudor Walters and Tudorbethan: Reassessing Britain’s Inter-War Suburbs’, Planning Perspectives, 17.3 (2002), 267–86.
29. Judith Roberts, ‘The Gardens of Dunroamin: History and Cultural Values with Specific Reference to the Gardens of the Inter-war Semi’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 1.4 (1996), 229–37; Sophie Seifalian, ‘Gardens of Metro-Land’, Garden History, 39.2 (2011), 218–38.
30. Matthew Hollow, ‘Suburban Ideals on England’s Interwar Council Estates’, Garden History, 39.2 (2011), 203–17.
31. Elizabeth Darling, ‘ “The Star in the Profession She Invented for Herself”: A Brief Biography of Elizabeth Denby, Housing Consultant’, Planning Perspectives, 20.3 (2005), 271–300.
32. White City Estate Plan, LCC, London Housing (1937), p. 111 in Pepper and Richmond, ‘Upward or Outward’.
33. ‘Slum Clearance at Poplar’, The Times, 30 August 1934, p. 6; ‘Slum Clearance in London’, The Times, 8 March 1938, p. 21.
34. J. Richardson, ‘The Provision of Open Spaces in Slum Clearance Areas and Congested Districts’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 4.5 (1939), 125–9.
35. ‘Quarry Hill Flats, Playground, Kitson House’, 1939, Leeds Central Library, D LIE Quarry (12) https://
www .leodis .net /viewimage /98774 [accessed 6 July 2023]. 36. Matthew Whitfield, ‘Keay, Sir Lancelot Herman (1883–1974)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
37. ‘New Flats in Liverpool’, The Times, 21 June 1935, p. 13.
38. Maxwell Fry, ‘The New Britain Must Be Planned’, Picture Post, 4 January 1941, 15–18.
39. Emmanuel Marmaras and Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘Planning for Post-war London: The Three Independent Plans, 1942–3’, Planning Perspectives, 9.4 (1994), 431–53; Patrick Abercrombie and J.H. Forshaw, County of London Plan (London: Macmillan, 1943).
40. J. Paton Watson and Patrick Abercrombie, A Plan for Plymouth (Plymouth: Underhill, 1943), p. 2.
41. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee to Enquire into the Provision of Play Space on New Housing Estates, 17 May’, 1960, National Archives, CB 1/64.
42. London County Council, ‘Spa Fields Extension’, 1951, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/RA/D2G/04/091; ‘Breathing Space in London’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.12 (1960), 667–9.
43. Harriet Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (London: Tauris, 2012).
44. ‘Forward to Festival of Britain’, The Architectural Review, 110 (1951), 73–9.
45. Lord Luke, ‘Festival of Britain 1951 NPFA to Play Important Part’, Playing Fields Journal, 9.4 (1949), 202.
46. Becky Conekin, ‘The Autobiography of a Nation’: The 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
47. Plan of Lansbury ‘Live Architecture’ Exhibition in Atkinson, The Festival of Britain.
48. Matthew Hollow, ‘Utopian Urges: Visions for Reconstruction in Britain, 1940–1950’, Planning Perspectives, 27.4 (2012), 569–85.
49. Simon Gunn, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Urban Modernism’, Journal of British Studies, 49.4 (2010), 849–69.
50. Anthony Minoprio, ‘Crawley New Town’, Town and Country Planning, 16.64 (1949), 215–21.
51. Watson Garbutt, ‘A Village Becomes a New Town’, Town and Country Planning, 12.45 (1944), 22–5.
52. Ministry of Health, Housing Manual (London: HMSO, 1949), p. 17.
53. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the First Meeting of the Children’s Playground Technical Subcommittee on 4 November’, 1952, National Archives, CB 1/68.
54. National Playing Fields Association, Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1953), Museum of English Rural Life, P2870 Box 5/12.
55. Malcolm Tozer, ‘A History of Eton Fives’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 30.2 (2013), 187–9.
56. National Playing Fields Association, Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats, p. 8.
57. Ministry of Housing and Local Government, ‘Housing Handbook’, 1957, p. 62, National Archives, HLG 31/11.
58. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee to Enquire into the Provision of Play Space on New Housing Estates, 17 May’, p. 2; National Playing Fields Association, Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats, 6th edn (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1974), National Archives, CB 4/76.
59. Marjory Allen and Mary Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady: Lady Allen of Hurtwood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).
60. Bob Holman, Champions for Children: The Lives of Modern Child Care Pioneers (Bristol: Policy Press, 2001).
61. Hal Moggridge, ‘Allen, Marjory, Lady Allen of Hurtwood (1897–1976), Landscape Architect and Promoter of Child Welfare’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
62. Marjory Allen, ‘Juvenile Delinquency’, The Times, 6 December 1948, p. 5.
63. Elizabeth Denby, Europe Re-Housed (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 269.
64. Marjory Allen, ‘Letter to the Editor: Children’s Playgrounds’, The Times, 12 December 1952, p. 9.
65. Marjory Allen, ‘Children in “Homes”’, The Times, 15 July 1944, p. 5; Marjory Allen, Whose Children? (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1945).
66. Gordon Lynch, ‘Pathways to the 1946 Curtis Report and the Post-War Reconstruction of Children’s Out-of-Home Care’, Contemporary British History, 34 (2020), 22–43 (p. 28).
67. Holman, Champions for Children; Roy Kozlovsky, ‘Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction’, in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children; An International Reader, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 171–90.
68. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, p. 230.
69. Carol Dyhouse, ‘The British Federation of University Women and the Status of Women in Universities, 1907–1939’, Women’s History Review, 4.4 (1995), 465–85.
70. ‘ASLA Notes’, Landscape Architecture, 21.2 (1931), 139–45; Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, p. 98; Harriet Jordan, ‘Mawson, Thomas Hayton (1861–1933), Landscape Architect’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
71. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, pp. 30–31.
72. Marjory Allen, New Houses, New Schools, New Citizens (London: Nursery School Association of Great Britain, 1934), p. 5.
73. Marjory Allen, ‘Why Not Use Our Bomb Sites like This?’, Picture Post, 16 November 1946, 26–9.
74. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, p. 196.
75. Jan Woudstra, ‘Danish Landscape Design in the Modern Era (1920–1970)’, Garden History, 23.2 (1995), 222–41.
76. Ning de Coninck-Smith, ‘Where Should Children Play? City Planning Seen from Knee-Height: Copenhagen 1870 to 1920’, Children’s Environments Quarterly, 7.4 (1990), 54–61.
77. A.K. Winship, ‘Editorial – Playing in Sand’, The Journal of Education, 70.16 (1909), 436.
78. Ning de Coninck-Smith, Natural Play in Natural Surroundings: Urban Childhood and Playground Planning in Denmark, c.1930–1950, Working Papers in Child and Youth Culture, 6 (Odense: University of Southern Denmark, 1999).
79. G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (New York: Appleton, 1906); Essi Jouhki, ‘Politics in Play: The Playground Movement as a Socio-Political Issue in Early Twentieth-Century Finland’, Paedagogica Historica, 2023, 1–21.
80. Asbjørn Jessen and Anne Tietjen, ‘Assembling Welfare Landscapes of Social Housing: Lessons from Denmark’, Landscape Research, 46.4 (2021) https://
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82. Sørensen, Parkpolitik, p. 54; quoted in Peter Bosselmann, ‘Landscape Architecture as Art: C. Th. Sørensen. A Humanist’, Landscape Journal, 17.1 (1998), 62–9 (p. 65).
83. Deborah Philips, Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
84. Robin Whalley and Peter Worden, ‘Forgotten Firm: A Short Chronological Account of Mitchell and Kenyon, Cinematographers’, Film History, 10.1 (1998), 35–51.
85. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
86. Scott Johnston, ‘Courting Public Favour: The Boy Scout Movement and the Accident of Internationalism, 1907–29’, Historical Research, 88.241 (2015), 508–29.
87. Joyce Antler, ‘Mitchell, Lucy Sprague (1878–1967), Educator’, American National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
88. Jean Lee Hunt, A Catalogue of Play Equipment (New York: Bureau of Educational Experiments, 1918), Project Gutenberg, 28466 www
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90. Ministry of Reconstruction Advisory Council, Women’s Housing Sub-Committee Final Report, p. 11.
91. Margaret McMillan, The Nursery School (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1921).
92. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, pp. 157–9.
93. ‘The Job of the Games Warden’, Playing Fields Journal, 12.1 (1952), 25–6.
94. Krista Cowman, ‘ “The Atmosphere Is Permissive and Free”: The Gendering of Activism in the British Adventure Playgrounds Movement, ca. 1948–70’, Journal of Social History, 53.1 (2019), 218–41.
95. Edward Keeling, House of Commons Debate, 30 March 1944, Vol. 398, Col.1542 (Hansard, 1944).
96. Ben Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes’, Cultural Politics, 9 (2013), 323–36; Krista Cowman, ‘Open Spaces Didn’t Pay Rates: Appropriating Urban Space for Children in England after WW2’, in Städtische Öffentliche Räume: Planungen, Aneignungen, Aufstände 1945–2015 (Urban Public Spaces: Planning, Appropriation, Rebellions 1945–2015), ed. Christoph Bernhardt (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016), pp. 119–40.
97. Kozlovsky, ‘Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction’; Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites’; Cowman, ‘Open Spaces Didn’t Pay Rates’; Lucie Glasheen, ‘Bombsites, Adventure Playgrounds and the Reconstruction of London: Playing with Urban Space in Hue and Cry’, The London Journal, 44.1 (2019), 54–74.
98. Marcus Lipton, House of Commons Debate, 13 March 1953 Vol.512 Col.1735 (Hansard, 1953).
99. Institute of Park Administration, Report of the 1955 Annual Conference (London: Journal of Park Administration Ltd, 1955), Museum of English Rural Life, P2870 Box 5/39.
100. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the Children’s Playground Committee on 17 March’, 1954, National Archives, CB 1/59.
101. Marjory Allen, Adventure Playgrounds (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1953); National Playing Fields Association, ‘Steering Committee on Adventure Playgrounds’, 1953, National Archives, CB 1/53; National Playing Fields Association, ‘Report of Adventure Playground Conference’, 1956, National Archives, CB 1/67.
102. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the Children’s Playground Committee on 18 November’, 1954, p. 2, National Archives, CB 1/59.
103. ‘Liverpool’s Adventure Playgrounds’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.10 (1960), 515–17.
104. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, p. 237.
105. Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).
106. Gabriel Moshenska, ‘Children in Ruins’, in Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, ed. Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 230–49.
107. Institute of Park Administration, Report of the First International Congress in Public Park Administration (London: Journal of Park Administration, 1957), p. 67, RHS Lindley, 969.2 Ins.
108. Marjory Allen, ‘Why the Stockholm Playgrounds Are So Successful’, The Architect and Building News, 30 December 1954, pp. 812–14.
109. Marjory Allen, Play Parks, 3rd edn (London: Housing Centre, 1964), p. 10.
110. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, p. 245.
111. Annabel Downs, ‘Sudell, Richard (1892–1968), Landscape Architect and Author’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
112. Richard Sudell, ‘How Can We Make Our Parks Brighter?’, Municipal Journal and Public Works Engineer, 46.2300 (1937), 397–8.
113. Richard Sudell, ‘Park Design for Modern Needs’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 14.10 (1950), 343–6; Richard Sudell, ‘Wanted – More Play Leaders’, Playing Fields Journal, 12.1 (1952), 20–24.
114. Seifalian, ‘Gardens of Metro-Land’.
115. National Children’s Playground Association, ‘The Five Million Club, Minutes of Executive Committee, 17 October’, 1950, National Archives, CB 1/76; National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the First Meeting of the Children’s Playground Technical Subcommittee on 4 November’.
116. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the Children’s Playground Committee on 17 March’.
117. Allen and Nicholson, Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady, p. 235.
118. J. Bergmann, ‘The Parks of Copenhagen’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 13.1 (1948), 18–21.
119. ‘Editorial’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 20.7 (1955), 283.
120. R.C. McMillan, ‘Changes in the Playground’, The Times, 12 July 1957, p. 11.
121. Reginald Wesley, ‘Play Leadership in the City of Belfast’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.8 (1960), 378–80.
122. A. Dodds, ‘Play and Our Young People’, Park Administration, 28.5 (1963), 36–43.
123. ‘Ninth Exhibition of Park Equipment, Machinery and Materials’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 26.11 (1961), 46–8.
124. H.F. Clark, ‘A New Type of Park Administrator’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 23.11 (1959), 439–41; ‘Editorial’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.5 (1959), 199; ‘Editorial’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 27.11 (1962), 21.
125. Ministry of Education, The Youth Service in England and Wales (London: HMSO, 1960), p. 68.
126. John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, ‘A Profile of Lansbury’, The Town Planning Review, 25.1 (1954), 33–58.
127. ‘Play Leadership Film’, Playing Fields Journal, 16.4 (1956), 25; J.H. Hingston, ‘Play Leadership in the Borough of Ramsgate, Kent’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.9 (1960), 438–40; ‘Come out to Play in Battersea Park’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 27.5 (1962), 65.
128. W.D. Abernethy, ‘What Play Leadership Implies’, Park Administration, 30.3 (1965), 55.
129. National Playing Fields Association, ‘Institute of Playleadership Minutes, 9 February’, 1970, National Archives, CB 1/64.
130. London and Greater London Playing Fields Association, ‘Children’s Playgrounds Exhibition and Conference Press Release’, 1954, p. 1, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/038.
131. ‘Planning Children’s Playgrounds’, The Times, 12 June 1954, p. 3.
132. Come out to Play, 1954, British Pathé Archive, DOCS 1359.01 https://
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134. W.G. Ayres, ‘The Provision of Children’s Playgrounds by a Local Authority’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 19.4 (1954), 151–60.
135. ‘New Playfield Ideas from All over the World: Fascinating Facts in Report on Children’s Playground Exhibition’, Playing Fields Journal, 15.1 (1955), 53.
136. London and Greater London Playing Fields Association, ‘Children’s Playgrounds Exhibition’.
137. R.B. Gooch, Selection and Layout of Land for Playing Fields and Playgrounds (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1956), National Archives, CB 4/59.
138. Gooch, Selection and Layout of Land for Playing Fields and Playgrounds, p. 66.
139. R.B. Gooch, Sketch Suggestions of Improvised Equipment for Children’s Play (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1956), London Metropolitan Archive, CLC/011/MS22287.
140. Marjory Allen, Design for Play: The Youngest Children (London: Housing Centre, 1962); Allen, Play Parks; Marjory Allen, Planning for Play (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968); Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Homes for Today and Tomorrow (London: HMSO, 1961).
141. Jan Woudstra, ‘Detailing and Materials of Outdoor Space: The Scandinavian Example’, in Relating Architecture to Landscape, ed. Jan Birksted (London: E & FN Spon, 1999), pp. 53–68.
142. A.H. Garnsey, ‘Playgrounds in Europe and America’, Playing Fields Journal, 12.3 (1952), 33–5.
143. Institute of Park Administration, Report of the First International Congress in Public Park Administration.
144. International Federation of Park Administrators, ‘Bulletin’, 1967, Museum of English Rural Life, SR CPRE C/1/130/2; W. D. Abernethy, ‘Report on United Nations Playground Seminar’, 1958, National Archives, National Playing Fields Association CB 1/70; Institute of Park Administration, Report of the Second World Congress in Public Park Administration (London: Journal of Park Administration, 1962), RHS Lindley, 969.2 Ins; Institute of Park Administration, ‘Third World Congress in Public Park and Recreation Administration Bulletin No.2’, 1967, Museum of English Rural Life, SR CPRE C/1/130/2.
145. ‘How Austria Equips Its Children’s Playgrounds’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 22.9 (1958), 448–9 (p. 448).
146. Arvid Bengtsson, ‘Children’s Playground in a Swedish Town’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 22.10 (1958), 478–9 (p. 479).
147. Alfred Ledermann and Alfred Trachsel, Playgrounds and Recreation Spaces, trans. Ernst Priefert (London: The Architectural Press, 1959).
148. Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900–2000 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012).
149. Shaina D. Larrivee, ‘Playscapes: Isamu Noguchi’s Designs for Play’, Public Art Dialogue, 1.1 (2011), 53–80.
150. Aline B. Saarinen, ‘Playground: Function and Art’, New York Times, 4 July 1954, p. 4.
151. ‘Planning’, The Architect and Building News, 1957, 477–81.
152. ‘The Library Shelf’, Official Architecture and Planning, 23.3 (1960), 135.
153. Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘Biased Opinions’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 12.1 (1947), 15–17.
154. Archie McNab, ‘Equipping Children’s Playgrounds’, Design, 159 (1962), 64–8.
155. Elain Harwood, ‘Post-War Landscape and Public Housing’, Garden History, 28.1 (2000), 102–16.
156. Elain Harwood, ‘Review: The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 and The Brutalist Playground’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 75.1 (2016), 117–19.
157. London County Council, ‘Unsupervised Play Space on Housing Estates’, 1959, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.
158. London County Council, ‘Experimental Play Equipment: Sketch Layouts’, 1959, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.
159. Philip Aldis, ‘Churchill Gardens’, New Left Review, 10, 1961, 55–9 (p. 58).
160. Charles Madge, ‘Planning for People’, The Town Planning Review, 21.2 (1950), 131–44 (p. 140).
161. Eleanor Mitchell, ‘Planning for Children’s Play’, Town and Country Planning, 34.8–9 (1966), 418–21.
162. Rob Withagen and Simone R. Caljouw, ‘Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds: Aesthetics, Affordances, and Creativity’, Frontiers in Psychology, 8.1130 (2017) https://
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164. Sam Lambert, ‘Children Playing on the Climbing Frames in the Playground, Park Hill Estate, Sheffield’, 1963, RIBA Collections, AP Box 212 Sheffield; Erno Goldfinger, ‘Design for an Unidentified Playground’, 1965, RIBA Collections, PA646/4(6).
165. Allen, Planning for Play, p. 18.
166. Ian C. Laurie, ‘Public Parks and Spaces’, in Fifty Years of Landscape Design 1934–84, ed. Sheila Harvey and Stephen Rettig (London: The Landscape Press, 1985), pp. 63–78 (p. 73).
167. Thomas Adams, Outline of Town and City Planning: A Review of Past Efforts and Modern Aims (London: J & A Churchill, 1936), p. 334.
168. Brenda Colvin, Land and Landscape (London: John Murray, 1948), p. 206.
169. Mary Mitchell, ‘Birmingham Parks’, Park Administration, 28.5 (1963), 47.
170. Mary Mitchell, ‘Landscaping of Housing Areas’, Official Architecture and Planning, 25.4 (1962), 193–6.
171. Mary Mitchell, ‘Birmingham Playgrounds’, Playing Fields, 21.4 (1961), 40–41; Mary Mitchell, ‘Birmingham Playgrounds’, Playing Fields, 24.2 (1964), 29–30; Mary Mitchell, ‘Landscaping of Housing Areas’, p. 193; ‘An Imaginative Approach to Playground Provision’, Park Administration, 28.12 (1963), 42; Allen, Planning for Play, p. 96; Arvid Bengtsson, Environmental Planning for Children’s Play (London: Lockwood, 1970), pp. 104 & 148; ‘Children’s Playgrounds’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 165 (1973), xxxv; Tom Turner and Simon Rendel, London Landscape Guide (Dartford: Landscape Institute, 1983).
172. ‘Playgrounds in Birmingham’, The Architect and Building News, 218.24 (1960), 767–8.
173. Michael Brown, ‘Landscape and Housing’, Official Architecture and Planning, 30.6 (1967), 791–9; Michael Brown, ‘Drawings and Plans in the Michael Brown Collection’, 1966, Museum of English Rural Life, AR BRO DO.
174. Allen, Planning for Play, p. 26; Bengtsson, Environmental Planning for Children’s Play, p. 52; Luca Csepely-Knorr and Amber Roberts, ‘Towards a “Total Environment” for Children: Michael Brown’s Landscapes for Play’, in Landscape and Children (presented at the FOLAR Annual Symposium, Museum of English Rural Life, 2019).
175. A.W. Cleeve Barr, Public Authority Housing (London: Batsford, 1958), p. 46.
176. William Gillespie, ‘Landscaping Our Urban Areas’, Park Administration, 30.11 (1965), 40–43 (p. 43).