Introduction

Playgrounds today

While a trip to the playground might be a fun and seemingly playful venture, behind the scenes present-day play spaces are an important site of social and political contest, generating considerable scholarly and public discourse about children’s place in both social and physical worlds. From Auckland and Athens to Singapore and Seattle, scholars have debated the problems and possibilities of the playground. Researchers have variously asserted that such bounded spaces are a symbol of children’s inequitable access to the city, a spatial predictor of adolescent drug use or sites for the powerful expression of playful child agency.¹ In the UK, £86m is spent each year maintaining more than 26,000 public playgrounds, but with little strategic direction about their purpose and form.² This uncertainty about the relationship between place and play has also regularly featured in creative expression, as artists have sought to make sense of the playground and its social function. In the last decade, exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, the Kunsthalle in Zurich and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead have all sought to problematise established ideas about the place of children’s play in the city.³

Beyond academia and the arts, the playground has also been a focal point for popular anxiety about the apparent disconnect between twenty-first-century childhood and the ‘natural’ environment. From impassioned pleas by naturalists and calls for a rewilding of childhood, to sobering statistics about the limits of youthful interaction with the natural world, there is considerable concern about children’s separation from ‘nature’ and a renewed emphasis on the need for more natural play spaces.⁴ Although these widely held assumptions about childhood and nature are not unproblematic, they nonetheless exert a significant influence on present-day debate about play space design.⁵ Alongside this anxiety about urban nature, there have also been increasing calls to rethink urban infrastructure from a child’s point of view. From UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative to the work of pioneering municipal authorities, a child-centric and family-friendly approach to the planning of housing, transport and the wider public realm is increasingly positioned as an essential part of creating inclusive urban environments.⁶ Meanwhile, aristocratic landowners have created substantial playgrounds, with high entrance fees, as part of wider efforts to generate income to help maintain their estates.⁷ Together, this complex range of responses to the present-day playground point to the need for an empirically grounded historical study, one that will help to make sense of the shifting values and assumptions that have shaped the enduring provision and contested form of dedicated places for play.

Playing in the past

This interest in the social purpose of children’s play is hardly a new phenomenon. Children have always played and as adults we have long sought to direct such playfulness, asserting that youthful recreation might perform a useful function, often prescribing where it should take place. Evidence that play has long been an important feature of childhood can be seen in museums around the world, from 4,000-year-old Egyptian and Indus Valley toys to ancient Greek ornaments depicting children playing games with friends.⁸ The captivating early modern oil painting Children’s Games (1560) by Pieter Bruegel depicts in encyclopaedic detail over 200 children playing in an imagined Dutch townscape.⁹ Over eighty playful activities are shown taking place in outdoor spaces, encompassing the urban street and town square, rural fields and nearby stream, reflecting the contemporary attitudes of the Dutch mercantile classes towards play and education.¹⁰

Beyond the museum and gallery, historians have found considerable evidence of child-specific toys, games and equipment, including a medieval dictionary entry for a ‘merrytotter’, an undefined structure seemingly intended to encourage children’s play outside, perhaps comparable to a swing or see-saw.¹¹ Although access to such structures would most likely have been constrained by children’s age, gender and social status, the quality of spaces for youthful recreation has also long been important. According to Thomas Elyot, writing in 1531, the Romans set aside a large open space, the Campus Martius, next to the River Tiber so that children could exercise and play in the water.¹² For Elizabethan pedagogue Richard Mulcaster, firm ground, shelter from the ‘byting winde’ and fresh air that was free from a ‘noisome stenche’ were essential features of a ground for the physical education of children.¹³ These associations between notions of childhood and environment would continue well into the nineteenth century. James Kay-Shuttleworth, the noted Victorian educationalist and Poor Law Commissioner, felt that an appropriately laid out playground provided a ‘means of teaching the children to play without discord’.¹⁴

Charting a longer history of play spaces for children is complicated by the ambiguous epistemology of the word ‘playground’. Today, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as either ‘a piece of ground used for playing on’ or in extended use ‘any place of recreation’.¹⁵ When imagining the playground today, we tend to think of it as a place for children to play, most likely equipped with swings, slides and other equipment. However, the term has not always been used to describe spaces specifically set aside for children. In 1768, the physician Francis de Valangin used the term ‘play-ground’ to describe a green open area for curative recreation beyond London’s city wall.¹⁶ In the 1830s, the residents of Hathern, Leicestershire, used the term to describe a place for playing sport, while for the noted mountaineer and author Leslie Stephen, the European Alps were the ‘playground of Europe’.¹⁷ In 1858, the successful Liverpool merchant Charles Melly used the term ‘playground’ to describe a space specifically for energetic exercise. He defined his free outdoor gymnasium as a playground for the healthful enjoyment of the city’s working-class residents, but still not specifically for children.¹⁸ In other contexts, the playground represented a space of education and rest for children but excluded the wider public. In the late eighteenth century, the travel writer Arthur Young described visiting an attractive school with a ‘spacious playground walled in’, while a boarding school for young gentleman in Ilford similarly included a large, enclosed playground and garden.¹⁹ At the same time, the exclusion of the public from the school playground was sometimes problematic. In nineteenth-century Hackney, the enclosure of common land to create a playground for the Grocer’s Company school resulted in a long running and high-profile dispute with the local community over Lammas rights.²⁰ As such, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term ‘playground’ was broadly conceived, variously used to represent spaces for education, exercise, sport and recreation. It also operated at a variety of scales and crossed the boundaries of public and private, childhood and adulthood.

In the face of such diverse meanings, the central focus here is on the public realm and the provision of dedicated public spaces for children’s playful recreation, rather than school playgrounds or spaces primarily for adult use. In adopting such a stance, the book remains sensitive to the wider meaning that the term playground could represent, particularly its associations with education, health, exercise and adventure. A similarly flexible and sensitive approach is adopted in relation to the age-related boundaries of childhood. For much of the period in question, definitions shifted as legislation and social norms sought to shape the age at which sexual consent, education and work could take place. Playground advocates adopted similarly flexible definitions of childhood, rather than an absolute age range for the spaces they sought to create. Broadly speaking, advocates imagined that playgrounds would be used by children from toddlerhood, perhaps with older siblings, up to their teens and a similar approach is adopted here.

Playground histories

The longstanding interest in the spaces and social function of children’s play might suggest a similarly enduring attention from the scholarly community. However, the playground has seldom been a feature of academic research, despite an increasing interest in the history of spaces where playgrounds are often found, such as public parks and housing estates, and studies of the enduring connection between landscapes and health. Despite undoubtedly being shaped by notions of education, welfare, health and leisure, the public playground has rarely been a feature of the historiography that covers these fields. Furthermore, attempts to construct playground narratives from beyond the discipline of history have either failed to justify their claims with historical evidence, and as a result have tended to overly romanticise the past, or have in turn relied on such unsubstantiated accounts to make their case. Moreover, there has been a tendency in popular accounts to present the history of the playground in the USA as a universal story that can be applied elsewhere. While there was undoubtedly an international exchange of ideas (something explored later in the book), the creation of dedicated spaces for children’s public recreation was also reliant on local attitudes to childhood, urbanisation and a host of other factors, something clearly evidenced in historical scholarship on playground spaces in Budapest, Dublin, Helsinki and Toronto.²¹

That does not diminish the considerable historiography that deals with the story of the playground in the USA, with historical accounts published as early as 1922.²² Subsequent studies have focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on the campaigning of the Playground Association of America (1906) and practical action in cities such as San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Within these spatial and chronological boundaries, scholars have positioned the playground as a space where notions of gender, race and citizenship were negotiated and urban land politics were played out.²³ A notable development in the field in the USA has been research into the microhistories of individual playground sites, including the Hull House playground in Chicago, to better understand children’s experiences of using them and contesting their boundaries.²⁴ That this research is possible points to a key difference between the development of playgrounds in Britain and the USA. In the latter, playgrounds were often highly organised spaces that involved significant adult organisation and coordination, with administrative records at individual playground sites preserved and archived.

In contrast, the promotion and management of playgrounds in Britain has involved a wide range of philanthropic, voluntary and governmental organisations whose remit often extended well beyond spaces for play. As a result, the playground archive is significantly more fragmented and dispersed. The name of the Metropolitan Public Gardens, Boulevard and Playground Association (1882) hints at its diverse campaigning interests, while its archive is spread around the world, with no central record of remaining materials. Within local government, playgrounds have variously been the responsibility of park superintendents, engineers, architects, surveyors and housing officers, and the quality and extent of record keeping has varied significantly across more than four hundred local authorities. The retention of records at Wicksteed Park has occurred somewhat by accident, and while a project is in the process of reviewing materials, there is still much to do to organise and catalogue records. As we might expect, the playground appears in more published material in the twentieth century, but still in no central repository. As such, the research that underpins Designed for Play has drawn on records and materials at the National Archives, London Metropolitan Archives, British Library, Wicksteed Park, the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library, the Landscape Archives at the Museum of English Rural Life, the Royal Institute of British Architects, various university libraries and local authority record centres.

Partly as a result, the historiography on play space developments in Britain has tended to focus on radical playground experiments in the mid-twentieth century, often using published accounts of the activists involved. Valerie Wright’s study of children’s play on Glasgow council estates in the 1960s is a useful addition to historical scholarship which has otherwise mainly concentrated on the iconic mid-century adventure playground in bomb-damaged cities such as London, Liverpool and Bristol.²⁵ Historians, including Krista Cowman and Roy Kozlovsky, have explored the assumptions, values and practical action that shaped the adventure playground movement and its role in postwar reconstruction.²⁶ Cultural historians, including Ben Highmore and Lucie Glasheen, have also analysed postwar representations of children at play in the city and their wider cultural significance.²⁷ Drawing on both similar sources and new ones, later chapters in the book will provide a re-reading of this twentieth-century material to assess the significance of ideas about nature and education, as well as adventure playground thinking, on the wider provision of public places for play. In doing so, the book responds to Katy Layton-Jones’s call for a study of landscapes designed for children, but also extends the chronology back into the nineteenth century to make sense of the wider social and environmental processes that shaped playground provision more broadly.²⁸

Childhood and the urban environment

In narrating a more expansive historical account of the playground, Designed for Play builds on a broad consensus among historians that conceptions of childhood underwent significant change during the nineteenth century. In that period, childhood was increasingly imagined and constructed as a distinct phase of life, one that contrasted sharply with adulthood. The gradual expansion of compulsory education, alongside a broader focus on understanding children’s minds and bodies, formed part of wider philanthropic and state-sponsored welfare directed at children. The principle of providing dedicated public places for play was undoubtedly influenced by broader attempts to extend childhood education in the nineteenth century, notably the increasing importance of outdoor games in schools, and efforts to reform educational provision in the twentieth century, inspired by radical pedagogy and the open-air school movement. However, the extension of these values into the public realm and their relationship with ideas about nature and the city has rarely been considered. Inspired by modern historians of childhood, Designed for Play highlights the socially, spatially and historically constructed nature of childhood, the extension of these values into the public realm and their intersection with ideas about nature and the city.²⁹ Drawing on historical photographs, newspaper articles and records which mention youthful activities, the book also shows how children adapted and contested adult expectations of the playground. In doing so, it seeks to balance on the one hand providing an original account of the adult anxieties, assumptions and practical action that led to the creation of playgrounds, while on the other hand being sensitive to examples of negotiation and contestation by children.

Just as attitudes to childhood and education were shifting in the nineteenth century, so too were concerns about the industrialised city and the impact of the urban environment on the physical and moral wellbeing of its inhabitants. Public parks, institutional gardens and other urban greenery were positioned as spaces of individual health and an environmental tonic for the ills of the city. However, there is often only a passing reference to amenities provided for children in historical accounts of this green infrastructure movement. Where children are mentioned in park histories, for instance, coverage tends to be cursory and often assumes that the place of play within the park is an obvious and natural one. As will become clear in later chapters, this has not always been the case. Inspired by the work of social and environmental historians who have critically engaged with the eco-cultural values that have shaped public parks on both sides of the Atlantic, Designed for Play unpicks these assumptions about children’s place in the park landscape.³⁰ It also considers the place of children in environmental histories, addressing their position as ‘academic orphans’ in the field.³¹

Beyond the park boundary, the fate of the playground would be closely tied to wider responses to the problems of the industrial city, both pragmatic and utopian. While the focus here is on the evolution of the children’s playground, Designed for Play speaks more broadly to the increasing interest among philanthropic, voluntary and state actors in adapting the urban environment to achieve social, political and environmental ambitions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In exploring these processes, the book contributes to recent interdisciplinary interest in narrating urban social histories and exploring the complex geographies and histories associated with ostensibly natural spaces and apparently biological assumptions about urban inhabitants.³² Uniquely, in seeking to identify the origins of the playground in the mid-nineteenth century and its fortunes through to the early twenty first century, it extends the chronological scope of historiography that considers the spatial expression of urban modernisms, charting their fortunes over the course of 150 years.³³

Designed for Play also contributes to revisionist accounts of welfare in Britain, particularly those that situate children and public space within such narratives. It points to the evolutionary and increasingly holistic nature of welfare provision, rather than sudden state involvement from 1945. Notably, this study expands on the chronological coverage provided by Mathew Thomson in Lost Freedom and shows that the provision of dedicated public spaces for children began much earlier than the 1940s.³⁴ In doing so, it provides important historical context for Thomson’s work, suggesting that the perceived need to protect children from both the street and inappropriate adult behaviour, and the associated provision of special places for play, had much earlier roots than has generally been acknowledged. While Lost Freedom sets the stage for this study, here the focus shifts from an emphasis on the child to an interest in the social and spatial consequences of ideas about urban childhood, in particular for the provision, design and management of public spaces set aside for children. In adopting such an approach, Designed for Play contributes to our understanding of the spatial consequences of modern welfare, uncovering the ambition, design and policy that sought to shape urban landscapes and children’s lived experience. It charts how administrators, professionals, academics and philanthropists sought to adapt the public realm in line with these ideas. But, as historian James Greenhalgh notes, such attempts to create more rational urban spaces and regulated behaviours were always negotiated by users and, as we shall see, children were particularly effective at subverting adult expectations about where and how they should play.³⁵

Overview

For the first time, Designed for Play traces the untold story of the children’s playground, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Taking in public parks, modern housing estates and other urban spaces, the book charts the playground’s journey from marginal obscurity to popular ubiquity and more recent challenges to its status as a site of health, nature and safety. Organised around a chronological structure, it examines the wider social, political and environmental assumptions that shaped the creation of dedicated places for play, drawing on the archival materials of reformers, parks superintendents, equipment manufacturers and architects, in Britain and beyond.

Chapter 1 focuses on the nineteenth-century experience and the ameliorative potential of green space and exercise for unhealthy urban childhoods. It shows how dedicated spaces for children were seen by some as a way to mitigate the social and environmental consequences of the industrial city, but that efforts to create such spaces would be largely unsuccessful until conceptions of childhood also included time for leisure later in the century. Chapter 2 goes on to analyse how the principle of the children’s playground became more firmly embedded in imagined and material urban landscapes as philanthropic, voluntary and state actors negotiated interventions into public space. The chapter examines the competing visions for the playground that were in circulation in the early twentieth century and the influence of commercial equipment manufacturers, particularly Charles Wicksteed & Co., in defining what would become the orthodox playground of swings, slides and roundabouts.

After this specific case study, Chapter 3 considers how this ideal type spread to cities across Britain in the interwar period, particularly as one solution to the dangers facing children when playing in the street. The increasing number of playgrounds and standardised design reflected municipal confidence in adapting the urban environment and the ongoing role of voluntary organisations in advocating for play. The chapter shows how swings in particular came to dominate playground spaces and charts the progress of wider debates about the role of adults in guiding children’s play. Chapter 4 investigates how this orthodoxy, centred on manufactured playground equipment, was initially consolidated and then challenged in the mid-twentieth century, as campaigners inspired by international exemplars and the adventure playground movement sought to promote greater freedom and creativity in children’s play. The chapter explores the work of pioneering play space advocates, including Marjory Allen’s intervention in play space debate and the significance of her environmental biography, as well as the work of designer Mary Mitchell. Chapter 5 focuses on the later twentieth and early twenty-first century, plotting a battle for ideas in playground discourse and highlighting a number of challenges to perceptions of the playground as a safe and healthy space for children. It plots the fluctuating interest of central government in play space provision and the ongoing influence of equipment manufacturers in shaping both popular and professional notions of the ideal playground. It considers the contested place of the playground in local politics, sociological research and anarchic thought, before charting popular and political anxiety about playground safety. In adopting a long chronology and broad scope, Designed for Play makes an important contribution at the intersection of urban and environmental histories and the geographies and histories of childhood.

Notes

1. 1.  M. Kotlaja, E. Wright and A. Fagan, ‘Neighborhood Parks and Playgrounds: Risky or Protective Contexts for Youth Substance Use?’, Journal of Drug Issues, 48.4 (2018), 657–75; P. Carroll and others, ‘A Prefigurative Politics of Play in Public Places: Children Claim Their Democratic Right to the City through Play’, Space and Culture, 22.3 (2019), 294–307; A. Pitsikali and R. Parnell, ‘Fences of Childhood: Challenging the Meaning of Playground Boundaries in Design’, Frontiers of Architectural Research, 9.3 (2020), 656–69; R. Sini, ‘The Social, Cultural, and Political Value of Play: Singapore’s Postcolonial Playground System’, Journal of Urban History, 48.3 (2022), 578–607.

2. 2.  Jon Winder, ‘Children’s Playgrounds: “Inadequacies and Mediocrities Inherited from the Past”?’, Children’s Geographies, 2023, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2023.2197577.

3. 3.  Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900–2000 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012); Simon Terrill and Assemble, The Brutalist Playground, 2015, RIBA; Burkhalter, Gabriela, ed., The Playground Project (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2016); Albert Potrony, Equal Play, 2021, BALTIC.

4. 4.  Natural England, The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England (London: Office for National Statistics, 2022).

5. 5.  Elizabeth Dickinson, ‘The Misdiagnosis: Rethinking “Nature-Deficit Disorder”’, Environmental Communication, 7.3 (2013), 315–35; Robert Fletcher, ‘Connection with Nature Is an Oxymoron: A Political Ecology of “Nature-Deficit Disorder”’, The Journal of Environmental Education, 48.4 (2017), 226–33.

6. 6.  Tim Gill, Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities (London: RIBA, 2021); Michael Martin, Andrea Jelić and Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink, ‘Children’s Opportunities for Play in the Built Environment: A Scoping Review’, Children’s Geographies, 21.6 (2023), 1154–70 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2023.2214505.

7. 7.  Tom Wilkinson, ‘Duchess’s Vision Sees World’s Biggest Play Park Opened’, Evening Standard, 24 May 2023 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/duchess-northumberland-b1083434.html [accessed 24 November 2023]; Amanda Hyde, ‘£56 for Two Hours: My Family Trip to Windsor’s Extortionate New Playground’, The Telegraph, 18 August 2023 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/united-kingdom/england/berkshire/windsor/family-trip-to-new-kids-playground-windsor-berkshire/ [accessed 24 November 2023].

8. 8.  National Museum, New Delhi, HR 13974/222, Harappan Toy Cart, twenty-fifth century BCE; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, H1956, Rag Ball from Grave 518, Tarkhan, Egypt, twenty-third century BCE; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 07.286.4, Terracotta Group of Two Girls Playing a Game Known as Ephedrismos, late fourth–early third century BCE.

9. 9.  Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, GG 1017, Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, 1560.

10. 10.  Amy Orrock, ‘Homo Ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 4.2 (2012), 1–21.

11. 11.  Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

12. 12.  Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (London: Dent, 1965), p. 62.

13. 13.  Richard Mulcaster, Positions (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888), pp. 114–15.

14. 14.  James Kay, The Training of Pauper Children (London: Poor Law Commissioners, 1838), p. 27.

15. 15.  ‘Playground, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

16. 16.  Francis de Valangin, A Treatise on Diet, or the Management of Human Life (London: Pearch, 1768).

17. 17.  ‘The Hathern Playground’, Leicester Chronicle, 14 January 1837, p. 4.

18. 18.  ‘Latest News – Mr Charles Melly’, John Bull, 5 June 1858, p. 368.

19. 19.  Arthur Young, A Tour in Ireland, 1776–1779, 2nd edn (London: Cassell, 1897), p. 48; ‘Boarding School for Young Gentleman at Ilford in Essex’, Morning Chronicle, 1 August 1795, p. 5.

20. 20.  ‘Open Spaces in Parliament’, The Times, 23 February 1885, p. 4; ‘Open Spaces in Hackney’, Daily News, 18 April 1890, p. 5.

21. 21.  Luca Csepely-Knorr and Mária Klagyivik, ‘From Social Spaces to Training Fields: Evolution of Design Theory of the Children’s Public Sphere in Hungary in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, Childhood in the Past, 13.2 (2020), 93–108; Vanessa Rutherford, ‘Muscles and Morals: Children’s Playground Culture in Ireland, 1836–1918’, in Leisure and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leeann Lane and William Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 61–79; Essi Jouhki, ‘Politics in Play: The Playground Movement as a Socio-Political Issue in Early Twentieth-Century Finland’, Paedagogica Historica (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2022.21554811–21; Ann Marie Murnaghan, ‘Exploring Race and Nation in Playground Propaganda in Early Twentieth Century Toronto’, International Journal of Play, 2 (2013), 134–46.

22. 22.  Clarence E. Rainwater, The Play Movement in the United States: A Study of Community Recreation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922).

23. 23.  Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Elizabeth Gagen, ‘An Example to Us All: Child Development and Identity Construction in Early 20th-Century Playgrounds’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 32.4 (2000), 599–616; Elizabeth Gagen, ‘Playing the Part: Performing Gender in America’s Playgrounds’, in Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, ed. Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 213–29; Elizabeth Gagen, ‘Landscapes of Childhood and Youth’, in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. James Duncan, Nuala Johnson and Richard Schein (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 404–19; Ocean Howell, ‘Play Pays: Urban Land Politics and Playgrounds in the United States, 1900–1930’, Journal of Urban History, 34 (2008), 961–94; Suzanne Spencer-Wood and Renee Blackburn, ‘The Creation of the American Playground Movement by Reform Women, 1885–1930’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 21 (2017), 937–77; Kevin G. McQueeney, ‘More than Recreation: Black Parks and Playgrounds in Jim Crow New Orleans’, Louisiana History, 60.4 (2019), 437–78.

24. 24.  Elizabeth Gagen, ‘Too Good to Be True: Representing Children’s Agency in the Archives of Playground Reform’, Historical Geography, 29 (2001), 53–64; Michael Hines, ‘ “They Do Not Know How To Play”: Reformers’ Expectations and Children’s Realities on the First Progressive Playgrounds of Chicago’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 10 (2017), 206–27.

25. 25.  Valerie Wright, ‘Making Their Own Fun: Children’s Play in High-Rise Estates in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s’, in Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain, ed. Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor (London: University of London Press, 2021), pp. 221–46.

26. 26.  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; 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; 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; Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures of Childhood: Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

27. 27.  Ben Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes’, Cultural Politics, 9 (2013), 323–36; 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; Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers, ‘ “Dirt and the Child”: A Textual and Visual Exploration of Children’s Physical Engagement with the Urban and the Natural World’, History of Education, 49.4 (2020), 517–35.

28. 28.  Katy Layton-Jones, National Review of Research Priorities for Urban Parks, Designed Landscapes, and Open Spaces: Final Report, Research Report Series, 4 (London: English Heritage, 2014).

29. 29.  For a detailed review of the field see Laura Tisdall, ‘State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood’, History, 107.378 (2022), 949–64.

30. 30.  Karen R. Jones, ‘Green Lungs and Green Liberty: The Modern City Park and Public Health in an Urban Metabolic Landscape’, Social History of Medicine, 35.4 (2022), 1200–1222; Peter Thorsheim, ‘The Corpse in the Garden: Burial, Health, and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century London’, Environmental History, 16 (2011), 38–68; Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

31. 31.  Bernard Mergen, ‘Children and Nature in History’, Environmental History, 8 (2003), 643–69; Simo Laakkonen, ‘Asphalt Kids and the Matrix City: Reminiscences of Children’s Urban Environmental History’, Urban History, 38 (2011), 301–23.

32. 32.  James Greenhalgh, ‘The New Urban Social History? Recent Theses on Urban Development and Governance in Post-War Britain’, Urban History, 47.3 (2020), 535–45; Simon Gunn and Alastair Owens, ‘Nature, Technology and the Modern City: An Introduction’, Cultural Geographies, 13 (2006), 491–6.

33. 33.  Simon Gunn, ‘The Rise and Fall of British Urban Modernism’, Journal of British Studies, 49.4 (2010), 849–69; Otto Saumarez Smith, Boom Cities: Architect-Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Guy Ortolano, Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

34. 34.  Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 144.

35. 35.  James Greenhalgh, Reconstructing Modernity: Space, Power, and Governance in Mid-Twentieth Century British Cities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).