Chapter 3 Playgrounds for the people: ‘a magnetic force to draw children away from the dangers and excitements of the streets’

Playing fields and playgrounds in interwar Britain

There had been local calls for the protection of existing playing fields and campaigns for the creation of new ones since the late nineteenth century. Organisations such as the London Playing Fields Committee (1890) and the Manchester and Salford Playing Fields Society (1907) had emphasised the ways in which playing fields could help to tackle physical degeneration and improve the character and morals of urban youths.⁴ By 1924 there was a growing sense that these local efforts needed to be coordinated and expanded. Recalling nineteenth-century demands for parks for the people, a number of prominent politicians signed an open letter to the national press in April 1925 calling for ‘playing fields for the people’, spaces that were distinct from public parks, gardens and commons.⁵ Signatories came from across the political spectrum and included government ministers, other high-profile politicians, as well as social reformers and campaigners. The letter argued that space for active recreation would contribute to both improved individual health and national efficiency and was therefore of significant domestic and imperial importance. Implicitly, their scheme suggested that participation in active recreation was a civic responsibility that needed to be performed across the nation by all sections of the community.⁶

There is little remaining evidence of the planning that went into the creation of the new organisation, but it would appear that playground advocates had a significant impact on its objectives, strategies and actions. An early draft of its constitution had a narrow typological focus on playing fields to facilitate participation in sport.⁷ By the time the new organisation was formally launched as the National Playing Fields Association in July 1925, both children and playgrounds had become fundamental to its stated objectives. The first edition of its quarterly journal, Playing Fields, stated that the NPFA’s two main objectives were to provide playgrounds for small children and playing fields for the masses.⁸ At its formal inauguration at the Royal Albert Hall, senior politicians, royalty and celebrities were united in their support for the new organisation, while former prime minister David Lloyd George famously declared that ‘the right to play is a child’s first claim on the community’.⁹

Given the widespread political support, it is perhaps surprising that the state did not lead attempts to provide recreational facilities in the same way that it provided infrastructure for education and other social work. However, the provision of public parks and the promotion of rational recreation in the nineteenth century had rarely been driven by central government and was instead promoted by social reformers and municipal authorities. Furthermore, historians of leisure have shown that the organisation of recreational provision by non-governmental organisations has often operated as an informal extension of the state in Britain, thus circumventing the need for formal state involvement.¹⁰ The NPFA certainly seems to fit with this conclusion. Its Council included two nominees of central government, but more significantly its governance and leadership structures included a long list of aristocratic elites, government ministers, cross-party representation of MPs and local politicians from across the country.¹¹ In addition, there was considerable continuity in the values and rhetoric used by earlier open space campaigners and the NPFA. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association (1882) and Commons Preservation Society (1865) were both represented on the NPFA Council. William Melland, Manchester councillor and secretary of the Manchester and Salford Playing Fields Society, took on a key role in the NPFA, particularly in relation to children’s playgrounds and play leadership. The environmental campaigner Lawrence Chubb became general secretary of the NPFA in 1928, having previously been a prominent member of the Coal Abatement Society and the National Trust.¹² By 1929, both the NPFA and Commons Preservation Society operated from the same offices at 71 Eccleston Square in London.¹³

The NPFA initially made significant progress in the capital. Its first annual report recorded voluntary donations of £4.3m (£23,000) and successful negotiations with the London Underground for reduced fares to playing fields.¹⁴ In Sutton and East Ham, it sought to ensure that play provision was included in the layout of new estates. Beyond London, the Birmingham Playing Fields Association helped to create a playground at Keeley Street, channelling £868,000 (£4,500) to help secure land in ‘one of the most congested areas of the city’.¹⁵ Schemes were initiated in other urban districts including Accrington, Wigan and Rochester. Although many of these schemes fell under the umbrella of the national association, there was nonetheless a strong sense of municipal civic pride, local voluntary action and small-scale philanthropy involved in making them happen. As such, the example of the NPFA and its local projects lend weight to suggestions that the urban remained a significant driver of citizenship in the early twentieth century and had not been entirely replaced by the national as is often assumed.¹⁶

Although the NPFA made much of the shortage of play space in densely populated urban areas, the countryside also featured prominently in its rhetoric and work from the outset. In its first year of operation, the NPFA were given land and money by private donors to create thirteen playing fields, of which five were in rural communities.¹⁷ By the end of its second year, the county branch in Cornwall alone had been involved in ten schemes to provide village play spaces. And while green space campaigners had long drawn upon romantic visions of pastoral landscapes to inform the design and use of urban public parks, for the NPFA it was the village green that acted as a space of social cohesion and physical health. This early emphasis on the recreational needs of rural districts would be a consistent feature of NPFA campaigning in the interwar period, contributing to wider processes which saw rural communities negotiating the impacts of modern life.

At the same time, the NPFA also emphasised its role as a movement of modern times, advocating for the creation of well-planned, properly designed and technologically modern spaces for rural play and recreation. It sought to increase its sense of authority through nationwide coverage and by providing expertise and guidance, initially through its layout committee and later through Playing Fields and other design-focused publications. From the outset, the NPFA also made use of modern technology to promote its cause, particularly through regular national and regional radio broadcasts. The inaugural meeting of the NPFA was relayed from the Royal Albert Hall on BBC national radio.¹⁸ Playing field associations from London and Glasgow to Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire regularly made appeals for funds on The Week’s Good Cause radio programme, while the official opening of a playground was sometimes recorded on film.¹⁹

A 1934 article in Playing Fields provides a useful insight into the way that these seemingly contradictory values of tradition and modernity were played out in practice. The article explored the need for traditional village play spaces, but at the same time did not lament the loss of large country estates and associated ways of life. Instead, it focused on the consequences for play and recreation as new landowners no longer permitted the use of a meadow or field for villagers to play games. As estates were sold off and broken up, as happened at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, the children of the village were apparently left with ‘absolutely nowhere but the roads on which to play’.²⁰ The unnamed author did not call for the retention of the country estate or oppose its subsequent redevelopment, but rather suggested that proper planning would enable land to be purchased at agricultural land values so that access to recreational facilities could continue. The implicit suggestion was that the idyllic vision of village cricket could be sustained through efficient planning and proper organisation. At the same time, it reiterated the well-established rhetoric that the street was a place of danger and the playground a place of safety. The landscape architect Marjory Allen, who features significantly in later chapters, also felt the village green represented an ideal place to play. Writing in 1937, she emphasised that where the village green had been lost to development, a sensitively designed playground could provide an entirely appropriate space for children’s play.²¹

The most significant feature of the NPFA’s attempt to develop a nationwide campaign was a tendency to identify the same problems and solutions in villages, towns and cities. The threat to existing open spaces and the dangers of the street were positioned as problems facing both urban and rural communities, and dedicated places for play were identified as the solution in both places too. But while it was possible to create playing fields on the edge of towns and in the expanding metropolitan suburbs, an alternative type of space was needed for young children living in the central areas of cities, where age or adversity limited access to distant sports pitches. The children’s playground close to home was a pragmatic response to the processes of urbanisation and diminishing access to local common land. However, while the NPFA’s guidance and model designs varied according to the size of the area available for play, they seldom varied according to its surroundings. Consequently, an inner-city local authority intending to create a playground received much the same advice as a rural parish council. Detailed design guidance invariably focused on the provision of manufactured playground equipment, such as swings and slides, and might also suggest a sandpit or a paddling pool.²² By not differentiating between urban and rural play spaces and promoting the inclusion of manufactured equipment, the NPFA contributed to the standardisation of play space across Britain. This version of the playground would come to dominate both professional and public expectations of children’s play spaces for at least the next fifty years.

Within this tendency towards standardisation and the more efficient provision of playgrounds was a complicated gender dynamic. On the one hand, gender-segregated play spaces had largely disappeared by the 1930s. The need for separate playgrounds for girls and boys had been a regular feature of late nineteenth-century rhetoric and the existence of such segregation is evident in park regulations and photographs. By the 1930s, only one of the LCC’s forty-nine playgrounds included separate play facilities for girls and boys, while the Wicksteed Park playground and many others were also not segregated by gender.²³ The rhetoric used by NPFA campaigners seemed to treat girls and boys equally too. At the inaugural meeting, many of those who addressed the gathering spoke of the need to provide facilities and opportunities that would enable all children to participate.

At the same time, campaigners continued to emphasise prewar gender norms in their work to promote play spaces. In both conceptual and practical terms, the NPFA’s approach was highly gendered and inequitable. The NPFA’s fundamental assumption that leisure was the binary opposite of work or school failed to recognise the complexities of lived experienced for many older girls and women. For some, the park or playground may have provided a legitimate way to escape from the confines of home, while time spent with their children could be a source of pleasure for mothers. But, as Langhamer argues, ‘child-centred forms of leisure, such as … a visit to the park, should be viewed as a complex synthesis of both duty and pleasure for adult women’.²⁴ Meanwhile, in practical terms, the potential for older girls and young women to play was considerably undermined by the NPFA’s emphasis on facilities for team sports, and in particular football. In 1921 the Football Association effectively banned women’s football, despite a successful thirty-year history, and in doing so did much to establish a long-running social taboo surrounding women’s participation in sport.²⁵

The NPFA did little to challenge this taboo and instead focused on providing facilities for male-dominated sports. Dominant social norms most likely shaped this approach, but so too did the preponderance of public school- and military-educated men among the organisation’s officers and committee members. In 1934, the patron of the NPFA was the king, its president the duke of York, and its officers included three earls, a field marshal, an admiral and two MPs, who had all been educated in public or military schools. Team games had been central to the culture of public schools and the military from the mid-nineteenth century, helping to explain the particular importance attached to sport among elites educated in these institutions.²⁶ Participation in games had started as a tool for managing pupil behaviour, but was soon understood as vital for the development of appropriately masculine character traits in schoolboys and cadets who would grow up to operate and administer the nation and empire.²⁷

These idealised character traits were often embodied in the figure of the imperial soldier hero, a character often assumed by scholars to have disappeared as an ideal type during the First World War.²⁸ However, there is increasing doubt among cultural historians over whether this is indeed the case.²⁹ An examination of the rhetoric used by the NPFA certainly supports this revisionist view. Much like the contemporary boys’ club movement, the NPFA continued to promote prewar notions of masculinity well into the 1930s.³⁰ This idealisation of a muscular, duty-bound, stoic and adventurous masculinity was often accompanied by a lampooning of the suburban, domesticated man and the NPFA was explicitly disparaging throughout the interwar period of this apparently feminised male character. These notions of gender were also combined with conceptions of class, and working-class masculinity in particular was characterised as deficient. The most notable examples are from the illustrations used on the cover of the NPFA’s journal, where the physical degeneration associated with urban working-class life is visibly contrasted with the fitness and stature of a heroic, middle-class sportsman. The front cover of Playing Fields Journal from 1934 showed a stooped working man, coming from the polluted air of the city, being welcomed by an upright, muscular footballer to the clear skies and tree-lined playing field. Much like the rhetoric of the MPGA in the 1890s, the NPFA continued to associate the problematic urban environment with notions of working-class degeneration, while also drawing on conservative gender ideals.

Furthermore, just as late nineteenth-century campaigners had been partially motivated by the apparent inadequacy of potential military recruits, so too were open space campaigners in the interwar years. Despite reservations about the quality of medical statistics, the idea that wartime conscription was constrained by the poor physical health of potential recruits remained a powerful rhetoric into the 1930s among playground advocates.³¹ Both the military classification system (where those classed A1 were fit for overseas service, B1 for garrison duties, C3 for sedentary duties and so on) and the association between stature and physical fitness remained powerful markers of health. Writing in 1935, Edward Prentice Mawson felt that Britain could never again ‘be caught with a predominantly C3 population’ and that better designed public play spaces would help to address this shortcoming.³² However, beyond play space advocates, these anxieties about physical fitness resulted in a focus on the bodily health of adults rather than children, even as adult health became increasingly associated with youth-preserving exercise.³³ Within the evolution of a wider physical culture movement, the 1937 Physical Training and Recreation Act provided grants to develop recreational amenities for adults, but specifically excluded facilities for children.³⁴ Instead, the somewhat ambiguous connections between physical health, class, gender and the urban environment would be replaced in the rhetoric of play space campaigners by a more direct and obvious threat to children’s lives.

Safety and supervision

While earlier notions of masculinity and assumptions about city life endured during the interwar period, there was also a gradual change in the way that the NPFA perceived and explained the threats that children faced in the modern world. The somewhat hazy connection between city life and individual physical stature was increasingly superseded by the use of compelling statistics which revealed the direct threat to children’s lives from the increased number of motor vehicles on both urban and rural roads. Contemporary responses to the dangers of the street were diverse, but the increasing dominance of motor vehicles was rarely questioned. Instead, responsibility was implicitly placed on children to adapt their behaviour to this changing public environment. Road safety training, the creation of play streets and even arrests were all part of this wider response, but the NPFA emphasised that the best solution was to remove children from the streets altogether.

Street play was still a frequent activity for children in the interwar period. The playgrounds which had been created by this point could not meet the recreational needs of all neighbourhoods, with dedicated play spaces too distant and other open spaces too formal. From personal accounts of growing up in London we know that the streets outside children’s homes invariably offered opportunities for sociability, play, spectacle, financial reward, and for older girls in particular, the responsibility of childcare.³⁵ On a brief summer stroll in 1928, the Bishop of Southwark counted ‘twelve games of cricket, six games of rounders, several mysterious games which consisted of hopping from square to square’ all taking place in the streets of Kennington.³⁶ The use of the street as a de facto playground had long been a feature of urban life, but what changed in this period was a data set of newly available statistics that highlighted to campaigners a stark indication of the dangers of the street.

In 1919, there were around 300,000 motor vehicles using the roads, a figure that increased to over 3 million by 1939.³⁷ This increase in the number of motorised vehicles also resulted in an increasing number of collisions with children. In 1931, Playing Fields reported on the work of the London and Home Counties Traffic Advisory Committee and its report ‘Street Accidents to Children in Greater London’. It found that playing in the street was the second most prolific source of motor accidents and that children between the ages of five and nine were most likely to be the victims of collisions.³⁸ A year later, the NPFA joined a deputation to the Minister of Transport to protest at the 6,000 fatalities that occurred on the roads in 1931, including many child victims.³⁹ By October 1932, Playing Fields was emotively describing ‘the cry of the children’, as hundreds of child deaths and 10,000 injuries on the roads each year resulted in ‘a pitiful tragedy of family bereavement or crippled life’.⁴⁰

The 1936 report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Road Safety Among School Children refined the data and statistics even further. It found that child road deaths had increased from 857 in 1920 to 1,433 in 1930, while the percentage of child fatalities which occurred on the road had increased from seven per cent in 1903 to forty per cent in 1933.⁴¹ Playing Fields followed this up with a piece which showed how the data could support the play space cause. In an article which promoted ‘the case for playing fields from a new angle’, LCC education officer Mr Lowndes emphasised the financial costs of child injuries and deaths on the road and the spatial relationships that could help explain them.⁴² At a time when many of the consequences of traffic accidents, such as hospital treatment or an early pension due to ill health, were not paid for from public funds, this was a call for playgrounds as a more efficient way to organise society, rather than necessarily a way to save public money specifically. At the same time, statistics from the Interdepartmental Committee showed that a case could be made for a close correlation between access to open space and child casualties; London Boroughs that were covered by more open space had a lower proportion of child road victims. The creation of new playgrounds assumed a renewed importance in this context: not only healthy and character building but lifesaving too. For Dr Mabel Jane Reaney, child psychologist and active member of the NPFA, it was

often the adventure-loving child with initiative and enterprise who is the victim, so that the nation is deprived of another potential leader. Scarcely a day passes without a coroner pointing out that the life of a child might have been spared if it had not been playing in the street.⁴³

The Interdepartmental Committee concurred with this view, stressing the need to balance the protection of children from harm while not inhibiting the ‘spirit of adventure’ that was both inherent in many children and a valuable national characteristic.

While there was growing concern about the rising number of child road deaths and the consequences for both families and the nation, there was also growing acceptance of the role of motor vehicles in modern society. Child behaviour and not the internal combustion engine, it seemed, was the essence of the problem. Accordingly, during the 1920s and 1930s both public and press opinion gradually shifted from generally siding with pedestrians to seeing them as increasingly unpredictable and erratic.⁴⁴ In an inquest into the death of three children under the age of three who had been run over by motor vehicles, the coroner focused on how ‘it was not fair to drivers that parents should allow their children to play in the street’.⁴⁵ In 1928, a newspaper columnist emphasised the ‘unbearable strain’ placed on motorists by children’s street play, emphatically stating that ‘there is no factor which plays so devastating a part in the wrecking of a motorist’s nerves as does the heedless child’.⁴⁶ Attempts were made to manage the use of roads and streets by motor vehicles. For example, the 1934 Road Traffic Act reintroduced a 30mph speed limit in built-up areas, but on the whole, it was children and their behaviour that was problematised. As a result, attempts to solve the problem of ‘traffic accidents’ were invariably focused on marshalling children and their play, rather than challenging motorists’ use of public space. Most significantly here, the children’s playground came to feature in several, although not all, responses to the problem.

The most uncompromising response to the problem of child road deaths was to forcibly prevent children from playing in the street. Section 72 of the 1835 Highways Act had long made it an offence to play on a public highway. In the interwar period, this section of the Act was still used to discourage children’s street play and, in some cases, to remove children from the street altogether. Admittedly, the usual police practice, in London at least, was for an inspector to caution the child in front of their parents, apparently with ‘good moral effect’ on the child and great appreciation from the adults.⁴⁷ Even so, of 1,828 cases that were heard in the eight Metropolitan Juvenile Courts in 1930, over a third related to playing in the street, while in the subsequent five years over 1,000 cases relating to street play were heard in court.⁴⁸ This practice was not without its critics. For Nancy Astor MP, speaking in the House of Commons, there was ‘no more pitiable sight in life than a child which has been arrested for playing in the street. Of all the pitiable sights that I have seen, that is the most pitiable. Though these children may be fined, we stand convicted.’⁴⁹

A second response involved attempting to educate children to cope with life on the streets, by bringing the road into the playground. From the 1930s the British government promoted road safety education through school crossing patrols, children’s clubs and public education films. At a local scale, parents also campaigned to improve road safety in their neighbourhoods. In north London, the Seven Sisters Safety Committee fought for safety improvements in Tottenham following the death of two five-year-old girls within a fortnight, both killed on the road by lorries.⁵⁰ A year later, a repurposed version of the playground became a novel attempt to educate the children of north London in road safety. The first ‘model traffic playground’ was opened in Lordship Lane Park in Tottenham in 1938. Designed by G.E. Paris, the borough’s parks superintendent, it was officially opened by the Minister of Transport and received widespread media publicity.⁵¹ As a training ground for an automotive society, the traffic playground included nearly a mile of roadway and miniature highway features, including traffic lights, police callbox, road signs and pedestrian crossings, so that it would resemble the conditions children could meet on real roads (Figure 3.1). Children were able to hire model cars or bring their own bicycles to use on the roadways, while playground equipment was located so that other children had to cross the road to get to it.⁵² While the traffic playground was ostensibly designed to educate children in road safety, Superintendent Paris later acknowledged that it was also in part a response to the problem of children annoying adults by riding their bikes around parks.⁵³ The model traffic playground was hugely popular with local children and was open until the outbreak of the Second World War, when it closed for nearly ten years.⁵⁴ Several other traffic playgrounds were created after the war, including in Dundee, Salford and Scunthorpe, but the adoption of the playground as a tool in road safety education did not become widespread.⁵⁵

A third response to the problem of child road deaths reversed the assumptions that underpinned the model traffic area and instead brought the playground into the road. Although popular opinion may have been increasingly sympathetic to motorists, a small minority felt that expecting children to take responsibility for their safety on the streets was both unreasonable and unlikely, challenging the prevailing attitude that ‘if children are killed, it is their own fault’.⁵⁶ Instead, a more radical response involved excluding motor traffic from the streets where children played. The earliest attempt to create safer streets for children’s play in Britain has been associated with Salford’s Police Chief Constable, Major C.V. Godfrey. He too felt it was impossible to train younger children to keep themselves safe on the roads and the only rational solution was to prevent motor vehicles from using streets when children were most likely to be playing out. As a result, by 1929 over one hundred streets in Salford were closed to through traffic after school.⁵⁷ During the 1930s the idea gathered momentum. In 1930, the London and Greater London Playing Fields Association contacted the Metropolitan Police to explore the possibilities of emulating a successful New York street play scheme in the congested areas of London.⁵⁸ City authorities in New York had first experimented with closing Eldridge Street to motor traffic to create a space for play in 1914 and by 1929 one hundred and sixty-five play streets had been created in thirty-six cities across the USA.⁵⁹ By 1934, the London Society and the London Safety First Council were calling for street playgrounds to receive greater consideration in the capital.⁶⁰ In 1936, the Interdepartmental Committee on Road Safety Among School Children recommended that legislation was needed to enable local authorities to create play streets, particularly for congested neighbourhoods without access to adequate play spaces, eventually resulting in the Street Playgrounds Act of 1938.⁶¹ By 1950, seventeen local authorities had closed streets for play, with a further eight closures under consideration by the Minister of Transport.⁶²

For the NPFA, street playgrounds were never an ideal solution to the problems of urban childhood. Playing on the street was seen as unhygienic and a threat to nearby property, while officially sanctioning such activities could even disincentivise local authorities from providing ‘proper’ play spaces. Moreover, roads represented the economic and circulatory drivers of city prosperity and were increasingly accepted as adult, automotive spaces. For a while at least, the problem of providing play space in congested inner cities outweighed these objections and the NPFA lobbied privately in favour of play streets. In 1932, the NPFA produced a draft Private Members Bill for discussion in parliament and pressured the Home Office, Police and Ministry of Transport to act.⁶³ But by the mid-1930s, the NPFA felt compelled to publicly distance itself from the play street campaign. An editorial in Playing Fields in January 1935 firmly stated that closing streets for play was both contrary to organisational policy and inappropriate: ‘it is obvious that it is not desirable to create in the mind of any child the impression that a street is a natural or proper place for play’.⁶⁴ In this instance, it seems that the NPFA eschewed pragmatism in favour of an apparently ‘natural’ principle. But while this self-belief and call to natural principles may have limited the uptake of play streets in a few instances, it also contributed to the NPFA’s subsequent commitment to the creation of ‘proper’ places to play.

For the NPFA, the only proper response to the problem of child road deaths was to create dedicated spaces that would encourage children to play away from the dangers of the street. Furthermore, such spaces needed to adhere to campaigners’ expectations of an appropriate space for play, increasingly a vision dominated by playground technology. As such, it was the presence of manufactured playground equipment, appropriately arranged and safely installed, that determined whether spaces would fulfil their function as a site of safety. This approach chimed with wider expectations about children’s place in society and generated significant support for the NPFA and its cause. Only a few years after its official inauguration, the Association secured considerable financial resources to help deliver its vision and increasingly assumed a position of authority in the field of children’s play. Within a year of its first national appeal in June 1927, the NPFA received over £63m (£330,000) and gifts of 157 hectares (388 acres) of land.⁶⁵ The most substantial financial support came from the Carnegie UK Trust, which contributed £38.6m (£200,000) as part of its wider efforts to ‘give a lead to important new movements of a national character … which at any given moment appear to be of prime importance’.⁶⁶ The Trust was established by the Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1913 and had previously supported the creation of public libraries, child welfare schemes and other educational and cultural activities. With widespread political support for the appeal, earlier donations from the king and queen, and the close match between the objectives of the Carnegie Trust and the perceived value of playgrounds, the donation was understandable, even if the cash amount was substantial.

The Carnegie donation was to be distributed as one-off grants that could only form part of the funding for any given scheme, helping to establish a role for the NPFA in allocating financial support that would continue until the 1960s.⁶⁷ Because Carnegie and the NPFA only part-funded schemes, local authorities also needed to raise money from elsewhere, often in the form of loans from central government. One estimate suggests that between 1920 and 1935, the Ministry of Health sanctioned loans for the purchase and construction of parks and playgrounds worth over £4.4bn (£22m).⁶⁸ Following the success of its national appeals and its administrative role in distributing grants, the chair of the NPFA, Sir Noel Curtis-Bennett, was able to assert that it had supported the creation of 782 children’s playgrounds and over 1,000 other recreational facilities in the interwar years.⁶⁹

As well as its involvement in financing play spaces, the NPFA issued advice and guidance on the design and layout of playgrounds to ensure they attracted children away from the street and fulfilled their wider functions. From the outset, the NPFA had established a layout subcommittee to provide expert advice and guidance to local authorities and others interested in play space design.⁷⁰ In addition, most interwar issues of Playing Field included articles or commentary specifically on children’s playgrounds, along with advice on their arrangement, equipment and supervision. Advice ranged widely in scope, from advocating ‘the demolition of one or two small houses’ to provide playgrounds in congested areas, to the repurposing of churchyards as spaces for play, and generally reinforced the view that playgrounds were ideally situated in ‘some odd corner or other’ to keep children out of the way.⁷¹

In a 1930 article, Brigadier General Maud, chair of the layout committee and chief officer of the LCC parks department, argued for the greater provision of equipped playgrounds, specifically in public parks. He felt that it was not enough to simply provide grassed areas for children to play and instead argued that

the best way to keep them out of mischief and amused is to provide gymnasia … well equipped with swings, giant strides and the various forms of modern apparatus now on the market, not forgetting a sand pit … tucked away so that those who do not seek it out will be unconscious of its existence.⁷²

At the same time, Playing Fields included an increasing number of adverts for play equipment manufacturers from across the UK. This combination of commentary, guidance and advertising meant that the NPFA both contributed to and reflected changing ideas about the way that play spaces were imagined.

Manchester parks superintendent W.W. Pettigrew asserted that ‘heavy iron chain swings’ had long been the most popular piece of playground equipment and until 1914 were ‘practically the first equipment provided in every town playground as soon as it was acquired’.⁷³ From the 1920s, the increasing number of suppliers and diversity of products meant that playgrounds included a wider range of equipment, although the swing had become a key feature in the signification of dedicated places for children to play, and in some cases dominated entire open spaces. LCC parks department records from the late 1930s show that of the ninety open spaces they managed with recreational facilities, forty-nine had dedicated spaces for children to play. These playgrounds included a wide range of manufactured equipment, from giant strides, see-saws and rocking horses to merry-go-rounds, maypoles and ocean waves. Forty-three included a sandpit and twenty-six had a paddling pool. But the sheer number of swings is the most remarkable feature of many of these play spaces. Most included an individual pendulum swing or plank swing, but regular swings were still by far the most numerous, with over 1,000 provided in total. Large parks, such as Victoria Park (87ha) or Southwark Park (25ha), had over fifty swings each, but even smaller spaces were abundantly equipped. The one-hectare Newington Recreation Ground in Southwark included forty-five swings, leaving little room for other playful activity.⁷⁴

Aside from this proliferation of swings and play equipment, the question arose as to who was best placed to exercise leadership over these newly engineered play spaces. As we have already seen, the MPGA had argued for caretakers who might prevent bad behaviour in children’s playgrounds. By the 1920s, this approach was being challenged by ideas from the developing fields of child psychology and progressive education, which emphasised a supportive rather than supervisory role for adults. However, this challenge was far from homogeneous, particularly among progressive educationalists, and there was considerable debate about the extent to which adults should intervene in children’s playful activities. Indeed, the activities of the NPFA in these years highlight the extent to which campaigners sought to rework earlier notions of the playground as a space of physical exercise, adult supervision and order, on the basis of emerging ideas which emphasised play experiences, adult facilitation and varying notions of freedom.

The interwar period saw a significant growth in psychologically informed approaches to caring for children, including child guidance clinics, progressive nursery education and play groups. Although rarely explicitly acknowledged by play space campaigners, the evolution of ideas about child development and the emerging field of psychology helped to shape a more nuanced understanding of children at play, even if the impact on play spaces was less immediately discernible. As early as 1908, the Board of Education Consultative Committee recognised that children under five needed specific educational spaces which encouraged movement, play, variety and rest, ideas that were implemented in practice by the nursery school movement.⁷⁵ The assumption that children had specific requirements from education and play at different stages of their lives remained central to the work of advocates such as Susan Isaacs, the hugely influential educational psychologist, and the socialist journalist and nursery education campaigner Margaret McMillan. Neither Isaacs nor McMillan seem to have been directly involved in the NPFA or wider attempts to promote public play spaces. But play and nature were important themes in their work, and it seems likely that they had some influence on ideas about how and where children should play.

McMillan is best known as a leading campaigner for the provision of nursery schools, but she was also an active member of the Independent Labour Party and Bradford School Board, a socialist journalist and founder of the Deptford Clinic in south London. While working in Bradford, McMillan introduced child-size furniture and sand trays into school classrooms. After moving to London, she shared social circles with members of the university settlement movement, including Philip Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed’s brother. In 1911 she established the Deptford Clinic, where children were treated for a variety of conditions and initially slept outside in the garden of the clinic to recuperate.⁷⁶ For McMillan, the clinic garden soon became much more than simply somewhere to recover, providing clean air, brightness and movement, as well as protection from the corrupting influence of society and the dangers of nature. For a time, the garden included apparatus to climb on, a lawn to run about on, a sandpit and a rubbish heap, with stones, old iron, assorted pots, and no rules, where children could play freely.⁷⁷ During the 1920s the role of the garden diminished both in the work of the clinic and in significance for McMillan, but despite this it seems to have mirrored evolving ideas about the function and design of public play spaces for children, especially the combination of health and education, physical apparatus and sand play. In contrast, playing with junk, in spaces such as adventure playgrounds, would not feature more prominently in either the ideas or practices of play space campaigners until after the Second World War.

The influence of interwar educational psychologists on playgrounds was in some ways less obvious, but nonetheless significant. By the early twentieth century, educational psychology was a customary feature of most teacher training courses. With foundations in the theories and practices of Freud, Froebel, Dewey and Montessori, individuals such as Susan Issacs and A.S. Neill were promoting and experimenting with alternative approaches to childhood health and education. Isaacs was particularly associated with the nursery movement and shared assumptions with McMillan about the role of infant schools as sites of education, health and social reform. Her practical experiment in progressive education, the Malting House School (1924–9), included a large garden, sandpit, tree house and tools for children to use.⁷⁸ A.S. Neill’s Summerhill (1921) took child-centred education to its most extreme, with no formal lessons and an emphasis instead on unstructured play, voluntary participation in activities and an emphasis on individual freedom within a community setting.⁷⁹ For a time Neill taught at King Alfred’s School in London, describing it as the freest school in England at the time, while subsequently arguing that ‘the evils of civilisation are due to the fact that no child has ever had enough play’.⁸⁰ Joseph Hartley Wicksteed, Charles Wicksteed’s nephew and later headmaster at King Alfred’s, combined this focus on play and self-determination with an emphasis on the outdoors, suggesting that the ‘garden, field, or woodland’ were the ideal places for children’s education.⁸¹ These shifts in educational thinking and experiments in progressive education signalled the beginnings of a move away from rote learning, formal teaching and restraint, towards freedom, discovery and a more permissive approach to discipline.

But while these values may have had little direct influence on the form of playgrounds, they did shape wider attitudes to childhood, particularly an increased awareness of the emotional lives of children and the role of play in child development. The New Education Fellowship promoted these progressive notions of childhood, while the wide-ranging careers of advocates, such as Isaacs and psychologist Cyril Burt, also helped to popularise aspects of progressive education.⁸² Their work in academia, education and popular communication meant they had a ‘powerful and enduring influence’ on notions of childhood.⁸³ The psychologist, writer and active NPFA member, Mabel Jane Reaney, also promoted these values more broadly, emphasising the place of play in the public realm. In 1919 she argued that there should be a director of play within government to ensure that towns and cities provided spaces for children to partake in ‘free play’.⁸⁴ In her 1927 publication, The Place of Play in Education, Reaney stressed the significance of free, ‘natural’ play in children’s mental and physical development, while her later articles and conference presentations promoted these values to both popular and specialist audiences.⁸⁵

For playground campaigners, the arena where these emerging ideas had the greatest influence was in discussions about play leadership, an issue that was particularly problematic for the NPFA. Adult involvement in the use of playing fields was straightforward – the rules, regulations and norms of adult team games were well established and could easily be applied to the games of older children and young people, with adults as referees. In contrast, the rules of the playground and the way that adults could or should be involved in children’s informal play had not yet been settled. In an attempt to make sense of the issues and to recommend a way forward, the NPFA established a subcommittee on play leadership in December 1928.⁸⁶ The committee was chaired by William Melland, Manchester Councillor, member of the city’s parks committee and leading figure in the Manchester and Salford Playing Fields Society. Other progressive members of the subcommittee included Miss Spafford from the Ling Association, which had promoted Swedish-inspired gymnastics and physical education since 1899, and Mabel Jane Reaney. The committee also included the apparently authoritarian and insensitive Commander B.T. Coote, Welfare Advisor to the Miners’ Welfare Fund (an endowment created from colliery company subscriptions to provide welfare facilities for mining communities including, for example, children’s playgrounds in the village of Llanbradach in Glamorgan and Newtongrange in Midlothian).⁸⁷

From the outset, the play leadership committee worked to emphasise the urgent need for a systematic approach, the type of people who would make appropriate leaders, the training they needed and how it could be organised, as well as the need for coordination with both the Board of Education and Local Education Authorities. In many ways the committee was clearer about the actions that were needed to develop and promote a system of play leadership than they were about fundamental questions relating to adults’ role in children’s play or wider uncertainties about the relative importance of nature and nurture, environment and society in children’s development.

In July 1933, the committee organised a conference on play leadership to explore these issues, with over one hundred delegates from across the country attending. In his conference address, William Melland attempted to bridge the gap between notions of supervision and leadership. From his experience as a member of the parks committee, he felt able to distinguish between the day-to-day management of play spaces and play leadership; park keepers could ensure law and order were maintained but specialist staff were needed for the latter. Fellow delegate, Miss Spafford, went further in emphasising that adult guidance would ensure that the full benefits of the playground were realised. She had initiated the debate about play leadership within the NPFA, sending a memorandum on play leadership to the NPFA executive committee that prompted the creation of the play leadership subcommittee. She also presented at the conference and argued that a play leader was far more important than apparatus, echoing assertions coming from the USA two decades earlier that organisation rather than equipment was the most important feature of a successful playground. She explicitly emphasised the need to learn from the approach adopted in the USA where, by 1925, 17,000 paid play leaders were working in 8,608 play areas.⁸⁸ Her presentation also revealed the complexities around adult involvement in children’s play. She felt that children’s play should be ‘free’ and ‘guided’ rather than over-organised, but at the same time expected a play leader to ‘prevent roughness and noise and make for order and discipline’ through highly structured activities such as basketmaking and folk dancing.⁸⁹

Mabel Jane Reaney also addressed the conference and warned against over-enthusiasm on the part of adults in organising children’s games. Her conference presentation on ‘the urgent need for trained play leaders’ combined concern about the impacts of the modern world on children and the nation, highlighted the problems with existing playgrounds and proposed solutions inspired by the latest ideas in psychology and child development. In her critique of existing play provision, Reaney felt that playgrounds would be unused or mistreated unless they were properly supervised and organised. She argued that a more scientific understanding of biology, psychology and child development should inform play provision and the work of play leaders. She noted that children of different ages engaged in different types of play, an argument rooted in the idea that children gradually developed instinctive play tendencies. Seemingly based on the work of earlier child psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, she categorised children’s play into distinct ‘play periods’ and identified the activities and leadership that were necessary for each. Children from birth to seven years of age played individually and sand provided a good medium for their expressive play. From seven to nine years old, they became more active but still played individually. From the age of nine to twelve, children became more cooperative, and it was here that the play leader could make all the difference between ‘a quarrelling herd and a self-respecting team’. Despite her claim that these traits were an innate part of every child, she also argued that play leaders needed to ‘know the needs of the children and how to satisfy these needs – for the children do not know themselves’.⁹⁰

Overall, the play leadership subcommittee argued that the instinct to play was biologically inherent in children, but at the same time found that children did not have the knowledge about how best to play, echoing earlier suggestions that ‘we have to teach a nation unused and unapt to play’.⁹¹ As a result, play leaders were necessary to ensure that children’s play achieved everything that campaigners hoped it could. The work of the committee was given greater emphasis as the economic crisis of the early 1930s led the NPFA to cut staff and reduce spending. While funding was not available for creating new playgrounds, the NPFA could promote the importance of existing facilities and emphasise the role that play leaders could have in maximising their usefulness. At the same time, local authorities faced even harsher economic conditions and could rarely justify recruiting additional staff, prompting a debate within the NPFA about the merits and shortcomings of volunteer play leaders.⁹² By 1936, the committee reported that six play leadership courses were taking place, while a London course had just finished with over sixty students graduating.⁹³ Demonstrations in play leadership continued, including events in Leamington, Leicester and Folkestone, the latter in conjunction with the annual conference of the Institute of Park Administration. As these locations suggest, play leadership remained largely an urban phenomenon. Organisations such as the Kent Rural Community Council did run lectures in play leadership, but more comprehensive training schemes were mainly confined to larger cities, including Birmingham, Glasgow and London.⁹⁴ Although ideas about play leadership did not achieve the same prominence as the principle of providing play spaces, the interwar meeting of progressive educationalists and playground campaigners set the conceptual foundations for the mid-century adventure playground movement and the play worker profession. Just as debates were taking place about the role of adults in children’s play, the physical form of the playground and the notion that it was a healthy and safe space were being challenged too.

Problems in the playground

As earlier chapters have shown, the creation of playgrounds could be controversial and invariably echoed wider debates over the use of public space. In the interwar period too, playgrounds were not always a welcome addition to green spaces and were sometimes perceived as a threat to traditional visions of the way that urban parks should be designed and used. In late 1929, for instance, the NPFA became embroiled in a public dispute between park traditionalists and George Lansbury, an east London MP and recently appointed First Commissioner of Works in the second Labour government. As Commissioner, Lansbury was responsible for the crown estate and soon ‘amazed civil servants with a radical programme of recreational improvements for the public in the royal parks’.⁹⁵ His programme, styled Brighter London Parks, focused on providing sporting and cultural facilities and dedicated play spaces for children. By October 1929 he was able to declare that ‘work would be begun almost at once on providing sandpits, swings, ponds, and shelters’.⁹⁶ The NPFA were keen to support the initiative and offered over £960,000 (£5,000) to help convert the former exhibition grounds in Hyde Park into playing fields, augmenting three existing sports pitches used by soldiers from the adjacent Kensington Barracks with a further three, and highlighting the enduring connections between representations of sport and military conflict.⁹⁷

In response to the plans, an editorial in The Times expressed in thinly veiled class terms unease about ‘ill-considered innovations’ and ‘mysterious operations’ that would convert ‘one of the most beautiful green stretches of Hyde Park’ into a ‘monstrous imitation of Coney Island or the beach at Blackpool’.⁹⁸ Lansbury’s proposals challenged traditional assumptions that emphasised the place of wholesome and genteel recreation within the park boundary, rather than playful amusement. The plans were debated in the House of Commons and while some felt Lansbury was humanising the office of the First Commissioner of Works, others were concerned about his proposals and their impact on park aesthetics.⁹⁹ Anxious correspondents wrote to The Times of their horror at the intrusion of football goals and the threat that the wider proposals posed to the principles of ‘peace and beauty and freedom’ which they felt defined the parks.¹⁰⁰ Lansbury felt strongly that a wider public needed facilities in the royal parks and that he ‘could not desecrate them by having too much for the children’.¹⁰¹ NPFA supporters endorsed his plans both in the press and in parliament, stressing that ‘the poor boys and girls of dismal Camden Town’ deserved places to play close to their homes and that a paddling pool, sandpit and see-saw would take up very little room.¹⁰²

The playground had become embroiled in fraught negotiations about the fundamental principles and purposes of public parks and the place of children in such spaces. It seems that Lansbury was committed to providing better public facilities for Londoners, but the programme of works also provided an opportunity for him to challenge traditional, elitist visions of the royal parks as bucolic, socially exclusive, natural landscapes in the heart of the city. Both Lansbury and the NPFA emphasised that children had a legitimate claim on public space, contributing to ongoing conversations about parks for the people and what that means. They implicitly argued that parks and playgrounds were about making the city more liveable for everyone and that the provision of dedicated places to play represented an important way for society to recognise and facilitate that claim.

While the introduction of playgrounds may have challenged traditional ideas about what public parks were for and how they should be used, once installed and in use they could also challenge campaigners’ rhetoric too. In principle, the playground promised health, education and safety for children, but in practice it could be a space of accidents, incidents and potentially a vector of ill health. Playground campaigners invariably emphasised a simple binary between dangerous streets and safe playgrounds, but in reality, dedicated play spaces had long represented spaces of risk to children. Early twentieth-century newspaper reports show that a falling bell, an explosion and a runaway horse all injured and killed children in purportedly safe play spaces.¹⁰³ The public playground, too, could be a space where children were exposed to life-changing and sometimes fatal events.

Before the First World War, local newspapers occasionally reported on accidents in the playground, briefly noting court proceedings and victims’ claims for compensation. For example, ten-year-old James Prosser sustained injuries after he fell from a swing in McLeod Street Playground, Edinburgh; a six-year-old girl was injured after being hit by a swing seat in Manchester’s Queens Park; and Albert Davage, aged nine, was killed in Charlton Kings Playground in Gloucester when a giant stride collapsed.¹⁰⁴ The outcome of these cases was by no means certain as the legal system attempted to establish principles about who was liable for accidents, the parameters against which these cases could be judged and the damages that might reasonably be awarded.

Within a wider landscape of interwar concern for safety, the problem of playground accidents became more pressing. Heightened anxiety about the human and financial costs of industrial and road accidents resulted in the creation of a number of organisations that campaigned to improve safety, including the London ‘Safety First’ Council (1916) which in time became the National ‘Safety First’ Association and ultimately the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).¹⁰⁵ Playground accidents in particular received greater publicity during this period, again in relation to the issue of legal liability and associated financial compensation for victims. It is difficult to conclude whether injuries and fatalities in playgrounds became more numerous, but concern and coverage both seem to have increased (the physical harm caused to children by such accidents did not generate wider concern, nor the interest of RoSPA and others, until the 1960s).

Play equipment had long balanced a fine line between providing exhilaration and ensuring safety. Manufacturers often emphasised the modern technological features of their products, including Wicksteed’s ‘hydraulic non-bumper see-saw’ and ‘patent safety arrangement’ that prevented over-swinging on the Ocean Wave, as well as Spencer, Heath and George’s ‘safety coaster slide’ with safety rails and wire cage underneath.¹⁰⁶ But despite these claims to technological advancement, children were still injured and sometimes even killed while playing in the playground. In 1931, the NPFA felt compelled to include a commentary in Playing Fields on the problem of legal liability for accidents and highlighted that the Miners’ Welfare Committee had already secured insurance for its play spaces.¹⁰⁷ As a result, the NPFA worked with insurance brokers to organise a specialist policy that other open space managers could purchase to help mitigate the financial consequences of legal proceedings linked to playground injuries.

Despite this attempt to provide reassurance, reports of court cases where damages were awarded to injured children and their families continued to ‘occasion a good deal of alarm’ among park managers throughout the 1930s (and beyond).¹⁰⁸ Presumably this alarm was in part caused by the level of damages sometimes awarded by the courts when playground providers were found to be at fault. When four-year-old Peter Coates was paralysed after being injured on a slide in Rawtenstall Recreation Ground in Lancashire, a judge initially awarded £295,000 (£1,500) in damages, which was subsequently doubled on appeal.¹⁰⁹ Even in the face of sizeable awards of damages, some park managers felt that it was probably more cost effective to accept the risk of a claim than to go to the expense of modifying equipment or increasing the number of playground attendants.¹¹⁰ In general, cases seem to have been judged against the principle that authorities were not liable for the consequences of dangers that were reasonably obvious to children.¹¹¹ But even though authorities were seldom found liable for playground accidents – and the NPFA keenly promoted such ‘successes’ – nervousness among park managers has been an enduring feature of public playground provision.¹¹²

Another threat to both individual children and the idea of the playground as a safe and healthy space was the ‘indecent’ behaviour of a small number of adults, resonating with enduring anxieties about the unhealthy aspects of public space use. As we saw in Chapter 2, the Metropolitan Radical Federation and LCC education committee had both previously raised concerns about such issues. But while the number of reported cases may have been low, for those children who were victims of sexual assault the issue was understandably distressing and often mentally and physically harmful. The written reports produced by park keepers provide troubling accounts of children’s experiences, often recording perpetrators’ attempts to entice children away from the playground, but also documenting the details of sexual assault.¹¹³ The accounts record male perpetrators and female victims, contributing to a sense that male strangers presented the main threat to children. In Manchester, the parks department recognised the need to take action to prevent men from ‘interfering with or molesting children’ and so, somewhat clumsily, banned children’s fathers from entering playgrounds with the rest of their family.¹¹⁴ In London, the LCC education officer began coordinating the response of park authorities and the police to cases of sexual assault and also attempted to support victims in the aftermath of such crimes.¹¹⁵ Although the number of cases appears to have been very low, their social significance ensured that the connection between the playground and fear of strangers would be a recurring one.

Just as dangerous adults and defective equipment could make the playground a hazardous place, so too could less-visible perils. These threats were often associated with the fabric of the playground and in particular the materials that formed the surfaces where children played. Gravel-surfaced areas for games, also known as dry playgrounds, were installed in a number of London parks in the early 1920s, including Clissold Park and London Fields. Soon concerns were raised by the Medical Officer of Health about children inadvertently inhaling dust while using them, leading the parks department to carry out a number of experiments in an attempt to tackle the problem.¹¹⁶ Much more troubling than dust, however, was sand.

Although seaside resorts, particularly those with extensive sandy beaches, were often characterised as spaces of restorative health, when transported to the city the relationship between sand and health was far less straightforward, particularly for park managers.¹¹⁷ The propensity for sandpits to harbour dirt, debris and disease-carrying pests meant that for some park staff they were seen as a ‘menace to health’.¹¹⁸ Inspired by anthropologist Mary Douglas’s conception of dirt as matter out of place, Canadian geographers Ann Marie Murnaghan and Laura Shillington have recently argued that our conception of urban sand has shifted over the course of a century, from purposeful to problematic.¹¹⁹ They have suggested that in the late nineteenth century sand had a rightful place in the city as a symbol of education and health, whereas by the late twentieth century urban sand was increasingly understood as unhealthy, dirty and out of place. But sand’s journey from pure to pathogenic has not been a straightforward, gradual, linear transformation. Instead, from the outset public sandpits have been seen as troublesome spaces where insects and infestations could lurk, as well as hopeful sites of learning, interaction with nature and occasionally even entertainment.

The idea that sand could be educational had its origins in Friedrich Froebel’s child-centred educational theories of the early nineteenth century. In his kindergarten, originally a metaphorical rather than a physical space, a shallow box of sand inside the classroom provided a practical tool for helping young children to develop physical skills.¹²⁰ Joseph Lee, the president of the Playground Association of America, would mystically claim that playing with sand connected children with their primeval amphibious ancestors, reflecting contemporary ideas about the evolutionary role of play in child development.¹²¹ In Britain, the organisation that promoted Froebel’s pedagogy, the Froebel Society, had endorsed the value of sand as an educational tool since its formation in 1874, but the first mention of sand in a public park seems to be in May 1893, when it was seen as something that was primarily enjoyable rather than necessarily instructive. The superintendent of Victoria Park reported to the LCC parks committee that ‘during the year a novel mode of enjoyment has been provided for the little children of the East End of London in the form of a sea-sand pit which is apparently much appreciated by the little ones’ (Figure 3.2).¹²² This imagined connection between the urban sandpit and the seaside endured and seems to have reflected wider ideas about both the role of parks in bringing nature into the city and the recreational value of public spaces. In 1898, J.J. Sexby, parks superintendent of the LCC, remarked that

nothing can be pleasanter than to stroll round from point to point and watch the happy little crowds disporting themselves on swings and seesaws, sailing their boats on the waters of the lake, of digging in the sand-pit, apparently quite as happy as though they were within sight and sound of the sea-waves.¹²³

However, the image he shared of the sandpit in Victoria Park, with well-dressed adults and orderly rows of well-behaved children, suggests a structured form of recreation that reflected traditional ideas about rational park behaviour.

As these values were gradually replaced in the playground by an emphasis on enjoyment and excitement in the early twentieth century, the sandpit might have become redundant. But while expectations around the value and use of sand shifted, sandpits became increasingly common in both the rhetoric of campaigners and play spaces themselves. Writing in 1907, the journalist Annesley Kenealy felt that a heap of sand was an essential feature of a properly equipped playground, while twenty years later Evelyn Sharp stated in her account of London childhoods that of all the thrills supplied in a modern playground, ‘the greatest of them all is undoubtedly the sand-pit’.¹²⁴ In 1915, fourteen of the thirty-one play spaces managed by the LCC included a sandpit, while by the 1930s there was sand in forty-three of their forty-nine playgrounds.¹²⁵ Sandpits even featured in debates in the House of Commons, with the First Commissioner of Works, George Lansbury, stating that ‘anyone who has seen children from the slum areas enjoying themselves in the sandpits will agree that the provision of these playgrounds has been a very good thing indeed’.¹²⁶

At the same time, the place of sand in the playground was not straightforward. The popularity of sandpits among park users, and most likely a degree of class prejudice, meant that sand was often seen as problematic by park authorities. By 1909, parks staff were disinfecting the Kensington Gardens sandpit with permanganate of potash once a week, turning the sand over once a month and replacing it entirely once a year.¹²⁷ Commercial versions of permanganate of potash, such as Condy’s Fluid, were promoted for their ability to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and purify crowded places, hinting at the concerns that park staff had about the potentially pathogenic nature of sand. The sandpit also challenged established expectations about park aesthetics and the forms of nature that were welcome there. In 1930, the St James’s Park sandpit appeared ‘very trodden down and untidy’ and park managers felt that more frequent upkeep was needed.¹²⁸ The improved maintenance regime would make the park appear more respectable, while also apparently helping to deter fleas. It is not clear what type of fleas the authorities were concerned about (sand fleas, for example, live in the tropical and subtropical areas of America and Africa) nor whether fleas were actually a problem, but increased maintenance would deter this undesirable fauna none the less. Park superintendent Pettigrew went even further, suggesting that proper maintenance was only one part of ensuring a sandpit was safe. He argued that they also needed to be ‘fenced in and only open to children when a play leader (preferably a young woman) is present to look after them’ and that without these additional arrangements, the sandpit ‘might easily become a menace to their health’.¹²⁹

Designing the perfect play experience

While the hazards hidden in the playground underlined the contested meanings of healthy spaces, debates also continued about the form and function of the playground. The sandpit may have become an essential feature, but wider approaches to the design and layout of playgrounds were being challenged too. As we have seen, advocates of play leadership tended to emphasise adult involvement rather than provision of equipment as the key feature of a successful play space. In addition, some campaigners, town planners and noted designers were also beginning to question the predominance of manufactured play equipment in playgrounds, and the associated lack of beauty and exclusion of nature.

During the 1920s, nature and exercise had appeared together less frequently in campaigners’ rhetoric, as organisations increasingly focused on promoting one or the other. As a notable advocate of children’s physical exercise, the NPFA’s rhetoric rarely promoted the benefits of closer interaction with the natural environment, beyond a general sense that fresh air was important to children’s health.¹³⁰ In contrast, organisations such as the London Children’s Garden Fund went beyond the benefits of fresh air by providing opportunities for children to interact closely with nature, in some ways taking on the mantle of helping poor children to experience curated forms of the natural world in the city. However, this separation of nature and play was short-lived and playground campaigners and landscape architects once more emphasised the need to include space for both exercise and interaction with nature in parks and play spaces.

As someone involved in advising on the details of play space creation, NPFA committee member Commander Coote embodied many of these ideas and demonstrated how they influenced the practice of providing for children’s play. He was critical of earlier versions of the playground, both in its ‘levelled and gravelled’ and ‘equipped’ forms. He felt that ‘there have been too many unattractive asphalt areas, congested with apparatus’ and instead argued that the ‘children’s playground should be no less beautiful to look at than a well-kept bowling green’.¹³¹ For Coote, equipment and the wider playground should be attractive as well as functional. That said, he was not calling for the removal of apparatus from the ideal playground, something that would have been incongruous, given that he had seemingly worked with play equipment manufacturers Spencer, Heath and George to design the ‘Commander B. T. Coote Model Combination Climbing Frame’.¹³² Instead, he called for ‘natural beauty’ to be incorporated into play spaces as well. In many ways this echoed the work of the MPGA in the 1880s and 1890s, when they attempted to provide gardens where children could experience physical activity and interaction with natural features, but with adaptations for the modern world. In his vision of the playground, the limitations of equipment and in particular the apparent monotony of swings and slides would be supplemented by nature. Playground equipment would be combined with grass, flowers, shrubs and trees, ponds, sandpits and fountains. At the same time, a play leader would ‘make the playground a magnetic force to draw the children away from the dangers and excitements of the streets’.¹³³

This vision of the playground received a further boost – and a specific moniker – with the publication of PlayParks by the Coronation Planting Committee in 1937. The committee had been established to promote horticultural and arboricultural celebrations for George VI’s coronation and a guide to the design of play spaces might therefore seem incongruous. However, the committee was chaired by landscape architect Marjory Allen and included representatives from a wide range of organisations that also supported the play space cause, including the NPFA, Institute of Park Administration, Town Planning Institute and the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association. Although it undoubtedly focused on commemorative planting schemes, committee members also made use of this high-profile period of celebration to promote a revised vision for children’s play spaces.¹³⁴

PlayParks was written by Thomas Adams, the chair of the technical subcommittee of the Coronation Planting Committee. He was also president of the Institute of Landscape Architects and an influential town planner who had worked on Letchworth Garden City, planned the rebuilding of Halifax in Nova Scotia, initiated a planning system for Canada and planned the reconstruction and expansion of New York City.¹³⁵ In the foreword to PlayParks, the industrialist and philanthropist Lord Wakefield emphasised young children’s ‘right to play in the fresh air in perfect safety’ and Adams went on to show how this could be achieved in practice, at the same time emphasising the importance of nature and staking a claim for the role of skilled designers in the creation of children’s play spaces. If ‘the street of tethered children’, where parents secured young family members to posts with a length of rope, represented the problem for Adams, then the verdant lawns, trees and shrubs of a village green represented something of an imagined ideal. In contrast to the street and existing playgrounds which were often ‘hard, bleak, and uninteresting’, a well-equipped and well-organised playpark would provide a sense of liberty, helping to develop proper habits of play and promoting an appreciation of natural beauty.¹³⁶ In contrast to earlier conceptions of the playground, Adams emphasised that play spaces needed to foster gentle, imaginative and quiet play, as he felt there had been a tendency in the past to over-emphasise the benefits of energetic physical activity.

For Adams, playparks were as important as schools in the education of children, but they also offered wider benefits to society. As well as ensuring the proper physical and mental development of children, playparks would help to reduce crime, lessen noise nuisance, increase property values, contribute to the development of a civilised community, provide indirect economic value through a physically fit and happy workforce, and contribute towards the modernisation of rural areas. Adams felt that to realise this range of social benefits, a well-designed and properly supervised playpark would combine the best elements of the playground, park and garden. It needed natural features such as trees, rocks and pools to enable imaginary games like camping and hunting, attractive planting that would foster an appreciation of nature, as well as some playground equipment, which occupied the minimum space necessary. A playground most definitely did not need ‘repulsive-looking fences’ which Adams felt were a waste of money. In many ways, PlayParks represented a synthesis of advocates’ thinking on dedicated play spaces, why society needed them, how they would benefit and nurture children, along with detailed considerations for their design.¹³⁷

While the influence of the NPFA and other play space campaigners involved in the Coronation Planting Committee is evident, the publication of PlayParks can also be seen as a call for the greater involvement of skilled designers, notably landscape architects, in the design and layout of children’s play spaces. In the 1920s and 1930s, individual landscape architects had been involved in the design and development of public parks. For example, the renowned landscape architect Thomas Mawson prepared designs for numerous public spaces around the world and his proposals often included large areas set aside for active recreation. Despite this, the wider landscape design profession seems to have rarely engaged with public park design, let alone spaces for children’s play.¹³⁸ Mawson’s son, Edward Prentice Mawson, seems to have been a solitary, and hardly prolific, exception. He had worked with Thomas Adams on PlayParks, preparing representative designs for large and small, urban and rural playparks, complete with planting, enhanced natural features and playground equipment. In 1935, Prentice Mawson also contributed an article to the trade journal Parks, Golf Courses and Sports Grounds where he emphasised the importance of parks and children’s playgrounds for promoting public health, physical fitness and national prestige.¹³⁹

Despite the efforts of the Mawson family, parks and playgrounds were of little interest to the wider landscape profession, perhaps reflecting an antipathy among designers towards landscapes for the masses and public spaces for children in particular. The Institute of Landscape Architects (ILA) was formed in 1929 and it was only after the publication of PlayParks in 1937 that children’s play spaces were mentioned in its quarterly journal, Landscape and Garden. Even then, it was in a begrudging tone and sought to minimise their impact on the landscape. The first mention came in the summer of 1938 in the text of a lecture that a Captain J.D. O’Kelly gave to the ILA.¹⁴⁰ O’Kelly briefly mentioned children’s play spaces alongside a commentary on recreational facilities more generally, noting that space for children’s activities should be properly planned, well planted, attractive to the child, but also isolated within the park to limit noise nuisance to other park users.

A second mention came in spring 1939 when W.R. Pertwee contributed an article entitled ‘Designing Children’s Gymnasia’. While recognising the irrefutable arguments in favour of the need for play spaces, Pertwee felt that their appearance left much to be desired and suggested they were the least satisfactory feature of public parks. Pertwee’s use of the older term ‘gymnasia’ perhaps reflected a last glance back to the nineteenth-century conception of the playground as space for energetic exercise, or it may have been a product of contemporary concerns with the physical fitness of the nation and a widespread interest in physical culture during the 1930s. Either way, Pertwee’s detailed design advice was certainly not child-centric. It included suggestions to plant horse chestnuts to dampen the noise made by children, the use of berberis shrubs in place of fencing because their thorns were ‘quite effective against children’ and only a limited quantity of equipment to ensure children had enough space to queue up and await their turn.¹⁴¹ If any interwar landscape architects were thinking about the provision of play spaces, they did not imagine that these spaces would take centre stage. Rather, an air of architectural elitism meant playgrounds should be hidden, protected from destructive children, and the visual and aural disturbance they created needed to be minimised.

While few landscape designers may have engaged with the issue of play space design, other professions were much more willing to discuss the purpose and form of playgrounds (and keen to host adverts from commercial playground equipment suppliers too). A well-organised and vocal parks profession had developed by the 1930s. The Institute for Park Administration was formed in 1926 and its monthly magazine, the Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, was involved in promoting play spaces from its very first edition in June 1936. The first page of this first edition was a full-page advert for the playground equipment of Charles Wicksteed & Co., including a photo of three spectacular-looking slides. The following month’s edition included several articles which offered advice on playground layout and another which espoused the benefits of play leadership. After that, every edition included adverts for playground equipment manufacturers. From April 1937 until well after the Second World War, the entire front cover was devoted to a Wicksteed advert, while regular articles considered the role of the playground in relation to a range of topics including public health, slum clearance, town planning, wartime child evacuation from cities and juvenile delinquency.

These articles emphasised the role of the playground in remedying the failures of the past, tackling the problems of modern life, as well as offering hope for the future. At the same time, it seems likely that the commercial viability of Park Administration was at least in part dependent on advertising income. Editors had to balance the opinions expressed in the journal with the expectations of advertisers and as a result criticism of the playground was invariably limited to a call for more planting or a greater sensitivity to their location. By 1936, the editor felt that the problem of providing appropriate playgrounds ‘which will really please children and at the same time prevent them from breaking their precious young necks’ had been solved ‘as far as humanly possible’ by ‘those two kindly wizards, Charles Wicksteed & Co. and B. Hirst & Sons’.¹⁴² Despite the efforts of landscape architects to reintroduce nature into the playground, the parks trade press played a significant role in promoting and reinforcing a vision for the playground centred on manufactured playground equipment.

This chapter has explored how the National Playing Fields Association became an important advocate of dedicated places for children to play in the 1920s and 1930s. Through its lobbying, funding, publicity and guidance it helped to shape contemporary ideas about what a playground was for, how it should be designed and how adults should be involved in its use. At times it endorsed conservative social values, but it also highlighted the importance of commercial technologies and rational planning in shaping a better future for children and the nation. Its national coverage and sense of authority contributed to the standardisation of playground spaces across the country, while its day-to-day activities at a local level point to the ongoing significance of voluntary and municipal civic action in the interwar period. At the same time, as society increasingly claimed that streets belonged to motorists, the NPFA successfully promoted the playground as a key tool in protecting children from life-threatening aspects of the modern world and actively campaigned against alternative approaches that sought to regulate the city rather than children. As a result, the number of children’s playgrounds increased significantly and a new orthodoxy, centred on manufactured swings in particular, became more firmly established in the minds of municipal administrators. By the 1930s, the London County Council managed nearly fifty equipped playgrounds and authorities in Manchester administered twenty-six, with many more provided by municipalities elsewhere.¹⁴³ The conviction that the playground was a space of health, education and safety obscured the threat to children from accidents, incidents and other maladies. The NPFA continued to operate during the Second World War, campaigning for play spaces for evacuees and lobbying for measures to protect children playing on the street during blackouts. The debates that it facilitated in the interwar years around play leadership, in conjunction with wartime damage to urban areas, would create an atmosphere that was conducive to the formation of postwar adventure playgrounds and a greater engagement by design professionals in the spaces where children were meant to play.

Notes

1. 1.  Edward Prentice Mawson, ‘Public Parks and Playgrounds: A New Conception’, Parks, Golf Courses and Sports Grounds, 1 (1935), 7–8.

2. 2.  W.W. Pettigrew, Municipal Parks: Layout, Management and Administration (London: Journal of Park Administration, 1937), RHS Lindley, 969.2 PET; W.W. Pettigrew, ‘The Manchester and Salford Gardens Guild’, Radio Times, 14 October 1927, p. 78, Radio Times Archive; W.W. Pettigrew, ‘The Northern Garden’, Radio Times, 24 April 1931, p. 243, Radio Times Archive.

3. 3.  Tom Hulme, ‘Putting the City Back into Citizenship: Civics Education and Local Government in Britain, 1918–45’, Twentieth Century British History, 26.1 (2015), 26–51; Charlotte Wildman, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

4. 4.  The London Playing Fields committee was renamed the London Playing Fields Society in 1899, ‘London Playing Fields Society’, The Times, 3 June 1899, p. 14; ‘Play Fields for Youths: New Manchester Movement’, Manchester Courier, 9 July 1907, p. 9; ‘The Playing Fields Society’, The Manchester Guardian, 19 October 1908, p. 10; E. Chandos Leigh, ‘The London Playing Fields Society’, The Times, 20 January 1911, p. 19; Basil Holmes, ‘More Playing Fields’, The Times, 12 March 1920, p. 12.

5. 5.  ‘Playing Fields for the People’, The Manchester Guardian, 4 April 1925, p. 7; ‘Playing-Grounds for Young People’, The Times, 4 April 1925, p. 17.

6. 6.  Carole O’Reilly, ‘From “The People” to “The Citizen”: The Emergence of the Edwardian Municipal Park in Manchester, 1902–1912’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 136–55.

7. 7.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Draft Constitution’, n.d., London Metropolitan Archive, LCC/CL/PK/01/042.

8. 8.  National Playing Fields Association, First Annual Report (National Playing Fields Association, 1927), p. 12, National Archives, CB 4/1.

9. 9.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Report of Proceedings at Inaugural Meeting of the National Playing Fields Association’, 1925, National Archives, CB 1/1; National Playing Fields Association, Second Annual Report (National Playing Fields Association, 1928), p. 20, National Archives, CB 4/1.

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

11. 11.  National Playing Fields Association, First Annual Report, pp. 3–8; ‘The Playing Fields Association’, The Manchester Guardian, 25 July 1925, p. 7.

12. 12.  Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Chubb, Sir Lawrence Wensley (1873–1948), Environmental Campaigner’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

13. 13.  National Playing Fields Association, Third Annual Report (National Playing Fields Association, 1929), p. 25, National Archives, CB 4/1.

14. 14.  National Playing Fields Association, First Annual Report, p. 35.

15. 15.  National Playing Fields Association, Second Annual Report, p. 16.

16. 16.  Tom Hulme, After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019).

17. 17.  National Playing Fields Association, First Annual Report, pp. 15–16.

18. 18.  ‘Speeches from the Meeting Held by the National Playing Fields Association’, Radio Times, 3 July 1925, p. 57, Radio Times Archive.

19. 19.  Raphael Jackson, ‘The Week’s Good Cause: Appeal on Behalf of the National Playing Fields Association’, Radio Times, 5 June 1936, p. 18, Radio Times Archive; M.W. Montgomery, ‘The Week’s Good Cause: Appeal on Behalf of the Glasgow and District Playing-Fields Association’, Radio Times, 24 May 1929, p. 403, Radio Times Archive; T.H. Vile, ‘The Week’s Good Cause: Appeal on Behalf of the Monmouthshire Branch of the National Playing Fields Association’, Radio Times, 8 July 1938, p. 25, Radio Times Archive; Tom Voyce, ‘The Week’s Good Cause: Appeal on Behalf of the Gloucestershire Playing Fields Association’, Radio Times, 12 February 1937, p. 22, Radio Times Archive.

20. 20.  ‘Need for Village Playing Fields’, Playing Fields Journal, 2.7 (1934), 312.

21. 21.  Marjory Allen, ‘The Coronation and the Village’, The Spectator, 12 March 1937, p. 467.

22. 22.  P. Maud, ‘Recreation in Public Parks and Open Spaces’, Playing Fields Journal, 1.2 (1930), 7–13; B.T. Coote, ‘Children’s Playgrounds: Their Equipment and Use’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 1.2 (1936), 102–5.

23. 23.  London County Council, ‘Recreational Facilities’, 1935, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/PK/GEN/02/003.

24. 24.  Claire Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England 1920–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 142.

25. 25.  Jean Williams, A Game for Rough Girls? A History of Women’s Football in Britain (London: Routledge, 2003).

26. 26.  Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Mike Huggins and Jack Williams, Sport and the English 1918–1939 (London: Routledge, 2006).

27. 27.  J.A. Mangan, ‘Manufactured’ Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism (London: Routledge, 2012).

28. 28.  Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994).

29. 29.  Martin Francis, ‘The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 637–52.

30. 30.  Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

31. 31.  Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly, The British Army and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

32. 32.  Prentice Mawson, ‘Public Parks and Playgrounds’, p. 7.

33. 33.  James Stark, The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

34. 34.  Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), 595–610.

35. 35.  Anna Davin, Growing up Poor (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996).

36. 36.  Bishop of Southwark, House of Lords Debate, 14 February 1928, Vol. 70, Col. 92 (Hansard, 1928).

37. 37.  Keith Laybourn and David Taylor, ‘Traffic Accidents and Road Safety: The Education of the Pedestrian and the Child, 1900–1970’, in The Battle for the Roads of Britain: Police, Motorists and the Law, c.1890s to 1970s, ed. Keith Laybourn and David Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 149–85.

38. 38.  ‘Street Accidents to Children’, Playing Fields Journal, 1.3 (1931), 19–20.

39. 39.  ‘Street Accidents’, Playing Fields Journal, 1.8 (1932), 12.

40. 40.  ‘The Cry of the Children’, Playing Fields Journal, 2.1 (1932), 4–5.

41. 41.  Board of Education and Ministry of Transport, Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee (England & Wales) on Road Safety Among School Children (London: HMSO, 1936).

42. 42.  G. Lowndes, ‘The Cost of Traffic Accidents, the Case for Playing Fields from a New Angle’, Playing Fields Journal, 4.1 (1936), 19–22.

43. 43.  Mabel Jane Reaney, ‘The Urgent Need for Trained Play Leaders, a Paper given at the Conference on Play Leadership at the Institute of Education, London, 21 July’, 1933, National Archives, CB 1/54.

44. 44.  Joe Moran, ‘Crossing the Road in Britain, 1931–1976’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 477–96.

45. 45.  ‘Street and Driving Accidents: The Coroner and Children’s Playgrounds’, The Manchester Guardian, 18 June 1907, p. 14.

46. 46.  ‘The Heedless Child: What He Means to the Motorist’, The Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1928, p. 8.

47. 47.  Metropolitan Police, ‘Memorandum from “M” Division, Tower Bridge Station Regarding Juvenile Courts, 4 August’, 1932, p. 2, National Archives, HO 45/15746.

48. 48.  Home Office, ‘Metropolitan Juvenile Courts Statistics for the Year 1930’, 1930, National Archives, HO 45/15746.

49. 49.  Nancy Astor, House of Commons Debate, 28 April 1926, Vol.194, Col.2155 (Hansard, 1926).

50. 50.  ‘Mothers Want Safer Streets’, Daily Mail, 12 October 1937, p. 11.

51. 51.  ‘Teaching Children Road Safety’, The Times, 28 July 1938, p. 11; Model Traffic Area No. 1 (Pathetones, 1938), British Pathé Archive, PT440 www.britishpathe.com/video/model-traffic-area-no-1 [accessed 6 July 2023]; H. Thornton Rutter, ‘The Chronicle of the Car’, Illustrated London News, 6 August 1938, p. 256.

52. 52.  ‘Tottenham’s Contribution to Road Safety’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 3.2 (1938), 95–6.

53. 53.  G.E. Paris, ‘A Children’s Playground and Model Traffic Area’, Playing Fields Journal, 5.2 (1939), 89–96.

54. 54.  ‘Training While They Play: Tottenham’s Model Traffic Area’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 12.3 (1947), 85–8.

55. 55.  ‘Dunfermline Trains Bairns in Road Sense’, Dundee Courier, 28 June 1950, p. 2; ‘Road Safety for Children’, The Manchester Guardian, 1 May 1956, p. 14; ‘Royal 12-Day Tour Begins’, The Times, 28 June 1958, p. 4.

56. 56.  ‘Traffic and Children: Expecting Too Much Wisdom’, The Manchester Guardian, 2 October 1936, p. 8.

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

58. 58.  F.R. Bush to Chief Commissioner of Police, letter, 13 February 1930, National Archives, MEPO 2/7803.

59. 59.  ‘Children Revel in Street Playground’, New York Times, 26 July 1914, p. 11; Will R. Reeves, ‘Report of Committee on Street Play’, The Journal of Educational Sociology, 4.10 (1931), 607–18.

60. 60.  Metropolitan Boroughs’ Standing Joint Committee, ‘Proposed Closing of Streets to Traffic for Use of Children’, 1934, National Archives, MEPO 2/7803.

61. 61.  Board of Education and Ministry of Transport, Road Safety Among School Children Report.

62. 62.  Alfred Barnes, House of Commons Debate, 28 March 1950, Vol.473, Col. 33 (Hansard, 1950).

63. 63.  Lawrence Chubb to Ernest Holderness, ‘Street Closures for Children’s Play’, 17 October 1932, National Archives, MEPO 2/7803.

64. 64.  ‘The Use of Closed Streets as Playgrounds’, Playing Fields Journal, 3.2 (1935), 35–6.

65. 65.  National Playing Fields Association, Second Annual Report, p. 12.

66. 66.  Lord Elgin, ‘Letter to Sir Arthur Crosfield, Chairman of the NPFA’, NPFA Second Annual Report, 1927, 12–13.

67. 67.  The NPFA allocated grants around the world on behalf of the King George’s Field Foundation from 1935 to 1965, and administered the National Fitness Fund, created by the 1937 Physical Training and Recreation Act. National Playing Fields Association, ‘King George’s Fields County Register 1931–1965’, 1965, National Archives, CB 2/24; National Playing Fields Association, ‘Register of Grants Given under the Physical Training and Recreation Act 1937’, 1942, National Archives, CB 1/83.

68. 68.  Prentice Mawson, ‘Public Parks and Playgrounds’, p. 7.

69. 69.  Noel Curtis-Bennett, ‘Playing Fields in the Post-War Period’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 10.3 (1945), 47–63.

70. 70.  National Playing Fields Association, First Annual Report, p. 12.

71. 71.  ‘Street Accidents to Children’, p. 20; ‘Children’s Corner’, Playing Fields Journal, 1.8 (1931), 29.

72. 72.  Maud, ‘Recreation in Public Parks and Open Spaces’, p. 13.

73. 73.  W.W. Pettigrew, Handbook of Manchester Parks and Recreation Grounds (Manchester: Manchester City Council, 1929), p. 14.

74. 74.  London County Council, ‘Recreational Facilities’.

75. 75.  Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860 < c.1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 113.

76. 76.  Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860–1931 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 101.

77. 77.  Margaret McMillan, The Nursery School (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1921), p. 47.

78. 78.  Philip Graham, Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children (London: Routledge, 2009).

79. 79.  Richard Bailey, A.S. Neill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

80. 80.  A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child-Rearing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 68.

81. 81.  Joseph H. Wicksteed, The Challenge of Childhood: An Essay on Nature and Education (London: Chapman & Hall, 1936), p. 116.

82. 82.  Burt is a controversial figure today. For a summary, see Pauline Mazumdar, ‘Burt, Sir Cyril (1883–1971)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

83. 83.  Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind, p. 220; Jenny Willan, ‘Revisiting Susan Isaacs – a Modern Educator for the Twenty-First Century’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 17 (2009), 151–65.

84. 84.  Mabel Jane Reaney, ‘A Director of Play’, The Manchester Guardian, 11 March 1919, p. 4.

85. 85.  Mabel Jane Reaney, The Place of Play in Education (London: Methuen & Co., 1927).

86. 86.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of the Sub-Committee on Play Leadership 14 December’, 1928, National Archives, CB 1/54.

87. 87.  W. John Morgan, ‘The Miners’ Welfare Fund in Britain 1920–1952’, Social Policy and Administration, 24 (1990), 199–211; ‘Miners’ Welfare: A Model Playground in Wales’, The Times, 2 June 1930, p. 11; Lord Chelmsford Opens First Children’s Playground to Be Erected under Miners’ Welfare Fund in Colliery Districts, 1926, British Pathé Archive, 634.18 https://www.britishpathe.com/video/lord-chelmsford-1 [accessed 6 July 2023].

88. 88.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Play Leadership in the United States’, 1933, National Archives, CB 1/54.

89. 89.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Report of Conference on Play Leadership’, 1933, pp. 7–14, National Archives, CB 1/54.

90. 90.  Reaney, ‘The Urgent Need for Trained Play Leaders’, pp. 5–6.

91. 91.  ‘The Need for Play’, Hospital, 66 (1919), 52.

92. 92.  National Playing Fields Association, Sixth Annual Report (National Playing Fields Association, 1932), pp. 11–19, National Archives, CB 4/1.

93. 93.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Minutes of Play Leadership Committee 23 April’, 1936, National Archives, CB 1/54.

94. 94.  National Playing Fields Association, Sixth Annual Report, p. 19.

95. 95.  John Shepherd, ‘Lansbury, George (1859–1940), Leader of the Labour Party’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

96. 96.  ‘Brighter London Parks: Mr. Lansbury Continues His Tour’, The Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1929, p. 17.

97. 97.  ‘Hyde Park Playing Field: £5,000 Offer to Mr. Lansbury’, The Manchester Guardian, 1 November 1929, p. 12; Peter Donaldson, Sport, War and the British (London: Routledge, 2020).

98. 98.  ‘Hyde Park or Coney Island?’, The Times, 7 February 1930, p. 15.

99. 99.  ‘Questions in the Commons: The Royal Parks: Mr. Lansbury’s Plans Challenged’, The Manchester Guardian, 18 February 1930, p. 6; John Pybus, House of Commons Debate, Royal Parks and Pleasure Gardens, 24 February 1930 Vol.235 Col.1909 (Hansard, 1930); ‘Mr. Lansbury and the Royal Parks: Criticism and Defence in Commons’, The Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1930, p. 5.

100. 100.  ‘Mr Lansbury and the Parks: The New Technique: Correspondents’ Protests’, The Times, 8 February 1930, p. 13.

101. 101.  ‘Mr. Lansbury and the Parks: Hyde Park or Coney Island? Reply to Critics’, The Observer, 9 February 1930, p. 17; ‘Mr Lansbury and the London Parks’, The Manchester Guardian, 11 February 1930, p. 6.

102. 102.  ‘Mr Lansbury and the Parks: Peace or Playground: The Serpentine Pavilion’, The Times, 12 February 1930, p. 15.

103. 103.  ‘Fall of a School Bell: Child Killed in the Playground’, The Manchester Guardian, 29 November 1906, p. 7; ‘Explosion in a City Schoolyard: Eight Boys Injured, Accident during Repair of Cable’, The Manchester Guardian, 29 May 1924, p. 9; ‘Runaway Horse Kills Kid’, The Manchester Guardian, 4 December 1924, p. 9.

104. 104.  ‘The Swing Accident in an Edinburgh Playground’, Edinburgh Evening News, 26 January 1905, p. 4; ‘Corporations and Public Playgrounds: A Question of Liability’, The Manchester Guardian, 10 January 1905, p. 12; ‘Fatal Accident in Charlton Kings Playground’, Gloucester Citizen, 19 December 1912, p. 5.

105. 105.  ‘Success of “Safety First” Campaign’, The Times, 29 March 1924, p. 15; C.G. Ingall, ‘Industrial Accident Prevention’, The Journal of State Medicine, 35.6 (1927), 360–65; Laybourn and Taylor, ‘Traffic Accidents and Road Safety’.

106. 106.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Playground Equipment, Tennis Posts, Fencing and Park Seats’, 1926, p. 10, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued; Spencer, Heath and George Ltd, ‘Playground Apparatus, 1932 Improved Models’, Playing Fields Journal, 1.8 (1932), xiii.

107. 107.  ‘Insuring against Third Party Risks: Playground Accidents’, Playing Fields Journal, 1.3 (1931), 13.

108. 108.  ‘A Recreation Ground Swing Accident’, Playing Fields Journal, 2.6 (1934), 266.

109. 109.  ‘Crown Court: £1,500 Damages for Boy, Playground Accident’, The Manchester Guardian, 22 December 1936, p. 5; ‘Child’s Injury in Playground: Damages Doubled, Corporation Loses Appeal’, The Manchester Guardian, 14 July 1937, p. 15.

110. 110.  Royal Parks, ‘Memoranda in Response to an Article in the Times, Dated 18 November 1933, on a Recreation Ground Swing Accident in Walthamstow’, 1933, National Archives, WORKS/16/846.

111. 111.  ‘Court of Appeal’, The Times, 15 March 1934, p. 4.

112. 112.  ‘Playground Risks’, Playing Fields Journal, 3.1 (1934), 3–4; Play Safety Forum, Managing Risk in Play Provision: A Position Statement (London: Children’s Play Council, 2002); David Ball, Tim Gill and Bernard Spiegal, Managing Risk in Play Provision: Implementation Guide (London: National Children’s Bureau, 2012).

113. 113.  Royal Parks, ‘Park Keepers’ Reports of Offences against Children’, 1932, National Archives, WORKS/16/532.

114. 114.  Pettigrew, Handbook of Manchester Parks, p. 26.

115. 115.  London County Council Education Department to Bailiff of the Royal Parks, ‘Child Molestation Cases’, 27 January 1932, National Archives, WORKS/16/532.

116. 116.  London County Council, ‘Playgrounds – Dry’, 1927, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/038.

117. 117.  John K. Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

118. 118.  F.A. Boddy, ‘Playgrounds for Children’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 3.11 (1939), 345.

119. 119.  Ann Marie Murnaghan and Laura Shillington, ‘Digging Outside the Sandbox: Ecological Politics of Sand and Urban Children’, in Children, Nature, Cities, ed. Ann Marie Murnaghan and Laura Shillington (London: Routledge, 2016).

120. 120.  Friedrich Froebel, Froebel Letters: Edited with Explanatory Notes and Additional Matter by A. H. Heinemann (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1893).

121. 121.  Joseph Lee, ‘Play for Home’, The Playground, 6.5 (1912), 146–58 (p. 152).

122. 122.  London County Council, ‘Report of the Parks and Open Spaces Committee, 16 May’, 1893, p. 5, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/CL/PK/01/104.

123. 123.  John James Sexby, The Municipal Parks, Gardens, and Open Spaces of London: Their History and Associations (London: Elliot Stock, 1898), p. 556.

124. 124.  Annesley Kenealy, ‘Playgrounds in the Parks: A Plea for the Children’, The Daily Mail, 14 March 1907, p. 6; Evelyn Sharp, The London Child (London: John Lane, 1927), p. 95.

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

126. 126.  George Lansbury, House of Commons Debate, 24 February 1930, Vol.235, Col.1894 (Hansard, 1930).

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

128. 128.  Royal Parks, ‘St. James’s Park. Children’s Playground and Paddling Facilities’, 1930, National Archives, WORKS/16/1504.

129. 129.  Pettigrew, Municipal Parks, p. 16.

130. 130.  David Niven, ‘The Parks and Open Spaces of London’, in London of the Future, ed. Aston Webb (London: The London Society, 1921), pp. 235–50.

131. 131.  Coote, ‘Children’s Playgrounds’, p. 103.

132. 132.  Spencer, Heath and George Ltd, ‘Playground Apparatus’.

133. 133.  Coote, ‘Children’s Playgrounds’, p. 105.

134. 134.  Coronation Planting Committee, The Royal Record of Tree Planting, the Provision of Open Spaces, Recreation Grounds & Other Schemes Undertaken in the British Empire and Elsewhere, Especially in the United States of America, in Honour of the Coronation of His Majesty King George VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939).

135. 135.  Michael Simpson, ‘Adams, Thomas (1871–1940), Town and Country Planner’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

136. 136.  Thomas Adams, PlayParks with Suggestions for Their Design, Equipment and Planting (London: Coronation Planting Committee, 1937).

137. 137.  Adams, PlayParks, pp. 15–26.

138. 138.  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.

139. 139.  Prentice Mawson, ‘Public Parks and Playgrounds’.

140. 140.  J.D. O’Kelly, ‘Parks and Playgrounds’, Landscape and Garden, 5 (1938), 94–5.

141. 141.  W.R. Pertwee, ‘Designing Children’s Gymnasia’, Landscape and Garden, 6 (1939), 28–31 (p. 29).

142. 142.  ‘Seen at the Public Health Exhibition’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 1 (1936), 247.

143. 143.  J. Richardson, ‘A Century of Playing Fields Progress’, Playing Fields, 6.4 (1946), 155–60.