Chapter 5 Playground scuffles: ‘it’s ours whatever they say’

The power of play

The 1970s saw a renewed and widespread general interest in both childhood and play. Progressive educationalists, rooted in interwar ideas about psychology and child development, reached a much wider audience. For example, A.S. Neill’s hugely influential book Summerhill achieved both considerable sales and widespread publicity in Britain and internationally for its promotion of childhood freedom and the role of play in education.³ As we shall see later in this section, central government departments commissioned research into children’s play and issued guidance on play space provision in a belief that play could help to achieve wider policy ambitions. At the same time, psychology was joined by sociology in trying to make sense of human nature and the place of children in society and the environment.⁴ By the 1970s, play could seemingly provide evidence to explain a wide range of biological, behavioural and social phenomena, from its evolutionary role in animals and humans, through physical and social development, to its significance in the progress of western civilisation.⁵

In addition to its analytic potential, play was increasingly seen as not just a healthy but also a medically therapeutic activity. The gardens and grounds of asylums and other medical institutions had long performed a therapeutic function, providing space for open air convalescence and interaction with nature and horticulture. From the 1970s, childhood play was nurtured in such spaces too. Hospitals began to encourage inpatient children to play, nurses were trained to support playful activities and the Department of Health issued a circular to encourage, although not fund, play in hospitals.⁶ In 1972, an outdoor play space that included climbing structures, a pond and a grazing goat was designed and created for Stoke Lyne Hospital by students from Exeter College of Art.⁷ At Farleigh Hospital, near Bristol, an adventure playground was created for its psychiatric patients, although it could hardly compensate for brutal failings in care at the institution.⁸ In 1970, Marjory Allen was involved in setting up an adventure playground in Chelsea, where disabled children and their siblings and friends could play together, followed by a wider association to support similar sites elsewhere.⁹

Despite the spread of these semi-public facilities for children’s play in various medicalised environments, the lack of public play space was still seen as a problem, particularly in relation to new forms of housing. A study into family life on housing estates in Leeds, London and Liverpool found that the problem of high-rise living, combined with inadequate playground provision ‘may well amount to a process likely to impair the normal personality development of the children affected’.¹⁰ Play and the playground continued to be seen, for the time being at least, as important vectors for healthy child development. Such trends were evident in planning policy, where town planners continued to promote the principle of the playground as a device of childhood wellbeing. In 1961, the Parker Morris report, most well known for establishing internal space standards for council housing, also made recommendations relating to the provision of play spaces. A 1968 double edition of the journal Town and Country Planning showed how planners could improve children’s lives at home, at school and at play, and emphasised the potential benefits of children’s participation in planning for the future.¹¹

The policy aspirations for planned play provision were implemented most notably and comprehensively in the new towns, where local authorities were replaced by semi-autonomous development corporations charged with making the purpose-built settlements a reality. Planners working on the development of Milton Keynes in 1973, adopted a particularly optimistic tone. Toddlers’ play spaces close to home, communal playgrounds in parks, adventure play centres and a children’s play officer would provide playful leisure opportunities to meet the needs of children and their families.¹² In Basildon, car-free public spaces were dotted with sculptural play equipment (Figure 5.1), while the provision of play space within residential areas was a strategic objective for planners in Harlow too.¹³ Even where housing schemes were less extensive and involved a smaller extension to an existing community, children’s play could still be central to their design and layout. New estates provided a significant improvement in housing conditions and often afforded more space and greater freedom for play. For example, photographs of the Middlefield Lane estate in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, show how children regularly used communal areas, so that while they ‘were not quite places for children, they were child-centred in the hope of fostering children’s wellbeing’.¹⁴ Play space provision remained important in established urban areas too. In Waltham Forest in east London, the council’s 1977 Corporate Plan placed a high priority on creating additional playgrounds, with eighteen new play spaces planned for parks, housing estates and education sites.¹⁵ The playground was still an integral part of visions for a better urban environment and the provision of dedicated space for play remained an important aspect of an optimistic approach to planning new communities during the 1970s. While new estates may have been positive spaces for some children, there were also increasing critiques of planning orthodoxy and its emphasis on creating planned spaces for play.

By the 1970s, planning had not made the urban world anew as its early advocates had often hoped. Many people still lived in dilapidated housing, in neighbourhoods that had either not been rebuilt after the war or were in the middle of slow rebuilding programmes. Over 240 local civic societies came together to describe a resulting ‘urban wasteland’ in many parts of the country, including Surrey Docks in London, Glasgow’s east end and St Radigund’s in Canterbury.¹⁶ The documentary photographer Nick Hedges made this strikingly clear in his work for the homelessness charity Shelter (1968–72) and in a subsequent exhibition commissioned by the Royal Town Planning Institute at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.¹⁷ His evocative images highlighted the enduring resourcefulness and adaptability of children at play, even as their surroundings decayed. A child playing on a small, enclosed balcony at the top of a monumental tower block or children playing on broken swings among crumbling buildings were very different from planners’ utopian hopes for redevelopment schemes and the playgrounds that accompanied them (Figure 5.2).

Hedges’s creative response to the problems came on the back of growing criticism among academics and journalists about modern planning and its consequences. Perhaps the most influential critique of planning and the places it was creating was The Death and Life of Great American Cities by the journalist Jane Jacobs, which offered a damning attack on the principles of modern city planning orthodoxy. Jacobs argued that planners had long been fixated by the ideas of Howard, Corbusier and others about how cities ought to work, rather than seeking to understand how they actually worked in practice through the everyday lives of ordinary people. Rather than the planners’ aerial perspective, Jacobs favoured a view of the city from the sidewalk. She argued that the street did not represent the problematic space so often ascribed by planners, nor were dedicated spaces for play inherently any better: ‘how nonsensical is the fantasy that playgrounds and parks are automatically OK places for children, and streets are automatically not OK places for children’. She mocked the ‘grass fetishes’ of park advocates and the ‘science fiction nonsense’ that green spaces somehow represented the lungs of the city. Instead, she argued that city streets had long possessed an important social function as sites of neighbourliness and community interaction. For children in particular, the street offered collective adult supervision, a variety of ways to play, space for imagination and creativity and opportunities to learn about adult society through imitation. She felt that children needed an ‘unspecialized outdoor home base from which to play, to hang around in, and to help form their notions of the world’ and the street was the best place for that to happen. In contrast, downgrading the street and removing children was the ‘most mischievous and destructive idea in orthodox city planning’.¹⁸

Although initially published in the USA and drawing on her experience of living in New York, Death and Life of Great American Cities became hugely influential. It inspired others to question long-held assumptions about planning and contributed to a degree of introspection within the planning profession in Britain. Writing in New Society in 1969, a group of British academics, architects and critics considered what would happen if there was no planning at all, calling instead for experiments in ‘non-planning’.¹⁹ In addition, as wider political and public consensus about the authority of the planner dissolved in the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable debate within the planning profession about its future. Nathaniel Lichfield, noted academic and planning consultant, felt that the system needed to be overhauled to ensure it met the needs of children.²⁰ Others from within the profession questioned planners’ ability to mediate between society and the environment, casting doubt on the adequacy of the system, its philosophical foundations and relationship with society at large, leading to considerable defensiveness and resistance to change.²¹ The conviction among planners, architects and politicians that modern approaches to the reconstruction of the city, including the provision of playgrounds, heralded a bright new future for society was increasingly being renounced by the same people that had endorsed it just a decade earlier.²²

This existential challenge to town planning was exacerbated by an increasing awareness and sensitivity to the lived experience of city dwellers, as the social sciences became increasingly influential in both academia and more widely. Like Jacobs’s work, Kevin Lynch’s influential book The Image of the City had sought to shift approaches to the city from the bird’s-eye view of the planner to that of the person on the street.²³ Psychologists, sociologists, geographers and others were subsequently inspired to study the everyday lived experience of the city and the impact of the environment on behaviour, including among children.²⁴ The concept of territorial ‘home range’, borrowed from animal ecology, was of particular interest as scholars sought to understand the ways in which children made use of the urban environment.²⁵ Most significantly, sociologists were increasingly attempting to understand the changing place of children in the city. Play, the playground and its relation to new forms of housing proved to be an important testing ground for new sociological research methods.

This focus on urban social change had its roots in earlier interest in day-to-day lived experience and attempts at more participatory forms of urban planning. As early as 1936 Elizabeth Denby, the housing consultant and friend of Marjory Allen, had demonstrated an interest in the views of residents in new housing schemes, even if her subsequent designs did not necessarily live up to future occupants’ expectations.²⁶ The creation and development of Mass Observation in the late 1930s helped to foster a greater awareness of the everyday experiences of working-class city dwellers in particular. After the war, the Building Research Station continued to study user satisfaction with new forms of social housing, while sociologists investigated the social consequences of rehousing schemes, particularly the impact on residents’ sense of community.²⁷ However, children’s play only occasionally featured in these initial assessments. A 1954 study of the Lansbury estate found children largely playing in the street, while the NPFA’s Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats (1953) assessed the quality of new play provision mainly by questioning those responsible for creating it.

One of the earliest attempts to adopt new sociological methods and position children more centrally was by Margaret Willis, a pioneering researcher employed from the early 1950s by the LCC architects’ department. In High Blocks of Flats, a study of nine council estates, Willis surveyed families to understand their experience of living in high-rise homes, including the impact on children’s play. She found that younger children living on higher floors were often kept inside rather than being allowed out to play and that where play spaces were provided they were often inadequate. Willis concluded that families with younger children should be housed on the lower floors of high blocks, so that it was easier for younger residents to play outside, a call that would be repeated in subsequent reports in other cities.²⁸ In a follow-up study of young children’s play on four estates, Willis found that few children used the playground frequently, with many preferring to play on the service roads, grass areas and in the entrances to buildings. When children did play in the playground, the sandpit was by far the most popular amenity among children. In a specific study of seven sandpits, Willis concluded that such amenities were an important playground feature on high-density estates, but that many parents expressed anxiety about the unhygienic and unhealthy nature of sand.²⁹ In the two decades after Willis’s pioneering work, which remained unpublished due to departmental hierarchies and bureaucratic protocols, there were regular sociological studies of the relationship between children and the urban environment; three in particular stand out for their focus on children and play provision.³⁰

The first, Two to Five in High Flats, was published in 1961. Written and researched by the sociologist Joan Maizels (and supervised by a committee that included Marjory Allen and Margaret Thatcher MP), it found that plenty of advice existed about children living in flats but that ‘official practice had lamentably failed to keep pace with precept’.³¹ In addition to its account of playgrounds for high blocks of flats, it examined the thoughts and experiences of 200 resident families and playground users, promoting the notion that children should have a greater influence in the places they were expected to play, even if this was mediated through their parents. Its findings also demonstrate how wider debates about childhood, play and public space were being worked through by individual families. It showed how new flats in high-rise blocks created better living conditions, but also disrupted earlier patterns of play that had centred on the street outside the home. With most of the families visiting parks and playgrounds only occasionally, the physical, visual and psychological disconnect between a high flat and ground level estate playground was problematic for both parents and campaigners.

Five years later, the Building Research Station published a second notable study, Children’s Play on Housing Estates (1966) by the sociologist Vere Hole. She utilised a range of techniques, including observation, timelapse cameras and film, to better understand how children played on new housing developments and what use they made of playgrounds and other landscape features. The study sought to uncover the play habits and preferences of children so that the adequacy of existing playgrounds could be assessed against their lived experience and needs, using scientific techniques.³² If children’s play could be properly understood, then perhaps designated play provision could be adapted to engage more children for more of the time.

Hole’s findings showed that children played in unusual ways and in different places to those previously imagined by play space campaigners. Of the 5,494 children observed, most spent their time taking part in sedentary but highly sociable play, including sitting, standing, watching and talking, leading Hole to suggest that the playground functioned as a site for children’s behaviour patterns that were not dissimilar to those of adults and the local pub. The playground and equipment often acted as a focal point for social gathering, where children would join friends or seek companions, and fifty per cent of children had soon left the playground to play elsewhere on the estate. Left to their own devices, many children sought out sociable encounters rather than physical excitement or exercise, with little observable difference between girls and boys. Hole eloquently described a picture of play ‘which is restless, changing, where groups coalesce and dissolve but where there is an underlying element of more continuous activity or repose’.³³

The research also highlighted the differences between children’s preferences and adult expectations. While in the playground, the sandpit, paddling pool and swings were the facilities of choice for children, while sculpture and architectural features afforded more pleasure to adults than to younger play space users. Despite their children’s demonstrated preferences, most parents’ criticism of estate play space focused on the lack of orthodox, manufactured playground equipment and Hole found that they displayed little awareness of contemporary theories about play or play space provision. Most tellingly, Hole found that play space was just about holding out against increasing demands for car parking and that the start of children’s television at 5 p.m. saw most children disappear from public spaces altogether to watch programmes such as Blue Peter, Jackanory and The Magic Roundabout.

A third key study into the ways children responded to the urban environment was carried out by Anthea Holme and Peter Massie and published as Children’s Play in 1970.³⁴ Whereas Maizels and Hole had concentrated on new housing estates, Holme and Massie focused specifically on playgrounds, motivated by the sense that not enough was known about children and their play. To remedy this, they sought to provide documented evidence for planners and play providers, local authorities and designers. They contrasted play provision in an old neighbourhood in Southwark and in the new town of Stevenage, surveyed 467 playgrounds across 19 local authority areas, interviewed parents and recorded the play activities of 1,800 children. Their research provides a useful snapshot of play provision in 1970 and the numerical significance of different typologies. In the nineteen study areas, fifty-four per cent of playgrounds were on housing estates, thirty-eight per cent were in parks, with eight per cent in other locations. Over seventy per cent of park playgrounds provided traditional manufactured equipment, while play spaces on housing estates were more likely to include a combination of traditional equipment and architectural, sculptural or improvised play features. Over eighty per cent of playgrounds had neither sand and water nor adult supervision.

Their research supported Marjory Allen’s earlier complaint that the provision of play space was only rarely coordinated between departments within local authorities, with playgrounds variously the responsibility of parks staff, engineers, surveyors, housing officers, education officials, town clerks and development corporations. In Stevenage, responsibility was spread across five different departments, while in Swansea all playgrounds were the responsibility of just the parks department. Even when provision was coordinated, the ongoing influence of conservative values in relation to public parks continued to shape opportunities for play. The study found that many parks remained ordered and formal spaces where children were forbidden from walking on the grass, climbing trees or riding bikes. In addition, while most of the playgrounds studied were poorly designed and lacked stimuli for play, they were generally well maintained and clean. Alarmingly, where playgrounds were not well cared for, conditions were very bad. With no statutory responsibility to provide playgrounds, good quality provision that was well maintained relied upon the enthusiasm of individual officials, councillors and outside pressure groups, something the authors found to be haphazard at best.

Beyond these three studies, interest in the consequences of urban childhood grew. The NPFA’s Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats had been reprinted six times by 1974. In addition, medical researchers were finding that flat dwellers suffered from a greater incidence of respiratory illnesses, while further sociological studies highlighted the difficulties facing urban children, including John and Elizabeth Newsom’s longitudinal research in Nottingham, Four Years Old in an Urban Community (1968) and Pearl Jephcott’s study of tall blocks in Glasgow, Homes in High Flats (1971).³⁵ Further research showed that high-rise living did not have an exclusive hold on poor-quality play provision and that low-rise council estates experienced problems too.³⁶ Evidence was building to support Holme and Massie’s conclusion that a national policy was needed to ensure that high quality, special places for play were provided, with minimal restrictions and maximum play opportunities.

The publication of Children at Play in 1973 by the Department of the Environment perhaps seemed like the first step towards a national policy for play.³⁷ It raised the stakes in terms of the number of children studied, from the 200 families in Two to Five in High Flats and the 5,000 children observed for Children’s Play on Housing Estates, to over 10,000 detailed observations of play in new and old housing areas. The report included a review of literature relating to children’s play in the urban environment from the previous decade and interviews were conducted with children, parents and other adults in low-, medium- and high-rise housing in cities across the country. The study explored doorstep play, playgrounds, adventure playgrounds, wild areas, and children’s ‘unorthodox’ play on garage roofs and elsewhere. It repeated earlier suggestions that families with children should be accommodated in houses or ground-floor flats with gardens, rather than on the upper floors of tall buildings. It also acknowledged that children did not solely play in playgrounds and so the wider housing environment needed to be able to withstand this playful use. It highlighted the work of the landscape architect Mary Mitchell in designing successful play spaces in Blackburn and provided images of well-planted playgrounds incorporating trees and shrubs. Mia Kellmer Pringle, psychologist and director of the National Children’s Bureau, contributed as a consultant advisor to the study team, helping to ensure its child-focused approach to play. As a result, the report appears to be a comprehensive study of children’s playful activity and an effective digest of the latest thinking on children and their play in the urban environment, in many ways a model of best practice.

Curiously, the tone of the document, its detailed suggestions and the images it used are completely at odds with its final design recommendations, which cover just one out of one hundred pages. Transposed word for word from Circular 79/72, a joint directive on play space issued by the Department of the Environment and Welsh Office a year earlier, the recommendations in Children at Play were based on a highly conservative understanding of the playground and its form. The circular stated that play spaces should be equipped with items from a shortlist of traditional manufactured equipment, including the swing, slide, climbing frame, see-saw, merry-go-round and rocking horse. In addition, it required surfacing to be hardwearing and existing trees to be retained only where possible. It applied specifically to local authority housing developments and unlike earlier communiqués it set a standard amount of play space, three square meters, and dedicated additional funding, £400 (£18) per child, to cover the cost of play space construction. The circular did not discuss imaginative, creative or adventurous play provision, the need for more trees, shrubs, flowers or other landscape features, nor the involvement of play leaders or specialist designers.³⁸

How can this apparent mismatch between Circular 79/72 and the wider tone of Children at Play be reconciled, particularly given that both were a product of the same government department? On the one hand, the circular followed a long tradition of indifference towards play provision by central government, which had hardly mentioned, let alone endorsed, the creation of playgrounds over the previous two decades. Where play space was mentioned in government documents, it was generally in relation to housing policy. The Ministry of Health’s 1944 Housing Manual did not mention play provision and the 1949 manual simply suggested playgrounds ‘might’ be provided.³⁹ In the 1950s, Conservative governments primarily sought to reduce the cost of housing provision through economy in the use of land, rather than improving the quality of estate amenities.⁴⁰ The 1957 Housing Handbook was highly dismissive of playgrounds, stating that there was a lack of research into the subject and that the approach to play provision advocated by campaigners such as the NPFA was unduly costly and therefore not strongly supported.⁴¹ In the mid-1960s, play space was once again eligible for central government housing subsidy but as this information was hidden in an appendix to a circular on housing costs it hardly represented a ringing endorsement.⁴² Instead, the government publicly stated that it would not insist on the provision of spaces for play.⁴³ An official account of the Ministry of Housing and its work, published in 1969, did not mention children nor play, despite asserting that a key role involved overseeing ‘the urban environment and its impact on the citizen’.⁴⁴ For central government, the issue of play provision was a minor component of housing policy, something to be provided alongside clothes-drying areas and waste disposal, primarily at the discretion of local authorities.

On the other hand, by the late 1960s ministers were ‘increasingly anxious to extend the provision of play spaces’ in response to questions in Parliament and a wider appreciation of the importance of play.⁴⁵ In 1968, Ministry of Housing officials issued a guidance note to local authorities that included a short paper by the NPFA on imaginative playground design, including the noteworthy instruction: ‘no old cars, play sculpture or other adult grotesqueries please’.⁴⁶ Even then, the covering note was explicitly clear that it solely represented the views and experiences of the authors and was in no way a government endorsement of the recommendations. Furthermore, the civil servants working to develop Circular 79/72 relied directly on a Wicksteed equipment catalogue to shape the instructions in the directive, rather than the NPFA note the department had previously shared with local authorities.⁴⁷ Ultimately, concerns about cost and administrative complexity dominated discussions between officials, rather than necessarily the needs of children when playing.⁴⁸ Mia Kellmer Pringle, consultant advisor on Children at Play, responded to an initial, confidential version of the circular by stating:

I would not wish to be quoted as being in agreement with the provision outlined in your draft. Of course, it is a very reasonable first step and this may be all that can at present be afforded, but this is very different from saying that it is in any way adequate.⁴⁹

Political pressure meant that civil servants had attempted to promote play provision, but the combined challenges of financial restraint and bureaucratic complexity limited the published standards to the bare minimum in the eyes of campaigners. Ministry officials acknowledged the likely opposition to the circular from the NPFA and Marjory Allen, but in the event the circular was far more widely criticised.⁵⁰

While campaigners welcomed the dedicated funding that accompanied the directive, other aspects including its approach to play space provision were roundly condemned. The Inner London Education Authority felt that the low standards were totally inadequate and encouraged planners to do much more than the circular suggested in terms of space for play and its design.⁵¹ For the deputy director of amenity services in Lambeth, the ‘list of playspace equipment is sad, it might have been appropriate ten years ago but it isn’t now’.⁵² For one unnamed commentator, the circular lacked a definition of play space, the list of equipment was unimaginative, there was no mention of facilities such as water fountains or toilets and it had a narrow focus on equipment at the expense of other forms of play.⁵³ Alongside these criticisms, the NPFA were disgruntled not to have been consulted on the content of the circular and submitted a revised version that more closely resembled campaigners’ thinking on play provision, but this was quickly dismissed by officials.⁵⁴

Despite considerable sociological research and the ongoing efforts of campaigners to promote alternatives, the approach to play demonstrated by the circular was remarkably conservative, particularly given the findings from Children at Play, which were available to officials well before it was published. The problem partly stemmed from the differing expectations of a play space standard. For campaigners, a standard was meant to be aspirational, an ideal that providers should aim for in terms of the quantity and quality of play provision. Conversely, for central government officials the standards in Circular 79/72 were designed to be the bare minimum acceptable to attract subsidy, something that progressive local authorities would want to exceed. For critics, this disconnect in relation to the purpose of a standard meant that the government appeared to be significantly behind the times in terms of their approach to play.

In a review of research and guidance in 1976, Clare Cooper Marcus and Robin Moore concluded that while more was known about children’s use of playgrounds, research findings had rarely been disseminated to those in central and local government, let alone shaped policy or implementation on the ground.⁵⁵ However, even researchers were selective in the findings they endorsed and extolled. Despite increased recognition that children played everywhere, there was still a sense that the playground was the place that children should play and the issue that needed to be solved related to the type of play spaces being provided.⁵⁶ In 1978, Moore asserted that ‘the creation of childhood places cannot be left to chance or the vagaries of pressure groups; they must be deliberately fostered by planning, design, and management to satisfy basic human needs’.⁵⁷ In a similar vein, some park advocates in Britain continued to see play as a juvenile version of adult leisure and recreation, an activity that needed spaces and equipment for play in public parks at an appropriate frequency.⁵⁸ For others, this increased knowledge about the way that children played suggested that it was not the attractiveness or frequency of play provision that was the problem but rather, as Jane Jacobs had argued in the early 1960s, that the principle of the playground was unsound.

This sense that the playground concept was flawed developed further in two very different fields of thought. On the one hand, those who had long observed children at play recognised that play could happen everywhere and anywhere, that children adapted to whatever environment they happened to be in. For others, the conventional playground was a symbol of political oppression, a space that symbolically and often physically denied children the freedom of the city that belonged to them as much as adults. Turning to the former initially, the work of the folklorists, Iona and Peter Opie best represents this line of thought.

In their 1969 book Children’s Games in Street and Playground they stated that

during the past fifty years shelf-loads of books have been written instructing children in the games they ought to play, and some even instructing adults on how to instruct children in games they ought to play, but few attempts have been made to record the games children in fact play.⁵⁹

Through observation and discussion with 10,000 children in England, Wales and Scotland, they collated details of children’s spontaneous and self-directed outdoor games. They found that similar games were played across the country, but with regional variation in names and local tweaks to the rules. Games of chase that were called ‘tig’ in Scotland and the north of England, were ‘tick’ or ‘tip’ in north Wales and the west Midlands, ‘touch’ in south Wales, ‘tag’ around Bristol and ‘he’ in London and the south-east. The Opies felt that children’s self-organised play demonstrated excitement, adventure, imagination and ways to opt out of the ordinary world. They concluded that ‘where children are is where they play’. Significantly, this recognition that children played everywhere and anywhere fundamentally undermined the assumption that children required dedicated places to play. Children could adapt to their surroundings and enjoyed secret, wild places best, away from adult supervision, where juvenile community could thrive. As a result, the Opies were dismissive of both the traditional playground and its ‘cage-like enclosures filled with junk by a local authority, the corners of recreation grounds stocked with swings and slides’ and the adventure playground and its play leaders, ‘the equivalent of creating Whipsnades for wild life’.⁶⁰ By focusing on children and their self-directed playful activities, the Opies found that the provision of playground spaces was something of a benign irrelevance to the social lives of children, just one of many spaces where children played and developed their own collective culture.

In contrast, for many left-wing radicals the playground was a highly visible feature of the wider exploitation and control of children by adults, an extension of the power exerted by men over women, the oppression of the working-class and attempts to enforce particular standards of behaviour in public space. With limited political power, children were seen to experience particular difficulties in their ensuing war with adults. For radicals, the conventional playground was a prime example of the way that adults had sought to control children, excluding them from the wider urban environment and limiting their behaviour through both designating space and the use of materials such as tarmac, ironmongery and fencing. There were calls of ‘free the children, down with the playground’ in response to efforts to enclose children’s play.⁶¹ In contrast, the adventure playground was often portrayed as an experimental space of childhood freedom and hope for a better society, a line of argument commonly associated with the anarchist writer Colin Ward.

In relation to Ward and others, the historian Mathew Thomson has argued that the late 1960s and early 1970s saw radical thinking and action in relation to landscapes for children. However, there is considerable evidence that points to the earlier development of radical ideas and action in relation to the children’s playground in particular. As we saw in the previous chapter, the conceptions of childhood that were inherent in the adventure playground ideal were grounded in the beliefs of interwar progressive educationists and were most visibly introduced to a wider British public by Marjory Allen’s Picture Post essay in 1946. In addition, Ward had been consistently promoting the adventure playground from the late 1950s. In 1958, he cited the adventure playground as a striking example of living anarchy, valuable both as a place in itself and as verification of libertarian rather than authoritarian values. He would make the case again in 1961, almost word for word, in a special edition of the journal Anarchy which focused on adventure playgrounds. The same text was largely reused for a chapter in Anarchy in Action (1973), this time reaching a wider audience and contributing to wider sociological investigations into urban childhood.⁶² In suggesting earlier roots to radical ideas about children’s play, this evidence does not diminish Thomson’s suggestion that Ward’s Child in the City, first published in 1978, represented a high point in radical thinking about urban childhood and the playground.

In Child in the City Ward built on the work of earlier sociological research and anarchist thinking to emphasise the extent to which children adapted the adult-imposed environment, where play provision operated on one plane and children on another. He would later write that Child in the City was intended as a celebration of children’s resourcefulness.⁶³ To facilitate such ingenuity and imagination, he felt that city officials who were genuinely concerned for children should make the ‘whole environment accessible to them, because whether invited or not, they are going to use the whole environment’.⁶⁴ In making a claim for the entire city for children, Ward differentiated his mission from that of other child advocates. He argued that ‘if we seek a shared city, rather than a city where unwanted patches are set aside to contain children and their activities, our priorities are not quite the same as those of the crusaders for the child’.⁶⁵

The artist and educator Simon Nicholson provides a good example of these alternative priorities and the development of a model for implementing them on the ground. Initially in the USA and later from the Open University in the UK, he sought to take children’s play beyond the playground to create the shared city that Ward imagined.⁶⁶ His ‘theory of loose parts’ promoted greater child involvement in the design of both objects and places for play. In a phrase often quoted since, he stated that ‘in any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it’.⁶⁷ As such, meeting the needs of children required an adaptable and flexible urban environment at a variety of scales. At the smallest, Nicholson felt that individual children needed their day-to-day environment to include loose materials, such as water, fire, living objects and resources for building, seemingly inspired by the ethos of early adventure playgrounds. At a wider scale, the urban environment needed to be flexible enough to accommodate community involvement in shaping it, rather than being fixed by planners, architects and builders in turn. Widely cited by playworkers since, at the time his concept built on the ideas of anarchists and radicals and coincided with the practical and arduous efforts of local communities to reclaim space within the urban environment for play.

Campaigning and working for play

The difficulties that community activists would face in creating space for play embodied many aspects of the wider battle of ideas outlined in this chapter so far. For many parents, planners, health workers and campaigners, play retained its association with childhood wellbeing and dedicated play spaces were seen as a symbol of a healthy urban environment. At the same time, sociological research, radical thought and the existential challenge to planning unsettled not only traditional conceptions of the playground but also cast doubt on the need for dedicated play spaces at all. Despite mounting evidence that challenged orthodox play provision, central government intervened in the battle for ideas, overtly endorsing traditional conceptions of the playground. However, the playground scuffles were far from settled. During the 1970s and early 1980s they would be played out in struggling local authorities, radical play work, the expanding market for manufactured equipment and in sensationalist debates about safety. Before turning to these arenas, the next section explores the place of play in community politics and activism.

Community demand for play provision was not new in the 1970s, but it did achieve a higher profile and became embroiled in wider political struggles that moved beyond campaigns for a healthier urban environment to challenge established notions of democracy, inclusivity and civic responsibility. In 1936, ninety-two people had petitioned the local council for a playground in Okehampton, Devon, while a 1952 survey by the NPFA showed that parents wanted more places for their children to play.⁶⁸ By the 1960s, vocal demands for more and better play provision increased significantly and often constituted a key demand of community groups attempting to improve the urban environment in the face of apparent inaction by local authorities. Groups of protesting children also made for emotive coverage in local newspapers and signalled childhood agency in both political debate and the use of public space. In 1963, 200 children marched on Stockport town hall with a 2,000-signature petition, protesting at the lack of play space on their estate in Edgeley.⁶⁹ A few months later, a further 100 children marched from Brinnington on the other side of town, to protest at the lack of space for play in their neighbourhood.⁷⁰ In Lancaster, there were dramatic reports that hundreds of children had stopped the traffic and ‘laid siege’ to the council offices in another protest about play provision.⁷¹ By 1970, housing officers in London felt under ‘constantly increasing pressure, highlighted by petitions, threats of protest marches, representations from Tenants’ Associations, MPs and our own members, social groups and the like, to provide bigger, better and more varied play facilities’.⁷² Children’s play had become a significant political issue at the local level, echoing the pressure felt in central government.

And just as photographers had recorded iconic images of postwar play on bombsites, film makers in the 1970s were drawn to attempts by children and their parents to secure space for play. A 1972 film, It’s Ours Whatever They Say, documented the perseverance of residents living on the Lorraine estate in Islington, north London, to secure a safe playground for their children.⁷³ The newsreel style documentary included footage of children playing on a disused timber yard and the council’s attempts to eject them, so that the site could be redeveloped for the more structured recreation associated with a scout hut and new housing. After threats of arrest, a protest march to the town hall, considerable local newspaper coverage, a renewed occupation of the site by children and finally the revelation of underhand behaviour by council officials, the film ends with residents securing the site as a space for their children to play. Another documentary film, Do Something!, included further coverage of the problems of children’s play in Islington and highlighted its intersection with issues of poor housing, racial tension and a problematic relationship between the council and local residents.⁷⁴

North London was not the only part of the capital where the playground became embroiled in direct action by local community groups. Residents in Notting Hill, west London, had experienced difficulties for many years, including riots in the late 1950s, exploitation and intimidation by private property owners and apparent indifference from the local authority. The social researcher Pearl Jephcott found that ‘the local press reflects with dreary monotony the extent and variety of troubles which afflict the district’.⁷⁵ Serious gaps in the provision of play space for children were a consistent feature of studies into the area’s problems and in time became a key demand of local activists, residents and protesting children.⁷⁶ As in Islington, the efforts of residents to exert more control of the spaces for play in their neighbourhood were evocatively captured on film. The Battle for Powis Square, filmed by Community Action Group in 1974 on portable video recorders, captured the ongoing attempts by the local community to open the square as a proper space for play and the dismissive and condescending attitude of local Conservative councillors.⁷⁷ The film documented residents’ efforts to retain grass areas for play and to provide play workers, shelter, toys and other activities, at odds with the council’s preference for an unadorned asphalt ground. Councillors imagined the playground as a tarmacked space, similar to surrounding streets but safe from traffic, while local residents envisaged a garden play space with supportive adults and appropriate facilities that would nurture the children of the neighbourhood.

These examples from Islington and Notting Hill highlight the extent to which the playground had become symbolic of a humane and liveable urban environment and attentive local government investment, not just among earlier advocates but also for parents and other local activists. The films’ portrayal of angry parents and enlisted children demanding action from stony officials encapsulates at an individual level many of the wider tensions in the evolving battle of ideas relating to urban play. Further research into the production, distribution, viewing and reception of these films could provide useful insights into the relationships between parental activism, local politics, technology and changing conceptions of urban childhood and the way that these issues were played out in the playground. Residents and community groups certainly saw dedicated spaces for play as one way to improve the quality of their neighbourhood and the lives of their children. But neither a tarmac ground as imagined by the Kensington councillors, nor playgrounds with orthodox equipment were the answer. Instead, local activists sought to provide something closer to a community-focused play centre which incorporated free play, aspects of the natural environment and adult advocates for children’s play, an approach which became synonymous with the developing play work profession.

The 1970s saw the expansion of an increasingly organised and professionalised play work sector, championed by the NPFA and grounded in an approach to urban childhood and play space inspired by the postwar adventure playground movement and subsequent community activism. And while the political urgency and associated publicity subsided from the late 1970s, on which more later, the story is important in wider accounts of the playground because the anarchic political values continued well beyond the decade in the culture of play workers and continues to influence present-day advocates for children and their play in public space.

From the 1960s, the NPFA had renewed its efforts to promote adult involvement in children’s play. It sought to enhance the status of the emerging play leadership profession by organising training courses in play leadership in conjunction with the Institute of Park Administration and with input from many individuals involved in the early postwar experiments in adventure playgrounds.⁷⁸ The influential director of the NPFA’s children and youth department, Drummond Abernethy (1913–88), had volunteered at Lollard Street adventure playground in the 1950s before spending two decades working for the NPFA, making it a nationally recognised centre for advocacy and advice in relation to progressive notions of play and play leadership.⁷⁹ After much debate over the name and purpose of the organisation, the Institute of Playleadership was established in 1970 by the NPFA, Institute of Park Administration, Marjory Allen and a number of early play workers.⁸⁰ The inauguration of the Institute was a notable step in the NPFA’s shift away from orthodox visions of the playground towards more progressive, liberal notions of play. This reached a logical conclusion in the late 1970s when adverts for manufactured playground equipment were dropped from its journal, a process explored in more detail later in this section. But in associating itself with the values of more radical advocates for children’s play, the NPFA’s authority and reputation would be challenged by a conservative backlash against wider efforts to promote political and social liberation.

Even without this negative reaction, the Playleadership cause remained beset by fundamental uncertainty about the precise role of adults in shaping children’s play and play environments. The increasingly organised and coordinated nature of the play work profession did not help to alleviate that doubt. In 1973, one Institute member felt the adventure playground and the role of play workers was ambiguous at best: ‘for the team of six playleaders, most of them inexperienced, the problem was less clear-cut. Was the centre to be educational, recreational, therapeutic or a mixture of these? Each of us part teacher, doctor, counsellor, community worker, builder, cleaner, handyman.’⁸¹ In addition, others felt that the overtly political stance of some workers was problematic.⁸² The play worker was unenviably struggling to be everything to everyone, treading a fine line between community worker and political activist, something that more recent advocates have sought to resolve while also attempting to provide the profession with greater theoretical and practical foundations.⁸³

Despite this ambiguity, the number of adventure playgrounds increased from the handful of postwar, short-term, experimental spaces.⁸⁴ A 1956 NPFA conference had brought together representatives from eight adventure playgrounds in Bristol, Cambridge, Grimsby, Hull, Liverpool and London, while Crawley sent apologies.⁸⁵ By 1962, the capital’s four sites had formed the London Adventure Playground Association to coordinate their work. And by 1974 there were twenty full-time adventure playgrounds in London, three in Liverpool and four in Bristol.⁸⁶ Those with practical experience of the initial experiments shared their knowledge and sought to increase the status of the profession. There had been earlier descriptions of experiments in adventure play, such as John Barron Mays’s account of Rathbone Street in Liverpool, but the 1970s saw a far greater number of publications as many play workers promoted their work and vocation.⁸⁷ In the space of a few years, Jack Lambert described his experiences of working at Parkhill adventure playground, Arvid Bengtsson provided a visual account of similar spaces around the world and Bernard McGovern penned advice on play leadership.⁸⁸

Joe Benjamin’s call for industry-sponsored adventure playgrounds might not have been realised, but in In Search of Adventure (1966) and Grounds for Play (1974) he cemented many of the enduring myths and tropes of subsequent play advocates. He repeated Allen’s assertion that Sørensen invented the adventure playground and reiterated the problems of orthodox equipment. He promoted the apparent freedom of adventurous play, but at the same time failed to acknowledge the highly gendered assumptions about children’s activities in such spaces.⁸⁹ Historian Krista Cowman has shown how the figure of the heroic male playleader, a character evident in many of the accounts mentioned above, significantly limited the potential of the adventure playground to challenge traditional gender norms, despite wider social changes that were altering the position of women in society.⁹⁰ In addition, not only did adventure playgrounds embody conservative gender values, but they were also becoming less radical in their approach to play.

In Grounds for Play, Benjamin lamented the shifting ethos of adventure playgrounds, as the continual processes of construction and destruction by children were gradually replaced by the labour of play workers with permanence in mind. Adult involvement in building improvised play structures was not new in the 1970s; the NPFA had produced and distributed plans for improvised play equipment in 1956, but the idea certainly gained momentum among play workers. By 1970, over 4,000 copies of the NPFA plan had been distributed and they continued to promote the idea in their journal.⁹¹ Several books on do-it-yourself playgrounds were available, particularly from the USA, although the NPFA advised caution in their wider application in light of inadequate materials and fixings.⁹² Despite Benjamin’s observation that the gap between conventional and adventure playground provision was narrowing, radical play workers nonetheless saw themselves at odds with the providers of more orthodox play provision. Hughes would later recall that play workers’ ‘natural enemy’ was the parks department and their ‘lazy, adult-oriented and wasteful’ approach to play provision.⁹³

In some ways this was an unreasonable generalisation. The campaigning and advocacy work of the 1950s and 1960s had influenced the wider approach to play provision, in some local authorities at least. The London County Council, and from 1965 its replacement the Greater London Council (GLC), was lauded for its progressive approach to play. Its parks staff attempted to create bespoke, adventurous play spaces in attractive landscapes, with facilities for adults and children that would be flexible in their use, with layouts that could be properly maintained once opened.⁹⁴ In Battersea Park, a new playground included some traditional equipment such as swings and roundabouts but also provided wooden stockades, a broad slide with sandpit at the bottom and a miniature theatre, while a sand valley, mature trees and landscaping helped to create a ‘natural’ setting for the playground.⁹⁵ Its Play Parks scheme, running since 1959, was also praised.⁹⁶ It provided staff and additional creative play opportunities adjacent to more conventional spaces in fourteen public parks by the mid-1960s. Such spaces invariably included areas for den building, sandpits, a quiet area for imaginative play and equipment that included building blocks, water play, garden tools and toys. Marjory Allen would promote this approach, along with examples from Sweden, in her pamphlet Play Parks in 1964.⁹⁷

Some landscape architects also continued to design imaginative and flexible spaces for play. Mary Mitchell won an award from the Civic Trust in recognition of her work on Birley Street Playground in Blackburn and her designs reached international audiences via the French modernist architecture magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.⁹⁸ However, Landscape Design, the journal of the British landscape profession, continued to have few contributions relating to children’s play during the 1970s.⁹⁹ This might be attributed to a greater awareness among designers of the need to think beyond the playground to create total environments for play, typified by Michael Brown’s approach to housing landscapes. It could equally be the consequence of a plethora of guidance for landscape architects that already dealt with the issue, both in Europe and the USA. For Anne Beer, environmental planner at the University of Sheffield, the landscape profession had focused too much on meeting standards, like those set out in the government’s Children at Play or the checklists promoted by some designers, rather than designing public spaces that responded to their surroundings and would meet the needs of children.¹⁰⁰

London’s Play Parks scheme hints at the problems associated with changing existing play spaces in response to the new ways of thinking that evolved in the 1960s and 1970s. The solidity and inertia of metal playground equipment not only limited opportunities for creative and flexible play in the minds of campaigners, but also made it difficult for designers and playground managers to adapt existing play spaces. Play Parks deflected this problem by providing additional play opportunities beyond the playground railings, whereas attempts to physically change individual play spaces would invariably take many years to realise. For example, after critical comments in the press and questions in Parliament in 1963, a survey of playground facilities by royal parks administrators concluded that ‘we are lagging a good way behind the LCC in our children’s play areas which at present are primarily designed for passive entertainment and do little to encourage spontaneous and creative play, which it is generally agreed is what should be aimed at.’¹⁰¹ Rather than incrementally replace individual items of equipment, they decided to renew the Gloucester Green playground in the north-east corner of Regent’s Park, which had originally been installed in the 1930s. A sum of £280,000 (£7,000) was nominally set aside and architects were instructed to design a scheme to replace the forty-year-old play space. After two overly expensive designs were rejected, a third, more affordable scheme received approval in 1969, work started on site in January 1971 and was completed that summer.¹⁰² Not only had the project taken nine years from inception to completion but it was also hardly a demonstration of innovative playground design. The layout included large areas of hard surfacing and the retention of original equipment and iron railings, with concrete pipes and a fallen tree trunk the most obvious nod to current thinking.¹⁰³ Renewed again at a cost of over £1m in 2020, the present-day Gloucester Green playground demonstrates the slow pace at which playground thought has influenced spaces on the ground, while the incorporation of significant areas of naturalistic planting and the presence of donation pay terminals both speak to contemporary concerns about the nature of the urban environment and how we should pay for children’s access to it.¹⁰⁴

Away from the prestigious royal parks, playgrounds on municipal housing estates and in public green spaces faced a number of challenges during the 1970s. There was a shift in power and influence away from urban municipal authorities towards national government, as finances and policy making were increasingly centralised. As we have already seen, the centralisation of policy making meant that traditional ideas about playground provision were given significant weight by national government circulars and guidance. At the same time, local government reorganisation in the early 1970s increasingly meant that park and playground provision became the responsibility of more generalised recreation and amenity departments, much to the consternation of many in the parks profession.¹⁰⁵ As a result, the staff responsible for play provision often had little specialist experience or training, coming from backgrounds as diverse as libraries, sports or engineering.¹⁰⁶

While reorganisation changed clerical structures it did little to change the day-to-day working of local authorities. For campaigners, the provision of play space remained beset by a lack of coordination. Municipal play space provision could still involve a range of officials from departments including the new recreation and amenity sections, as well as health, education, architecture and housing, while small rural parish councils often only employed a solitary clerk to manage all of their affairs, including playground provision. In central government nine different departments had some involvement in children’s play provision in 1975.¹⁰⁷ The number of requests for a government guide to interdepartmental responsibility for play highlighted the ongoing uncertainty among local authority and voluntary organisations about where responsibility and direction lay. It also demonstrated the extent to which government did not seek to address this problem, with one Department of the Environment official keen to side-step ‘the role of co-ordinator, which we have so far managed to avoid’.¹⁰⁸

Beyond government policy and organisation, wider patterns and spaces of leisure were also changing, with free, communal provision including parks and playgrounds often sidelined by new spaces for leisure. The 1970s saw the dramatic growth of sports and leisure centres; historian Otto Saumarez Smith has argued that these often short-lived buildings represented both a continuation of municipal provision of facilities for health, but also combined the values of public health and commercial entertainment.¹⁰⁹ Some playgrounds responded by attempting to emulate this combination. At Wicksteed Park, by this point managed separately from the manufacturing company, the free playground and gardens were joined by paid-for attractions including crazy golf, dodgems, a rollercoaster, donkey rides, motorboat trips and a big wheel, all promoted in glossy colour brochures and other marketing materials.¹¹⁰ Nature had not been completely relegated, although the small black-and-white pamphlet that highlighted its existence in the park was underwhelming in comparison to other publicity materials.¹¹¹ Nor was Wicksteed Park immune from the organisational troubles facing local authorities, with management consultants called in to restructure the operation of the site, complete with a new organogram structure, improved budgetary procedures and portion control in the cafeteria (the latter presumably for financial rather than health reasons).¹¹²

Play equipment manufacturers also attempted to adapt to changing attitudes to play and responded to some of the criticism levelled by more radical advocates. Companies sought to demonstrate how their products could fit into new conceptions of the playground, while a few railed publicly against criticism of their products. Unsurprisingly, all continued to promote the principle of the playground. Wicksteed & Co. produced landscape models to display their playground design expertise and ability to create undulating play landscapes that incorporated planting and sculptural features.¹¹³ A concerted sales drive saw them diversify their advertising to include Caravan, Chalet and Camp Site Operator, Council Equipment and Building News and Education Equipment, as well as advertising supplements in regional newspapers.¹¹⁴ They trialled ‘Swedish-inspired’ climbing structures and spacecraft roundabouts in an effort to demonstrate their ability to provide for imaginative play.¹¹⁵ Their equipment catalogue emphasised the health and happiness that their products could deliver.¹¹⁶

Children were also a less regular feature of the text and images used to create manufacturers’ advertisements and were sometimes missing altogether. Hunt & Son and Wicksteed & Co. implicitly acknowledged that children were not in reality their customers, but rather the municipal officials responsible for installing and maintaining playgrounds. As a result, their adverts emphasised the dependability and longevity of products, comprehensive aftersales service and included images of factories and maintenance vans rather than children playing.¹¹⁷ Hunt & Son even took the unusual step of paying for advertising space to issue an open letter that responded to the comments of an unnamed critic. The company protested that government-imposed purchase tax stultified invention in equipment design, argued that popularity among children trumped adults’ aesthetic considerations and that if their products were not popular or necessary that they would be out of business.¹¹⁸

In fact, the opposite seemed to be the case as the number of companies competing to sell playground equipment increased significantly from the late 1960s.¹¹⁹ The three well-established manufacturers, Wicksteed, Hirst and Hunt, and their traditional equipment faced increasing competition as a wide range of new suppliers promoted alternative playground products that incorporated new materials and technologies. Bowen Associates’ ‘triodetic playdome’ was an early example, a domed climbing frame made from aluminium tubes.¹²⁰ Playstyle introduced playcubes, a ‘modular play system’ comprising fourteen-sided, interconnected plastic polyhedrons and designed in conjunction with ‘leading educationalists, child psychologists, playgroup leaders, playground designers … and of course children’.¹²¹ Recticel-Sutcliffe patented a new safety seat for swings, made of foam and rubber, to replace traditional wooden types (and even appeared on the TV series Tomorrow’s World as part of a feature on how children might play in the future).¹²² SMP Landscapes won a Design Council Award for their products, the first playground equipment manufacturer to do so, and their ‘intensive use’ play space in Leyton, east London, included a helicopter-shaped climbing frame and log cabin slide.¹²³ Other companies attempting to take a share of the playground equipment market included Record, Furnitubes, Massey & Harris, Tyneside Engineering, GLT Products, Kidstuff, Rentaplay, Sportsmark and Gilbert & Gilbert.¹²⁴ By 1979, the trustees of Wicksteed Park had asked SMP to take on an £88,000 (£11,000) project to redesign the original playground, an embarrassing indication of the extent to which Wicksteed & Co. and their products were seen to be increasingly antiquated and out of touch.¹²⁵

The trade journals cashed in on the resulting demand for advertising space and in addition to the regular adverts from manufacturers they published long articles promoting equipment companies and their products. Previously, the publications had relied on contributions from parks administrators, landscape architects and sometimes playground campaigners to provide content for their pages. By the 1970s, these discursive or polemic articles had largely disappeared and were replaced by advertorial content, invariably written by a ‘special correspondent’ and exclusively based on information and images provided by the commercial equipment manufacturers.¹²⁶ In doing so, the companies collectively re-established themselves as the authority on public play provision for the parks profession and any debate about the function and form of the playground largely disappeared from trade journals like Parks Administration and Parks and Recreation.

For the NPFA and their journal Playing Fields, this was increasingly problematic. In the past, Playing Fields had included regular adverts from equipment manufacturers, alongside discussion about the provision and design of play spaces. By the 1970s, both the organisation and journal were resolutely advocating more progressive approaches to play provision, including adventure playgrounds, play parks, professional leadership and well-designed playgrounds, all of which constituted implicit criticism of more orthodox provision. In addition to the journal, the NPFA information centre was providing over forty publications on innovative play space design and leadership, including their own pamphlet series, information from the International Playground Association, as well as key texts by Allen, Bengtsson and others.¹²⁷ Partly to deal with this contradiction, the NPFA ceased publication of Playing Fields in 1976 and replaced it with Play Times, a more accessible magazine-style periodical that adopted an unequivocal approach to campaigning and no longer included advertising from equipment manufacturers.¹²⁸ But just as the NPFA wholeheartedly adopted the ideas and attitudes of the progressive playground movement, there was a corresponding increase in wider concern about child safety, which at times descended into panic.

Danger and decay

The debates about childhood freedom within and beyond the playground collided with other forces that increasingly characterised urban play provision as a problematic example of wider social and environmental malaise. In an article in the Municipal Review, Drummond Abernethy of the NPFA concluded that some parts of the country were providing good places to play, including in Bristol, Stevenage and Islington, but that elsewhere many play providers were failing in their responsibilities. In the same piece, the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, argued that many local authorities had got their priorities badly wrong, suggesting that ‘it is not through malice or evil intent I am sure, but they have been overtaken by the motor-car and other matters so that play provision has been left behind’.¹²⁹ However, it was no longer the motor car that dominated the rhetoric of those concerned with children’s safety as it had done for many playground campaigners from the 1930s to the 1950s. It remained a concern, but increasingly significant was the perceived risk to children from the unlikely combination of paedophiles, pets and even playgrounds themselves.

As we saw in earlier chapters, the threat to children from abusive adults had been recorded by park staff for much of the playground’s existence, but the issue was often obscured by an unwillingness to talk openly about such incidents. By 1968, the sociologists Elizabeth and John Newson found that parents in Nottingham were increasingly protective of their children in response to fears about the dangers of sexual molestation.¹³⁰ Mathew Thomson has argued that this anxiety moved from a background concern to a major public issue from the mid-1970s. There was high-profile coverage of sexual crimes in the media and a public and political backlash against a short-lived sympathy, including among some adventure playground advocates, for a conception of the paedophile as a child lover rather than child molester.¹³¹ Attempts at fostering rational public discourse by groups such as the Paedophile Information Exchange, including through conference attendance and book publishing, generated a little sympathy from the social work trade press and some in the gay liberation movement. In contrast, the frenzied response of tabloid newspapers and campaigns by socially conservative activists, such as Mary Whitehouse, meant this fragile sympathy was short-lived.¹³² And so, just as greater freedom in play was being promoted by the findings of sociological research, anarchic politics, community activism and play advocates, there was an opposing anxiety about the risks of unacceptable adult behaviour that added to the perceived dangers of the urban environment.

A further danger to children at play was associated with pets rather than people. As historian Neil Pemberton has shown, there was concern in Burnley and beyond about the threat to children’s health posed by dog faeces, in particular the problems associated with infection by toxocara canis (also known as dog roundworm).¹³³ This concern had developed from a number of scientific studies in Britain and the USA which pointed to the potential risks.¹³⁴ One in particular, which found that a quarter of soil samples from British public parks included the parasite, proved to be particularly influential.¹³⁵ Detailed descriptions of the parasite’s ‘hard, horny jaws which enable it to burrow through human tissue’ and consequences that included loss of sight in children resulted in urgent calls for action.¹³⁶ Coinciding with rising concern about rabies, national newspapers portrayed a crazed canine menace that threatened children and their health in places where they were supposed to be safe.¹³⁷ This dramatic reporting, which continued for over fifteen years, contributed to the burgeoning anxiety about children playing in public space.

Adding to this angst was an awareness that in addition to hazardous people and pets, playgrounds could be dangerous places too. Up to the 1950s, there was a sense among those advocating for playgrounds that the safety of children at play was primarily the responsibility of mothers. Playgrounds for Blocks of Flats (1953) repeated a well-established assumption when it declared that playgrounds for young children had to be located within sight of mothers in their homes. Inadequate supervision by parents was even prone to scorn from officials. For one parks superintendent, the ‘question of unaccompanied toddlers in a playground is quite serious and very difficult to overcome if irresponsible parents permit their small children to roam at will’.¹³⁸ Court cases relating to potential local authority negligence in playground provision were reported in the trade press, although they also reinforced the idea that parents had responsibility for children’s welfare while using play spaces.¹³⁹ There was also a growing sense that playground safety needed to be considered by officials, partly in relation to the design of manufactured equipment but also the type of surfaces used, especially concrete.¹⁴⁰

The 1950s saw the first trials of rubber safety surfaces, initially in the USA as an experimental collaboration between the Akron Board of Education and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, but also subsequently in Britain too. In Akron, the self-proclaimed rubber capital of the world, waste rubber was chopped into small pieces and stuck to the playground surface where it was found to lessen the problem of skinned knees and, unlike grass, dried quickly after rain.¹⁴¹ In St Pancras in London, the noted architect Frederick Gibberd worked with the British Rubber Development Board to include rubber surfacing in the playgrounds of a redevelopment scheme because it was thought that it would help to minimise injuries and provide a harder-wearing surface than grass.¹⁴² In both cases the organisations involved suggest that the initial development of safety surfaces in playgrounds was as much about the creation of new commercial products that dealt with industrial waste – and incorporated rather vague notions of safety in their marketing rhetoric – as it was about a direct response to evidence of specific dangers in the playground.

In the 1960s, playground safety remained a concern, although mainly for the professionals managing play spaces rather than the public more widely. For the LCC, it resulted in both anxiety and confusion among officials. In response to playground accidents, including several deaths, the council attempted to limit the use of apparently dangerous equipment. By the early 1960s there was considerable uncertainty among officials about which items of equipment could or could not be used, as no formal resolution had been reached. Parks and housing officials had made ad hoc decisions to initially stop installing slides, climbing nets, rocking horses and giant strides and subsequently all moveable, mechanical equipment. As a result, LCC architects produced bespoke designs for immobile playground features, including play walls, a wooden tent, tubular steel climbing frame and playhouse.¹⁴³ However, councillors were unwilling to make this official policy, so that by 1962 officials found that ‘no specific list of barred equipment can be traced’.¹⁴⁴ In addition, playground safety was not always a dominant concern for housing officials. The attitudes of residents, Tenant Associations and councillors to playground facilities meant that experimental equipment could appear and disappear very quickly, as happened on the Aboyne estate in Tooting.¹⁴⁵

Despite evidence that children were much better at judging their exposure to risk than their parents, by the 1970s the issue of playground safety received widespread and increasingly sensational publicity, while the design of playground equipment became a topic for discussion in national newspapers.¹⁴⁶ The British Medical Journal reported on a study by Cynthia Illingworth at Sheffield Children’s Hospital which analysed injuries sustained by children while using playground equipment. While acknowledging that ‘many accidents were due to normal childhood rashness’, the article nonetheless highlighted the fractures, lacerations, concussion and other injuries associated with using swings, slides and climbing frames.¹⁴⁷ In 1972, the Guardian reported on the dangers of moving equipment, including the roundabout, rocking horse, ocean wave and swings, and the gruesome injuries and deaths they could cause.¹⁴⁸ A year later, The Times reported on the dangers for children at play, particularly the danger from hard wooden swing seats. It found that hospital records showed swings caused thirty to forty per cent of playground accidents; in Leicester and Manchester, the summer holidays saw ten children a day being admitted to hospital for head injuries; in the Netherlands, twenty children died each year in playground accidents. The Times described these figures as a major problem.¹⁴⁹

These concerns were seen in the local press too. The safety of the playground in Wicksteed Park received considerable publicity in local newspapers, after reports of 700 accidents each year and action by the local authority Public Health committee.¹⁵⁰ In east London, the Wapping Parents’ Action Group lobbied the local council and their MP after a child was injured by a rocking horse in a playground near Green Bank.¹⁵¹ Parks staff and equipment manufacturers were accused of ignorance or indifference to the problem when they asserted that the number and severity of injuries were both insignificant. With no national data on the problem of playground accidents, it was hard to establish the scale of the problem and estimates varied wildly. In 1976, newspapers reported 20,000 playground accidents each year.¹⁵² Two years later, the newly formed Fair Play for Children campaign estimated that ‘150,000 to 250,000 children are hurt or killed in playground accidents every year’ on hard surfaces or play equipment that was often a ‘death trap’.¹⁵³

These dramatically increasing (and largely unsubstantiated) numbers were accompanied by well-publicised problems on the ground too, particularly with aging equipment that had not been adequately monitored. After several items of playground equipment collapsed, the GLC undertook a detailed inspection of its playground apparatus.¹⁵⁴ Rather than relying on visual inspection by park keepers as it had done for many years, technical officers conducted detailed scientific assessments and tests. As a result, half of its playground equipment was condemned, including seventy per cent of its slides, affected by corroding materials and inadequate safety precautions. The assessment of corrosion, particularly decay that was internal or invisible, undoubtedly required expertise analysis and subsequent remediation. But in using technical staff to assess questions of safety, the GLC unintentionally instigated a binary approach to playground risk, where equipment and spaces were either safe or unsafe, rather than recognising that assessing risk involved a value judgement, or even that the educational or developmental benefits of a playful activity could outweigh the risks. In addition, there was a sense that not only had older equipment not been properly checked and maintained but that the design of some items fell short. The British Standard, created in 1959 apparently to ensure the safety of equipment (although also partially to simplify and promote export business), was no longer adequate for ensuring the welfare of children at play.¹⁵⁵ The Design Council felt that the existing standard was so woefully out of date that it promoted its own list of reputable suppliers of safe playground products.¹⁵⁶

By 1977, the wider pressure to address playground safety was being felt in central government. After a high-profile rocking horse accident in his constituency, the Labour MP and Secretary of State for the Environment Peter Shore asked his officials to expedite the revision of the earlier Circular 79/72 and Children at Play, and to encourage the British Standard Institute (BSI) to revisit the 1959 standard with an emphasis on safety. Obstinately, officials remained reluctant to intervene in the matter, suggesting in a handwritten note that ‘this is a good example of an area in which we should not be intervening’.¹⁵⁷ Despite this, and with ongoing pressure from the Fair Play campaign and Consumer Association, civil servants did attempt to update the earlier circular and design advice.¹⁵⁸ After a number of difficulties including opposition from equipment manufacturers and problems coordinating the work of the BSI and Department, an interim letter was sent to local authorities in 1978 asking them to focus on the safety of both new and existing play spaces and to establish a more methodical approach to inspection and maintenance.¹⁵⁹ Although the Fair Play campaign was ‘delighted’ at the new advice, more experienced play advocates including the NPFA and local authority staff disagreed with many of its detailed suggestions, which often seemed naïve and disproportionate.¹⁶⁰ One respondent felt that the concerns expressed by the Fair Play campaign, which had obviously influenced the content of the interim letter, were extreme, lacked evidence and that ‘injuries in children’s playgrounds in most places seem to be quite remarkably light and may well be lower than almost any of the other common situations in which children find themselves’.¹⁶¹ Despite these observations, a preoccupation with safety was further embedded in playground discourse when the British Safety Council (formed in 1957 and usually concerned with industrial accidents) successfully made the case that the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act applied to play provision, much to the surprise of government officials.¹⁶² This was to prove particularly problematic for adventure playgrounds.

Within the wider battle for ideas that characterised play space discourse in the 1970s, adventure playgrounds had already shifted considerably from their original emphasis on freedom, open access and child-centred play. In 1974, play worker Joe Benjamin acknowledged that such spaces had become significantly less accessible; they were invariably fenced and locked up unless a play worker was present, so that children were limited as to when they could use them. In Grimsby, the adventure playground even topped its fencing with barbed wire.¹⁶³ In addition, playful constructions that had previously been built by children on adventure playgrounds were increasingly replaced by large climbing structures, made from scrap materials, and instigated, designed and built by adult play workers.¹⁶⁴ The application of health and safety legislation to playgrounds meant that child-led activities were even more constrained.

In 1979, the Health and Safety Executive’s Factory Inspectors issued a Prohibition Notice to the voluntary management committee of Northumberland Road adventure playground in Southampton, temporarily closing the site until significant dangers were addressed. The features that had previously symbolised freedom and creativity, including scrap materials, self-built structures, ladders and platforms, were now classified by the inspectors as unreasonably dangerous and a threat to the health and safety of people using the playground.¹⁶⁵ Before the management committee could appeal or take any remedial action, the local authority repossessed the site and cleared the playground.¹⁶⁶ Similar events took place elsewhere. After safety inspections in Manchester, the local authority instructed the city’s adventure playground association to close all of its sites, forty-eight hours before the school holidays started.¹⁶⁷ In Suffolk, St Edmundsbury borough council dismantled Puddlebrook adventure playground on safety grounds.¹⁶⁸ By 1980, when the NPFA published Towards a Safer Adventure Playground many play spaces had already been closed or lost their local authority funding.¹⁶⁹ At the same time, financial problems were not limited to adventure playgrounds and by the late 1970s play spaces more generally were being affected by the consequences of reduced local authority budgets.

Play provision had long been subject to the vagaries of wider economic circumstances and the associated impact on local government finances and priorities.¹⁷⁰ In the 1960s, the documentary photographer Robert Blomfield captured the vulnerability of the playground to these wider conditions. The swings in Edinburgh’s Harrison Park, with their seats removed and other equipment missing, appear desolate in the mist in his photo from 1960 (Figure 5.3). By the late 1970s, however, the playground increasingly became associated with the wider decline of parks and council housing estates. Landscape historians have characterised the 1970s as the start of a gradually intensifying period of decline in public parks, caused in part by reductions in municipal funding and the associated reduction in the quality and quantity of maintenance, but also a response to the low profile of parks within newly reorganised municipal structures and changing leisure patterns.¹⁷¹ Park keepers were jettisoned and local authorities attempted to manage the decline of the Victorian park model.¹⁷² In large cities, such as Liverpool, these national trends were compounded by local economic decline and persistent social problems, which meant that parks and their amenities dropped even further down the local political agenda.¹⁷³

There was a sense among some commentators that public parks and the playgrounds within them were in crisis, increasingly obsolete, badly managed, expensive and underused.¹⁷⁴ But if the term ‘crisis’ implies a sense of calamity or urgency, it seems more likely that public spaces were experiencing a long, slow decline in response to incremental changes in management and as inspection and maintenance regimes were neglected.¹⁷⁵ In an attempt to shame authorities into taking action to improve matters, Play Times instigated a ‘brick of the month’ award in 1977 which highlighted the poor-quality design and non-existent maintenance of play spaces across the country. Birmingham, once praised for its play space designs, was criticised for an accumulation of notices prohibiting play on its estates.¹⁷⁶ A decaying concrete train in Portsmouth and a neglected playground in Neath, with rusting, seat-less swing frames and the remains of a ‘dead’ concrete giraffe, were lamentable winners.¹⁷⁷ Knowsley borough council seemed to achieve the greatest fall from grace, with playgrounds left to decay so that they were ‘the worst the editor has seen in a decade of looking at playgrounds all over the country’.¹⁷⁸

Housing areas fared little better as the pragmatic modernism of the council estate playground was often incrementally chipped away in response to the problems of providing parking space for cars and increasing indifference among politicians and officials. The modernist Quarry Hill flats in Leeds provides a good example of this process. The estate was designed in the 1930s to have five playgrounds, but when construction worked stopped prematurely in 1940 only three had been laid out and equipped. Despite postwar agitation by tenants, the land set aside for the two additional play spaces remained ‘deserts of glass-strewn asphalt … destitute of all furnishings’. In the 1960s, twelve per cent of playground space on the estate was reallocated to car parking and most grass areas were enclosed with fencing and children’s play there forbidden. Unlike the grass, the three playgrounds were now without fencing and almost all of the equipment had been removed, dismantled by exasperated officials in response to continual hard use and occasions of ‘wanton vandalism’. By the early 1970s, the estate’s buildings were characterised as obsolete, while the external environment was labelled ‘intolerable’, and the decision was made by local councillors to demolish the entire estate.¹⁷⁹

Playground monsters

After the 1979 general election, a new Conservative government exacerbated the decline of both park and housing play spaces. The new administration rescinded Circular 79/72, removed the accompanying funding and distanced itself from play provision altogether, emphasising in Parliament that it was up to local authorities to decide on appropriate play space arrangements.¹⁸⁰ The somewhat perplexing sight of the new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, opening an adventure playground in London’s east end might seem paradoxical, given her government’s attitude towards local government and the place of the adventure playground in left-wing, anarchic politics. However, she adroitly used the opportunity to expound her views about the dehumanising effects of state intervention and advanced the possibilities of charitable action, praising the voluntary management committee that had established and funded the play space.¹⁸¹ Behind the scenes, officials pragmatically concurred, suspicious that local authorities had often taken advantage of the earlier playground subsidy provided by the circular but had not always used it to provide play spaces on the ground.¹⁸²

At the same time, the urban redevelopment projects of the postwar decades, in which children represented hope for a better society, were recast as dystopian environments where children were a significant cause of the social and physical decline. Whereas playground advocates had long emphasised the deleterious impact of the city, by this time children were conversely seen to wield significant power over their city surroundings through vandalism, graffiti and other antisocial behaviour. Rather than addressing the root causes of such acts, a Home Office report laid the blame squarely on young people, suggesting that reducing child density on estates by dispersing families with children was a potential solution.¹⁸³ In 1985, Alice Coleman and the Design Disadvantagement Team at King’s College London controversially cast judgement on modern housing landscapes and the children that lived in them. In considering playgrounds and the ‘hordes of anonymous children’ that they attracted, Coleman argued that dedicated play spaces were closely associated with a deterioration in the quality of lives of all estate residents.¹⁸⁴ Against a number of measures, including the existence of graffiti, litter, damage, urine and faeces, she argued that playground ‘absence is better than their presence’ and even associated the existence of play spaces on estates with a higher likelihood that children would end up in the care of social services.¹⁸⁵ For Coleman, the answer was to remove playgrounds altogether, dividing the space up into private gardens for ground-floor residents. Although rebutted by other researchers, the shift from seeing children as victims of the urban environment to blaming them for its problems was echoed in the popular press too.¹⁸⁶ Subsequent newspaper reports vilified ‘tiny vandals’ and described the terror of living on council estates with ‘playground monsters’, rhetoric that would continue well into the 1990s.¹⁸⁷

Furthermore, with no government guidance on play provision, disenchantment with council estate landscapes and the denigration of problematic children, advice on playground standards was increasingly reduced to a technical matter. The revised British Standard, B.S. 5696 Play Equipment Intended for Permanent Installation Outdoors, was published in 1979 and received considerable publicity in trade journals.¹⁸⁸ While part pertained to the construction of manufactured equipment, the Standard also now covered site layout, surfacing, maintenance and inspection regimes and placed particular emphasis on safety.¹⁸⁹ In addition, by focusing on the provision of traditional equipped play spaces it further legitimised that particular vision of the children’s playground at the expense of one which emphasised freedom, creativity or interaction with nature as imagined by play campaigners.

As we have already seen, the number of companies supplying playground equipment expanded significantly, as did suppliers for rubber safety surfaces. The two experiments with rubber surfacing in the 1950s evolved so that ‘safety surfaces’ became a common feature of playground provision from the 1970s and offered a new business opportunity. In 1977, Play Times tried to promote a measured approach to the use of increasingly expensive surfacing, suggesting that grass, sand and wood chip could all provide a suitable playground surface.¹⁹⁰ In busy areas, asphalt might even be suitable and at around £37 (£3.60) per square metre relatively affordable. At £385 (£37) per square metre, rubber safety surfacing was over ten times more expensive, and offered little to children in terms of play opportunities, but nonetheless became an integral feature of later play space provision as vague notions of safety trumped both play value and value for money.

The significance of close relationships between local authority officials and equipment suppliers in reinforcing this approach to play provision is not clear. The bribery and fraud associated with municipal housing contracts uncovered during the Poulson scandal had undoubtedly raised important questions about the ethics of public officials and the aptitude of local authorities, but there was no explicit suggestion that this behaviour extended to other sectors.¹⁹¹ There were, however, close relationships between playground equipment manufacturers and local authority politicians and officers.¹⁹² It is not clear for instance why such senior politicians and officials, including the lord mayor, chair of the parks committee and the director of parks, from a small Midlands city all needed to visit the factory of Wicksteed & Co. to develop their plans for a new playground, something normally dealt with by junior staff.¹⁹³ Appropriate or not, these close business relationships only strengthened the place of the equipped playground in the practices of local authorities and invariably made manufacturers the first port of call when money was made available to create or enhance dedicated spaces for children’s play.

As urban historian Guy Ortolano has suggested, ‘on either side of the 1970s, history remained untidy’.¹⁹⁴ Despite broader shifts in the political landscape during the 1980s, away from social democracy and towards market liberalism, the public playground remained free to use and communally funded. Unlike social housing and state-run industries, ownership of public play spaces was not subject to high-profile privatisation. At the same time, local authorities continued to buy playground equipment from commercial suppliers, while also being compelled to outsource playground maintenance to private companies through compulsory competitive tendering. Privately run indoor soft play centres and play zones within shopping centres provided alternative spaces for play, at least for those families who could afford to access them.¹⁹⁵ Since its inception in the nineteenth century, the form and function of the children’s playground had been shaped by the interaction of a wide range of actors. In the 1980s, local authorities continued to own and manage public spaces for play, but limits on municipal power, funding and social remit left playgrounds somewhat adrift in the urban landscape.

This situation continued for much of the 1990s. Central government involvement in play space provision remained limited and the equipped playground remained the dominant conception of a public space for children’s play. In 1996, researchers at the University of Reading found widespread antipathy in government, with no coordination or mandatory responsibility for play provision.¹⁹⁶ The British Standard was revised again in 1997 and remained focused on the safety requirements and layout of manufactured playground equipment, as did guidance booklets published by RoSPA on creating and inspecting play spaces.¹⁹⁷ With sponsorship of RoSPA’s booklets provided by equipment manufacturers, including Wicksteed and SMP, it is perhaps unsurprising that swings and roundabouts continued to dominate both professional and public conceptions of the playground.

The election of a Labour administration in 1997 did not initially mark a radical change in the approach of central government, but there was a renewed interest in the form and social function of children’s play spaces among researchers and children’s advocates. In 1999, a special edition of the academic journal Built Environment focused entirely on the problems and potential of the playground.¹⁹⁸ Contributors pointed to ongoing uncertainty among providers about why they provided playgrounds and children’s limited opportunities to participate in play space design, but also the ways in which such dedicated public spaces provided important meeting places for adults and children alike. The papers also highlighted ongoing points of contention between researchers who emphasised the importance of qualified professionals in designing the public realm and play work inspired advocates who promoted children’s agency in the urban environment.

At the same time, play advocates continued to lobby for policies and funding to improve children’s public play opportunities. In 2000, the NPFA and Children’s Play Council published Best Play, a report that lamented the loss of suitable public spaces for play and the associated impact of ‘play deprivation’ on children’s physical and emotional development.¹⁹⁹ Beyond the perceived health benefits for individuals, advocates invested children’s play with social and political power and positioned as a remedy for poverty, deprivation and antisocial behaviour, much as it had been for well over a century. Furthermore, the report asserted that appropriately designed public play provision would help children to become economically useful and socially responsible adult citizens. In the early twentieth century, play advocates had imagined that gymnastic exercise or playful excitement would deliver these outcomes. In the twenty-first century, campaigners continued to draw on rhetoric first developed by the adventure playground movement, emphasising children’s freedom of expression, imagination and involvement.²⁰⁰

For the next decade, campaigners inspired by and drawn from the play work profession promoted the importance of play for children’s wellbeing, encouraged more rational approaches to playground risks, and lobbied for public investment in play.²⁰¹ In time, governments across the UK responded with programmes and sometimes funding to promote children’s playful environments. The Welsh government created a pioneering Play Policy in 2002, while the Play Strategy for Scotland was published in 2013.²⁰² Both governments have also placed a play sufficiency duty on local authorities in their jurisdictions, requiring an assessment of existing provision and the creation of new spaces for play where necessary. In England, the 2008 Play Strategy was accompanied by £235m in funding and design guidance that sought to create more naturalistic play spaces, with less emphasis on manufactured equipment, as part of a wider drive by central government to improve educational outcomes and reduce child poverty.²⁰³ This high-profile intervention was short-lived and in 2010 a new coalition administration withdrew both the guidance and funding.

Despite this, the children’s playground remained a feature of social and political debate in the twenty-first century. The playground has continued to provide a focal point for high-profile conversations about the inequitable impacts of financial austerity, the segregation of public space by housing tenure and social class, and even the ‘intrusion’ of wild animals into spaces ostensibly set aside for children’s play.²⁰⁴ This ongoing public interest is unsurprising given the playground’s longstanding physical presence in the urban environment, the malleability of the playground concept and its place in collective assumptions about children’s place in the city. Despite controversy and debate, more than 26,000 children’s playgrounds are still owned and managed by over 400 public organisations, representing all tiers of government across the UK. In an unusual quirk of welfare provision, the Ministry of Defence is the largest single provider of children’s playgrounds in the UK, alongside large London boroughs, unitary authorities and small parish councils.²⁰⁵ This administrative complexity and dispersed responsibility goes some way to explaining why playground provision has changed relatively little in the last century, despite the efforts of campaigners and radical changes in our understanding of children’s lives.

In summary, from the late 1960s a battle of ideas in relation to the playground pitched radical, anarchic notions of childhood freedom against an increasingly widespread but often unsubstantiated preoccupation with safety. Play workers pitted themselves against parks departments, while the places in which children were supposed to play made national headlines for all the wrong reasons. The act of playing continued to be seen as a healthy component of childhood, but the playground suffered an acute loss of purpose. The nineteenth-century children’s gymnasium and twentieth-century orthodox playground had both been inscribed with an unequivocal mission; to deliver childhood health through physical exercise, excitement and interaction with the natural environment, even if this was not always achieved in practice. In contrast, the postwar debate about the form and function of the playground had unsettled this mission. Planners, and briefly central government, felt that dedicated play spaces were still a worthwhile investment, but as the foundations of the planning profession were challenged, the comprehensive redevelopment schemes that had previously provided space for playground creation fell out of favour. An earlier sense that playgrounds could contribute to the future of society through the health of children was replaced by less grand aims, as public spaces more generally struggled to find a place in the new world of leisure and altered attitudes to local government. In any case, sociologists had shown that children did not really use playgrounds and as a result they were increasingly seen as something of an irrelevance. Despite this, playgrounds in parks and on housing estates endured, increasingly the preserve of equipment manufacturers, more about commerce than child development, health or happiness. At the same time, adventure playgrounds became less about providing a public space for play and more akin to a radical community centre; a DIY version of the orthodox playground, built by adults rather than children as originally intended.

From the 1970s, an increasingly widespread anxiety about safety meant that all playground typologies were reduced to spaces where risk needed to be managed, a problem to be solved rather than a space of possibility and potential. Interaction with curated forms of nature, once a key rationale in visions for the playground, disappeared almost entirely from the late-twentieth-century playground debates. The landscape architecture profession, previously advocates for nature in the playground, stepped away from play space design for several decades. Less of a priority in the face of organisational change and financial stringency, many existing playgrounds were seemingly abandoned by authorities. Paradoxically, this meant that a wilder version of nature began to reclaim at least some urban play spaces. Just as the principle and form of the playground waned, the NPFA also lost its reputation and function as a source of authority and expertise in relation to play space. At its inauguration in 1926 senior politicians had lined up to support the cause, but by the 1970s ministers and officials felt it was amateurish and doubted its technical advice.²⁰⁶ With central government no longer seeking to guide or fund play provision, the British Standard, with its traditional conception of the playground and corresponding emphasis on safety, became the mainstream source of advice on playground provision in the later twentieth century.

But perhaps this did not matter. One of the primary goals of interwar playground advocates had been to reduce the number of children being killed on the streets and by the 1970s this had largely been achieved. But despite campaigners’ expectations, it was not the playground that had protected children from the dangers of playing among motor vehicles. Instead, children were increasingly confined to the home, private garden or commercial play centre, while the car had replaced the child in public space. Ironically, by the 1980s critics blamed the playground for this loss of freedom, asserting that such spaces represented an unreasonable attempt to control children’s behaviour, irrelevant to children’s needs and described by children themselves as boring.²⁰⁷

The broader shift from social democracy to market liberalism undoubtedly affected the management, maintenance and perception of public play spaces during the 1980s and 1990s. But as a site that had long balanced public provision and commercial products, this case study of the children’s playground highlights the complex ways in which broader historical processes were played out on the ground. Despite a very brief interlude in the early twenty-first century, when government guidance and funding held promise for advocates of children’s inclusive access to the public realm, the playground story is still dominated by manufactured equipment. And while central government once more shows little interest in play space provision, many local authorities remain committed to the principle of the orthodox playground. Considerable sums are spent maintaining and improving existing play spaces, while local planning policies invariably require the provision of play space in new housing developments. However, as attitudes to childhood have changed, the public playground no longer acts as an extension of the home and a site for unsupervised play. Instead the twenty-first-century playground represents a rather confused response to children’s place in the city.

Notes

1. 1.  Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, ‘The Benighted Decade? Reassessing the 1970s’, in Reassessing 1970s Britain, ed. Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 14.

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

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

4. 4.  Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

5. 5.  For an overview of the place of play in wider thinking see, for example, J.S. Bruner, A. Jolly and K. Sylva, eds., Play: Its Role in Development and Evolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

6. 6.  Susan Harvey, ‘Play in Hospital’, Mental Health, 24.3 (1965), 121–3; Chiswick Polytechnic, ‘Hospital Play Specialist Course’, 1973, National Archives, MH 152/134; Joint Board of Clinical Nursing Studies, ‘Children’s Play Panel’, 1977, National Archives, DY 1/77; Department of Health and Social Security, Play for Children in Hospital, Circular HC(76)5 (London: HMSO, 1976).

7. 7.  Jane Bentley and Laura Freeman, ‘Play Space: The Design, Research and Development of a Play Area for Courtenay Special School, Stoke Lyne Hospital, Exmouth’, 1972, Museum of English Rural Life, Landscape Institute, Pamphlet 2870 Box 1/08.

8. 8.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Adventure Playgrounds at Farleigh Hospital’, 1971, National Archives, CB 1/63; ‘Farleigh Hospital’, British Medical Journal, 2 (1970), 58–9.

9. 9.  ‘Adventure Playground for Handicapped Children’, 1970, Wellcome Collection, Robina Addis Archives PP/ADD/K/2/2.

10. 10.  Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Families Living at High Density: A Study of Estates in Leeds, Liverpool and London, Design Bulletin, 21 (London: HMSO, 1970), p. 35.

11. 11.  ‘Children and Planning’, Town and Country Planning, 36.10–11 (1968), 430–512.

12. 12.  Milton Keynes Development Corporation, ‘Play in a New City’, Playing Fields, 34.1 (1973), 26–31.

13. 13.  Sam Lambert, ‘Housing, Laindon, Basildon, Essex: Open Space with Children’s Play Area’, 1967, RIBA Collections, AP Box 752; Frederick Gibberd, Harlow: The Story of a New Town (Stevenage: Harlow Development Corporation, 1980).

14. 14.  Ian Waites, ‘ “One Big Playground for Kids”: A Contextual Appraisal of Some 1970s Photographs of Children Hanging out on a Post-Second-World-War British Council Estate’, Childhood in the Past, 11.2 (2018), 114–28 (p. 126).

15. 15.  M. Hart, ‘Dual Use Education Playgrounds’, Parks and Recreation, 43.8 (1978), 40–41.

16. 16.  Timothy Cantell, Urban Wasteland: A Report on Land Lying Dormant in Cities, Towns and Villages in Britain (London: Civic Trust, 1977).

17. 17.  Alison Hall, ‘The Shelter Photographs 1968–1972: Nick Hedges, the Representation of the Homeless Child and a Photographic Archive’ (unpublished thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016); Nick Hedges, Larry Herman and Ron McCormick, ‘Problems in the City’ (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1975).

18. 18.  Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), pp. 91–101.

19. 19.  Reyner Banham and others, ‘Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom’, New Society, 20 March 1969, pp. 435–43.

20. 20.  ‘Planning Standards Criticised’, The Guardian, 17 March 1966, p. 2.

21. 21.  Sylvia Law, ‘Planning and the Future: A Commentary on the Debate’, The Town Planning Review, 48.4 (1977), 365–72.

22. 22.  Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘The Inner City Crisis and the End of Urban Modernism in 1970s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 578–98.

23. 23.  Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).

24. 24.  See, for example, the thirteen-volume series Human Behaviour and Environment: Advances in Theory and Research (New York: Plenum Press), edited from 1976 to 1994 by the social psychologist Irwin Altman, and the journal Children’s Environment Quarterly, 1984 to 1995.

25. 25.  Howard F. Andrews, ‘Home Range and Urban Knowledge of School-Age Children’, Environment and Behavior, 5.1 (1973), 73–86; Amos Rapoport, ‘The Home Range of the Child’, Ekistics, 45.272 (1978), 378.

26. 26.  Elizabeth Denby, ‘Rehousing from the Slum Dweller’s Point of View’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 44 (1936), 61–80; Elizabeth Darling, ‘What the Tenants Think of Kensal House: Experts’ Assumptions versus Inhabitants’ Realities in the Modern Home’, Journal of Architectural Education, 53.3 (2000), 167–77.

27. 27.  Vere Hole, ‘Social Effects of Planned Rehousing’, The Town Planning Review, 30.2 (1959), 161–73; Michael Young, ‘Kinship and Family in East London’, Man, 54.210 (1954), 137–9.

28. 28.  Margaret Willis, ‘High Blocks of Flats: A Social Survey’, 1955, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A Toddlers’ Playgrounds; John P. Macey, ‘Problems of Flat Life’, Official Architecture and Planning, 22.1 (1959), 35–8.

29. 29.  Margaret Willis, ‘Toddlers’ Playgrounds: An Enquiry into the Reactions of Mothers to the Experimental Play Equipment for Pre-School Aged Children’, 1959, London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A; Margaret Willis, ‘Sandpits: A Social Survey’, 1951, University of Edinburgh, PJM/LCC/D/6.

30. 30.  Ruth Lang, ‘The Sociologist within: Margaret Willis and the London County Council Architect’s Department’ (presented at the Architecture and Bureaucracy: Entangled Sites of Knowledge Production and Exchange, Brussels, 2019).

31. 31.  Joan Maizels, Two to Five in High Flats (London: Housing Centre, 1961), p. 1.

32. 32.  Vere Hole, Children’s Play on Housing Estates, National Building Studies Research Paper, 39 (London: HMSO, 1966).

33. 33.  Hole, Children’s Play on Housing Estates, p. 23.

34. 34.  Anthea Holme and Peter Massie, Children’s Play: A Study of Needs and Opportunities (London: Michael Joseph, 1970).

35. 35.  D.M. Fanning, ‘Families in Flats’, British Medical Journal, 4 (1967), 382–6; Pearl Jephcott, Homes in High Flats (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1971); John Newson and Elizabeth Newson, Four Years Old in an Urban Community (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968).

36. 36.  A.T. Blowers, ‘Council Housing: The Social Implications of Layout and Design in an Urban Fringe Estate’, The Town Planning Review, 41.1 (1970), 80–92.

37. 37.  Department of the Environment, Children at Play, Design Bulletin, 27 (London: HMSO, 1973).

38. 38.  Department of the Environment and Welsh Office, Children’s Playspace, Circular 79/72 and 165/72 (London: HMSO, 1972).

39. 39.  Ministry of Health, ‘Housing Manual’, 1944, National Archives, HLG 110/10; Ministry of Health, Housing Manual (London: HMSO, 1949).

40. 40.  Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Houses 1952: Second Supplement to the Housing Manual 1949 (London: HMSO, 1952); Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Houses 1953: Third Supplement to the Housing Manual 1949 (London: HMSO, 1953); Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Houses 1953, Circular 54/53 (London: HMSO, 1953).

41. 41.  Ministry of Housing and Local Government, ‘Housing Handbook’, 1957, National Archives, HLG 31/11.

42. 42.  Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Housing Standards, Costs and Subsidies, Circular 36/67 (London: HMSO, 1967).

43. 43.  House of Commons Debate, 2 February 1965, Vol.705, Col.873, Housing Estates (Children’s Play Spaces) (Hansard, 1965).

44. 44.  Evelyn Sharp, The Ministry of Housing and Local Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).

45. 45.  W.C. Ulrich to P.R.O.s, ‘NPFA Advice on Children’s Playgrounds’, 1968, National Archives, AT 54/24.

46. 46.  W.D. Abernethy, ‘Children’s Playgrounds’, 1968, p. 3, National Archives, AT 54/24.

47. 47.  ‘Play Space Standards: List of Equipment Taken from Wicksteed Catalogue’, 1971, National Archives, AT 54/24.

48. 48.  T.M. Heiser, ‘Note for File: Play Space’, 18 November 1971, National Archives, AT 54/24.

49. 49.  Mia Kellmer Pringle to J. Littlewood, ‘Standards’, n.d., p. 3, National Archives, AT 54/24.

50. 50.  J. Littlewood to T.M. Heiser, ‘Play Space’, 12 November 1971, National Archives, AT 54/24.

51. 51.  ‘Special Report: From Five to Fourteen’, Play Times, 6 (1978), 8–9.

52. 52.  Peter Smith, ‘Time to Give Play a New Priority’, Municipal Review, 44.519 (1973), 78–81 (p. 81).

53. 53.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘DoE Circular 79/72 Children’s Play Space: Note by the Children’s Play Officer’, 1972, National Archives, CB 1/61.

54. 54.  J.A. Goodburn to Mr Poore, ‘Children’s Play Space – NPFA Proposals’, 23 November 1972, National Archives, HLG 118/1897.

55. 55.  Clare Cooper Marcus and Robin C. Moore, ‘Children and Their Environments: A Review of Research 1955–1975’, Journal of Architectural Education, 29.4 (1976), 22–5.

56. 56.  Geoffrey Hayward, Marilyn Rothenberg and Robert R. Beasley, ‘Children’s Play and Urban Playground Environments: A Comparison of Traditional, Contemporary, and Adventure Playground Types’, Environment and Behavior, 6.2 (1974), 131–68.

57. 57.  Robin C. Moore and Donald Young, ‘Childhood Outdoors: Toward a Social Ecology of the Landscape’, in Children and the Environment, ed. Irwin Altman and Joachim F. Wohlwill, Human Behaviour and Environment: Advances in Theory and Research (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), III, 83–128 (p. 83).

58. 58.  Ivor Seeley, Outdoor Recreation and the Urban Environment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973).

59. 59.  Iona Opie and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. v.

60. 60.  Opie and Opie, Children’s Games, pp. 12 and 16.

61. 61.  Ian Taylor and Paul Walton, ‘Hey, Mister, This Is What We Really Do …’, in Vandalism, ed. Colin Ward (London: Architectural Press, 1973), pp. 91–5; Paul Thompson, ‘The War with Adults’, Oral History, 3.2 (1975), 29–38; Denis Wood, ‘Free the Children! Down with Playgrounds!’, McGill Journal of Education, 12.2 (1977), 227–42.

62. 62.  Colin Ward, ‘Adventure Playground’, Freedom, 6 September 1958, pp. 3–4; Colin Ward, ‘Adventure Playground: A Parable of Anarchy’, Anarchy, 7 (1961), 193–201; Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973).

63. 63.  Colin Ward, The Child in the Country (London: Bedford Square Press, 1990), p. 10.

64. 64.  Colin Ward, The Child in the City, 2nd edn (London: Bedford Square Press, 1990), p. 73.

65. 65.  Ward, The Child in the City, p. 179.

66. 66.  Simon Nicholson, ‘How NOT to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts’, Landscape Architecture, 62.1 (1971), 30–34.

67. 67.  Simon Nicholson, ‘The Theory of Loose Parts, an Important Principle for Design Methodology’, Studies in Design Education Craft & Technology, 4.2 (1972), 5–14 (p. 6).

68. 68.  ‘Ratepayers Petition Council for Children’s Playground’, Western Times, 24 April 1936, p. 7; ‘More Playgrounds, Please, Say Parents’, Playing Fields Journal, 12.1 (1952), 38.

69. 69.  ‘200 Children March on Town Hall’, The Guardian, 27 August 1963, p. 12.

70. 70.  ‘Children’s Protest March’, The Guardian, 13 August 1964, p. 14.

71. 71.  ‘200 Children “Lay Siege” to Town Hall’, The Guardian, 5 September 1968, p. 18.

72. 72.  Greater London Council, ‘Toddlers’ Playgrounds: Play Provision on GLC Housing Estates’, 1970, London Metropolitan Archive, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.

73. 73.  It’s Ours Whatever They Say, dir. by Jenny Barraclough, 1972, British Film Institute, BFI Player https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-its-ours-whatever-they-say-1972-online [accessed 12 July 2023]. The site is now known as Biddestone Park.

74. 74.  Do Something!, dir. by Ross Devenish, 1970, British Film Institute, BFI Player https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-do-something-1970-online [accessed 12 July 2023].

75. 75.  Pearl Jephcott, A Troubled Area: Notes on Notting Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 17.

76. 76.  Roger Mitton and Elizabeth Morrison, A Community Project in Notting Dale (London: Allen Lane, 1972); Jan O’Malley, The Politics of Community Action: A Decade of Struggle in Notting Hill (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1977); ‘Children March through Melee’, Kensington Post, 31 May 1968, p. 2; ‘Children March to Town Hall’, Kensington Post, 14 June 1968, p. 7.

77. 77.  The Battle for Powis Square, 1975, London Community Video Archive, CVA0019b https://lcva.gold.ac.uk/videos/5e5522d7c899b32870ce69d2 [accessed 12 July 2023].

78. 78.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Playground and Play Leadership Committee Minutes’, 1963, National Archives, CB 1/55.

79. 79.  ‘Drummond Retires’, Play Times, 6 (1978), 3; Nick Balmforth, ‘Drummond Abernethy OBE (1913–88)’, Journal of Playwork Practice, 1 (2014), 101–3.

80. 80.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Institute of Playleadership Minutes, 9 February’, 1970, National Archives, CB 1/64.

81. 81.  ‘Out of the Way: Our Gang’, New Society, 8 February 1973, pp. 305–6.

82. 82.  ‘Politics and Play: Some Comments by a Play Worker’, Play Times, 6 (1978), 2.

83. 83.  See, for example, Bob Hughes, Notes for Adventure Playworkers (London: Children and Youth Action Group, 1975) and subsequent university courses, academic journals and publications.

84. 84.  Nils Norman, An Architecture of Play: A Survey of London’s Adventure Playgrounds (London: Four Corners Books, 2003).

85. 85.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Report of Adventure Playground Conference’, 1956, National Archives, CB 1/67

86. 86.  Joe Benjamin, Grounds for Play: An Extension of In Search of Adventure (London: Bedford Square Press, 1974), p. 49.

87. 87.  John Barron Mays, Adventure in Play: The Story of the Rathbone Street Adventure Playground (Liverpool: Liverpool Council of Social Service, 1957).

88. 88.  Arvid Bengtsson, Adventure Playgrounds (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1972); Bernard McGovern, Playleadership (London: Faber and Faber, 1973); Jack Lambert and Jenny Pearson, Adventure Playgrounds: A Personal Account of a Playleader’s Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

89. 89.  Joe Benjamin, ‘Adventure for Industry’, New Society, 13 December 1962, p. 22; Joe Benjamin, In Search of Adventure (London: National Council of Social Service, 1966); Benjamin, Grounds for Play.

90. 90.  Krista Cowman, ‘ “The Atmosphere Is Permissive and Free”: The Gendering of Activism in the British Adventure Playgrounds Movement, ca. 1948–70’, Journal of Social History, 53.1 (2019), 218–41.

91. 91.  T.L. Cook, ‘Children’s Improvised Play Equipment’, Playing Fields Journal, 30.2 (1970), 33–8.

92. 92.  Paul Hogan, Playgrounds for Free (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974); M. Paul Friedberg, Do It Yourself Playgrounds (London: Architectural Press, 1975); David Raphael, ‘Grounds for Playful Renaissance’, Landscape Architecture, 65.3 (1975), 329–30; ‘DIY Playground Equipment’, Play Times, 15 (1979), 15.

93. 93.  Bob Hughes, Evolutionary Playwork, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 29.

94. 94.  J. Kennedy, ‘Playground Planning’, Park Administration, 32.8 (1967), 36–8.

95. 95.  ‘Come out to Play in Battersea Park’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 27.5 (1962), 65.

96. 96.  London County Council, ‘Play Parks’, 1963, London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/PUB/11/01/119.

97. 97.  Marjory Allen, Play Parks, 3rd edn (London: Housing Centre, 1964).

98. 98.  ‘Civic Trust Award’, Playing Fields Journal, 30.2 (1970), 46; ‘Children’s Playgrounds’, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, 165 (1973), xxxv.

99. 99.  Ian C. Laurie, ‘Public Parks and Spaces’, in Fifty Years of Landscape Design 1934–84, ed. Sheila Harvey and Stephen Rettig (London: The Landscape Press, 1985), pp. 63–78 (p. 73).

100. 100.  Anne R. Beer, ‘The External Environment of Housing Areas’, Built Environment, 8.1 (1982), 25–9; Michael Haxeltine, ‘A Check List for Play Spaces’, Parks and Recreation, 38.6 (1973), 25–9; Lance H. Wuellner, ‘Forty Guidelines for Playground Design’, Journal of Leisure Research, 11.1 (1979), 4–14.

101. 101.  L. Potts, ‘Children’s Playgrounds’, 21 May 1965, National Archives, Royal Parks, WORK 16/2299.

102. 102.  R.G. Emberson to Mr Barrow, ‘Regent’s Park – Gloucester Green Playground’, 25 September 1969, National Archives, Royal Parks, WORK 16/2299; J.W. Gorvin to R.G. Emberson, ‘Gloucester Green Children’s Playground’, 30 December 1970, National Archives, Royal Parks, WORK 16/2299.

103. 103.  Royal Parks, ‘General Layout Plan for Gloucester Green Children’s Playground’, 1969, National Archives, WORK 16/2299.

104. 104.  ‘International Landscape Awards – Gloucester Gate Playground by LUC’, Landezine, 2021 https://landezine-award.com/gloucester-gate-playground/ [accessed 12 July 2023]; ‘Donation Machines Next to Playground in Regent’s Park’, Camden New Journal, 26 March 2021.

105. 105.  ‘Amalgamations’, Park Administration, 31.11 (1966), 21; Philip Sayers, ‘Whence and Whither? From Parks Superintendents to Leisure Planners’, Park Administration, 31.12 (1966), 18–19.

106. 106.  National Playing Fields Association, ‘Annual Report and Accounts’, 1976, Museum of English Rural Life, SR CPRE C/1/73/2.

107. 107.  ‘A Guide to Inter-Departmental Responsibilities for Children’s Play’, 1975, National Archives, AT 60/30.

108. 108.  ‘Handwritten Note Regarding Guide to Inter-Departmental Responsibilities’, 1979, National Archives, AT 60/30.

109. 109.  Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘The Lost World of the British Leisure Centre’, History Workshop Journal, 88 (2019), 180–203.

110. 110.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘Wicksteed Park; 140 Acres of Fun and Freedom’, 1970, Wicksteed Park Archive, BRC-1793; Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘Hi! There’s a Big Smile for Everyone to Wear at Wicksteed Park’, n.d., Wicksteed Park Archive, BRC-1821.

111. 111.  Wicksteed Village Trust, ‘Wicksteed Park Nature Trail’, 1971, Wicksteed Park Archive, PRM-1883.

112. 112.  P.A. Management Consultants, ‘Organisation and Control’, 1967, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

113. 113.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘Design for Playing’, Playing Fields, 25.4 (1965), 25.

114. 114.  ‘Various Cuttings from Trade Journals and Newspapers’, 1966, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

115. 115.  ‘Six New Pieces of Playground Equipment’, Evening Telegraph, 29 July 1964, p. 8.

116. 116.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘The Gateway to Health and Happiness through Wicksteed Playground Equipment’, 1970, Wicksteed Park Archive, BRC-3010.

117. 117.  Charles Wicksteed & Co., ‘When You Buy Wicksteed Equipment, You Receive Wicksteed Service’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.8 (1960), 392; H. Hunt & Son, ‘Where It All Comes From’, Park Administration, 28.1 (1963), 1.

118. 118.  H. Hunt & Son, ‘Playground Equipment – the Verdict Is Yours’, Playing Fields, 22.3 (1962), 9.

119. 119.  ‘The Growing Variety in Playground Furniture’, The Municipal and Public Services Journal, 75 (1967), 1272–3.

120. 120.  ‘Triodetic Aluminium Playdome’, Park Administration, 31.12 (1966), 39.

121. 121.  Playstyle Ltd, ‘The Complete Playground: Playcubes’, Playing Fields, 34.1 (1973), 10.

122. 122.  Sutcliffe Engineering, ‘Seat for a Swing’, 1978, Espacenet Patent Search, GB1535728A.

123. 123.  ‘Catering for the Kids’, Parks and Recreation, 40.6 (1975), 64–83; ‘ “Intensive Use” Play Park’, Playing Fields, 37.1 (1976), 64–5.

124. 124.  ‘Conference Issue’, Parks and Recreation, 42.6 (1977).

125. 125.  SMP Landscapes, ‘Play Area Layout, Scheme B, Wicksteed Park Kettering’, 1979, Wicksteed Park Archive, uncatalogued.

126. 126.  ‘Children at Play’, Park Administration, 34.6 (1969), 18–29; ‘Keeping up to Date with Playground Equipment’, Parks and Recreation, 42.10 (1977), 29–40.

127. 127.  ‘Publications Available from the NPFA’, Playing Fields, 37.4 (1976), 49–50.

128. 128.  ‘Welcome to Your First Issue …’, Play Times, 1 (1977), 3.

129. 129.  Smith, ‘Time to Give Play a New Priority’, p. 78.

130. 130.  Newson and Newson, Four Years Old in an Urban Community.

131. 131.  Thomson, Lost Freedom, chapter 6.

132. 132.  Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

133. 133.  Neil Pemberton, ‘The Burnley Dog War: The Politics of Dog-Walking and the Battle over Public Parks in Post-Industrial Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 28.2 (2017), 239–67.

134. 134.  J.A. Marron and C.L. Senn, ‘Dog Feces: A Public Health and Environmental Problem’, Journal of Environmental Health, 37 (1974), 239–43; A.W. Woodruff, ‘Toxocariasis as a Public Health Problem’, Environmental Health, 84 (1976), 29–31.

135. 135.  O.A. Borg and A.W. Woodruff, ‘Prevalence of Infective Ova of Toxocara Species in Public Places’, British Medical Journal, 4 (1973), 470.

136. 136.  Woodruff, ‘Toxocariasis as a Public Health Problem’, p. 29.

137. 137.  ‘Pets Danger to Children Playing in Parks’, The Times, 23 November 1973, p. 5; ‘Why Do We Let Dogs Foul Our Streets?’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1976), 1486; ‘Girl Lost Sight of Eye from Disease Carried by Dogs’, The Times, 25 June 1976, p. 2; ‘Canine Menace’, The Sunday Times, 3 April 1977, p. 13; ‘Sting in the Tail: Man’s Best Friend Can Also Be One of Children’s Worst Enemies’, The Guardian, 8 February 1989, p. 27.

138. 138.  W.G. Ayres, ‘The Provision of Children’s Playgrounds by a Local Authority’, Journal of Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 19.4 (1954), 151–60 (p. 153).

139. 139.  ‘Accidents on Playgrounds: Local Authorities Discuss Liability Questions’, Playing Fields, 14.3 (1954), 26; ‘Play Chute Negligence Case’, Playing Fields, 17.1 (1957), 48–9.

140. 140.  L.A. Huddart, ‘Safety on the Playground’, Playing Fields, 13.1 (1953), 42–50.

141. 141.  ‘Developing the Rubberized Playground Surface’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 18.8 (1954), 342.

142. 142.  G.H. Harris, ‘All-Rubber Playgrounds Reduce Accident Risks’, Playing Fields, 14.4 (1954), 36–8.

143. 143.  London County Council, ‘Unsupervised Play Space on Housing Estates’, 1959, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.

144. 144.  London County Council, ‘Playgrounds – Equipment’, 1962, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.

145. 145.  London Standing Conference of Housing Estate Community Groups, ‘Newsletter’, 1960, London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/HG/HHM/12/S026A.

146. 146.  D.A. Routledge, R. Repetto-Wright and C.I. Howarth, ‘The Exposure of Young Children to Accident Risk as Pedestrians’, Ergonomics, 17.4 (1974), 457–80.

147. 147.  C. Illingworth and others, ‘200 Injuries Caused by Playground Equipment’, British Medical Journal, 4.5992 (1975), 332 (p. 334).

148. 148.  Richard Carr, ‘Playing Safe’, The Guardian, 6 October 1972, p. 11.

149. 149.  ‘Dangers for Children at Play’, The Times, 6 June 1973, p. 10.

150. 150.  ‘Park Safety Still Causing Concern’, Evening Telegraph, 26 February 1968, Wicksteed Park Archive.

151. 151.  Richard Carr, ‘Games of Chance’, The Guardian, 23 April 1976, p. 9.

152. 152.  ‘Playground Mishaps Injure 20,000’, The Guardian, 6 May 1976, p. 6.

153. 153.  ‘Peril of Playground Death Traps’, The Guardian, 12 June 1978, p. 3.

154. 154.  ‘Playground Probe Reveals Dangers in Swings and Slides’, The Sunday Times, 4 June 1972, p. 3.

155. 155.  British Standards Institution, B.S. 3178: Playground Equipment for Parks (London: British Standards Institution, 1959); ‘A British Standard for Children’s Playground Equipment for Parks (Unbound Press Release Inserted into Journal)’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 24.6 (1959), 1–2.

156. 156.  Design Council, Street Scene (London: Design Council, 1976).

157. 157.  R.E.K. Holmes to M. Albu, ‘Safety in Children’s Playgrounds’, 1977, National Archives, AT 54/159.

158. 158.  J. Littlewood to Mr. Oddy, ‘Play Space Standards’, 27 January 1978, National Archives, AT 54/159.

159. 159.  R.E.K. Holmes to Local Authority Chief Executives, ‘The Need for Improved Safety in Children’s Playgrounds’, 31 October 1978, National Archives, AT 54/159.

160. 160.  Fair Play for Children, ‘Press Statement’, 3 November 1978, National Archives, AT 54/159; Bob Satterthwaite to R.E.K. Holmes, ‘The Need for Improved Safety in Children’s Playgrounds’, 24 November 1978, National Archives, AT 54/159.

161. 161.  D.F. Hodson to R.E.K. Holmes, ‘Borough of Thamesdown Response to DoE Letter on Children’s Playgrounds’, 4 December 1978, p. 1, National Archives, AT 54/159.

162. 162.  R.E. Gamble to Mrs. Watson, ‘Playground Safety’, 7 August 1978, National Archives, AT 54/159.

163. 163.  Benjamin, Grounds for Play, p. 51.

164. 164.  Harry Shier, Adventure Playgrounds: An Introduction (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1984).

165. 165.  ‘Northumberland Road Adventure Playground and the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974’, Play Times, 14 (1979), 2.

166. 166.  ‘Health and Safety Act’, Play Times, 15 (1979), 2.

167. 167.  ‘Helping with Safety in Manchester’, Play Times, 16 (1979), 2.

168. 168.  Hughes, Evolutionary Playwork, p. 29.

169. 169.  National Playing Fields Association, Towards a Safer Adventure Playground (London: National Playing Fields Association, 1980).

170. 170.  ‘Factors in the Development of the Playing Field Movement’, Playing Fields Journal, 19.1 (1959), 25–6; ‘Reductions in Capital Expenditure from Public Funds’, Playing Fields, 25.4 (1965), 26.

171. 171.  Stewart Harding, ‘Towards a Renaissance in Urban Parks’, Cultural Trends, 9.35 (1999), 1–20.

172. 172.  Liz Greenhalgh and Ken Worpole, Park Life: Urban Parks and Social Renewal (London: Comedia/Demos, 1995); David Lambert, The Park Keeper (London: English Heritage, 2005).

173. 173.  Katy Layton-Jones and Robert Lee, Places of Health and Amusement: Liverpool’s Historic Parks and Gardens (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008).

174. 174.  B. Clouston, ‘Urban Parks in Crisis’, Landscape Design, 149, 1984, 12–14.

175. 175.  ‘Safety on Play Areas’, Play Times, 1 (1977), 11.

176. 176.  ‘The X-Certificate Playgrounds’, Play Times, 2 (1977), 6–7.

177. 177.  ‘Brick of the Month Award – Portsmouth’, Play Times, 14 (1979), 4; ‘Brick of the Month – Neath’, Play Times, 17 (1979), 13.

178. 178.  ‘Brick of the Month – Knowsley’, Play Times, 16 (1979), 16.

179. 179.  Alison Ravetz, Model Estate: Planned Housing at Quarry Hill, Leeds (London: Croom Helm, 1974), pp. 141–50.

180. 180.  Nigel Lawson to Michael Heseltine, ‘Housing Subsidy System and Project Control’, 7 July 1980, National Archives, HLG 118/1897; Mr. Stanley, House of Commons Debate, 19 January 1981, Vol.997, Col.66, Play Space (Hansard, 1981).

181. 181.  Dennis Barker, ‘Self-Help Is Child’s Play for Thatcher’, The Guardian, 12 July 1980, p. 3.

182. 182.  Ian Nicol to Mr Moss, ‘New Subsidy Arrangements: Playspace Provision’, 6 October 1980, National Archives, HLG 118/1897.

183. 183.  R.V.G. Clarke, ed., Tackling Vandalism Home Office Research Study, 47 (London: HMSO, 1978).

184. 184.  Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing (London: Hilary Shipman, 1985), p. 47.

185. 185.  Coleman, Utopia on Trial, p. 78.

186. 186.  Peter Dickens, ‘Utopia on Trial: A Response to Alice Coleman’s Comment’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 11 (1987), 118–20; Paul Spicker, ‘Poverty and Depressed Estates: A Critique of Utopia on Trial’, Housing Studies, 2.4 (1987), 283–92.

187. 187.  Christopher White, ‘Rampage of the Tiny Vandals, Aged 10’, Daily Mail, 30 April 1985, p. 1; ‘Vandals Leave £1.8bn Bill and a Trail of Fear’, The Sunday Times, 13 August 1989, p. 5; Geoffrey Levy, ‘Playground Monsters’, Daily Mail, 16 May 1990, p. 6; David Charter, ‘The War in the Playground’, The Times, 29 April 1997, p. 20.

188. 188.  ‘BSI Standards for Playground Equipment’, Parks and Recreation, 44.3 (1979), 30–31; ‘For Safety’s Sake: The New British Standard on Playground Equipment’, Play Times, 13 (1979), 11.

189. 189.  British Standards Institution, B.S. 5696: Play Equipment Intended for Permanent Installation Outdoors (London: British Standards Institution, 1979).

190. 190.  ‘A Surface Guide for Children’s Playgrounds and Multi-Purpose Play Areas’, Play Times, 5 (1977), 11.

191. 191.  Peter Jones, ‘Re-Thinking Corruption in Post-1950 Urban Britain: The Poulson Affair, 1972–1976’, Urban History, 39.3 (2012), 510–28.

192. 192.  L.B. Creasey, ‘A Visit to Wicksteed’s of Kettering’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 22 (1958), 632.

193. 193.  ‘A New Type of Play Area’, Park Administration, Horticulture and Recreation, 26.1 (1961), 59.

194. 194.  Guy Ortolano, Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 257.

195. 195.  John McKendrick, Anna Fielder and Michael Bradford, ‘Privatization of Collective Play Spaces in the UK’, Built Environment, 25.1 (1999), 44–57.

196. 196.  Susan Markwell and Neil Ravenscroft, The Public Provision of Children’s Playgrounds (Reading: University of Reading, 1996).

197. 197.  Peter Heseltine, The Children’s Playground: A Basic Guide (London: Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, 1997); Peter Heseltine, Regular Inspection of Children’s Playgrounds (London: Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, 1999).

198. 198.  John McKendrick, ‘Playgrounds in the Built Environment’, Built Environment, 25.1 (1999), 5–10.

199. 199.  National Playing Fields Association, Best Play: What Play Provision Should Do for Children (London: National Playing Fields Association, 2000).

200. 200.  Play England, Developing an Adventure Playground: The Essential Elements, Practice Briefing (London, 2009).

201. 201.  Tim Gill, No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007); Adrian Voce, Policy for Play: Responding to Children’s Forgotten Right (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2015).

202. 202.  Welsh Assembly Government, Play Policy (Cardiff: Welsh Assembly, 2002); The Scottish Government, Play Strategy for Scotland: Our Vision (Edinburgh: Scottish Government, 2013).

203. 203.  Aileen Shackell and others, Design for Play: A Guide to Creating Successful Play Spaces (London: Department for Children, Schools and Families and Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2008).

204. 204.  Richard Adams, ‘Hundreds of Children’s Playgrounds in England Close Due to Cuts’, The Guardian, 13 April 2017; Harriet Grant, Aamna Mohdin and Chris Michael, ‘ “Outrageous” and “Disgusting”: Segregated Playground Sparks Fury’, The Guardian, 26 March 2019.

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

206. 206.  ‘Future Role of the NPFA’, 1970, National Archives, HLG 120/1614.

207. 207.  Robin C. Moore, ‘Playgrounds at the Crossroads’, in Public Places and Spaces, ed. Irwin Altman and Ervin H. Zube (Boston, MA: Springer, 1989), pp. 83–120.