Conclusion

The children’s playground is an everyday feature of British towns and cities. Often seen as the obvious place for children to play, these apparently simple spaces of pleasure are the tangible expression of significant and interconnected historical themes. In exploring playground form and function over the course of two centuries, Designed for Play has provided important new perspectives on the histories and geographies of childhood, nature, welfare, philanthropy, education and the urban environment. The book has tracked the ideas and practical actions that have sought to channel childhood playfulness, exposing an enduring tension between a universal urge to play and adult attempts to create public spaces where this should take place. A detailed analysis of dispersed archive material has provided a more nuanced and multilayered understanding of the playground, the key actors involved in its development and its social, political and environmental rationales. In plotting these processes for the first time, the book has shown how a diverse set of assumptions about human wellbeing – pursued by state, philanthropic, commercial and voluntary actors – has had a lasting influence on the material form of the playground and the politics of urban space. But the evolution of the playground has been far from linear or straightforward. At times a public plantation focused on nurturing young minds and muscles, the playground has also been associated more disparagingly with monstrous gangs of troublesome children.

As such, the fortunes of the playground have swung back and forth, much like the motion of a swing, from marginal obscurity to popular ubiquity and back again, towards a place of somewhat aimless eccentricity. Similarly, many of the wider themes that have shaped playground discourse and practice have varied in importance over time, often coming full circle, much like the rotation of a roundabout. In particular, assumptions about the restorative potential of nature have consistently orbited the playground ideal. At times passing close by, nature provided a central justification for the children’s garden gymnasiums of the 1890s and inspiration for landscape architects in the 1960s. At other times, nature’s trajectory took it to the margins of the playground, and it was barely visible in the 1930s orthodox playground or in anxieties about safety in the late twentieth century. In contrast, conceptions of the playground as a place of health have tracked less obviously onto the cyclical movements of manufactured equipment. Instead, dedicated public spaces for children were consistently positioned as sites of salubrious safety from the mid-nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century. Initially, energetic exercise was understood as a vector for physical strength and vigour, while progressive education would later help to shape the playground as a site of emotional health and cognitive development. In practice, playgrounds had long posed risks to children and by the 1970s these threats were increasingly seen to outweigh the benefits that dedicated play spaces could provide. Technology, particularly in the form of manufactured equipment, has provided a lasting influence on the material form of public playgrounds, despite highly critical and enduring condemnation. Initially expressed in the 1930s but seen most notably in mid-twentieth-century anarchic thought and radical experiments in adventurous play, this criticism continues to reverberate today.

For the first time, the chapters in this book have plotted the interaction of these processes in more detail over time and space, positioning the children’s playground as a site where social, political and environmental values have long been played out and contested. From the sporadic attempts to create dedicated public spaces for children in the mid-nineteenth century to the work of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association in the 1890s, it has explored the links between conceptions of the city, nature, childhood and health. Charles Dickens’s unsuccessful Playground Society showed how the provision of dedicated spaces for play would require a diverse set of ideas, values and assumptions to coalesce before material change could take place. Later in the nineteenth century, social and political anxiety about both cities and childhood would combine with voluntary action and philanthropy to create smaller, more local public gardens with a focus on energetic physical exercise and interaction with nature. However, while the principle of creating dedicated places for children’s recreation became more firmly established at the turn of the century, the form of such spaces was far from settled.

In the early twentieth century, one vision for the playground increasingly acquired ‘orthodox’ status, based in part on the ideas, products and playground promoted by Charles Wicksteed. Inspired by amusement park rides and progressive attitudes to childhood and education, the playground was reimagined as a site of excitement for all, and increasingly featured in visions for modern, planned urban environments. As municipal officials, architects and planners delivered new city spaces, the number of public playgrounds increased significantly during the interwar years, in part a response to the active campaigning of the National Playing Fields Association. At the same time, the swing and other manufactured equipment came to dominate playground spaces, to the exclusion of naturalistic features. The principle of the playground indirectly benefited from the wider mid-century welfare consensus and its emphasis on the wellbeing of children and their families. At the same time, this focus also provided the foundations for an increasingly critical reception for the orthodox playground, as a diverse range of activists and practitioners emphasised children’s self-determination, adventure and creativity.

During the 1970s, a wave of sociological research, anarchic thought, community activism and wider attempts to promote child liberation all challenged conventional playground thought. A backlash against these wider values from the 1980s saw anxieties about pets and paedophiles contribute to an assessment of the playground as a problem to be solved, rather than a place of promise and potential. While a belief in the playground as a space of safety had long concealed possible threats, when wider social discourse created an atmosphere in which these threats seemed increasingly insurmountable, perceptions of the playground shifted among park managers, politicians and the public. Exacerbated by cuts to local authority budgets, from the late 1970s through to the early twenty-first century, such spaces were increasingly perceived as spaces of danger and decay, inadvertently supporting radical attempts to undermine the case for playground provision altogether.

Designed for Play has identified the main actors involved in shaping playground provision and explored their assumptions and motivations over the course of two centuries. In doing so, the book has shown how the term ‘playground’ has proven sufficiently flexible to accommodate many revisions to its meaning, while largely retaining its core association with spaces of purposeful and healthy recreation. The narration of this story has placed children more centrally in our understanding of the nineteenth-century public parks movement, initially making sense of their absence from such spaces, before examining their increasing presence from the 1880s onwards. Assumptions about urban nature were significant in such processes, as were changing attitudes towards park-based recreation, notably the shift in emphasis from genteel perambulation to more energetic exercise. Spaces for play have long embodied and reflected wider social norms, including segregation by gender in the late nineteenth century, an emphasis on popular leisure activities in the interwar period, and the ongoing place of philanthropy and voluntary action in shaping both public life and public space.

The case study of Charles Wicksteed, his company and the playground he created provides a comprehensive account of this highly significant playground advocate and charts his enduring influence on international visions for the playground. He combined progressive notions of childhood, industrial philanthropy and a direct connection to the ideas of other garden city advocates, cementing the playground’s place in modern planned visions for housing and the wider urban landscape. The book has built upon existing scholarship that charts the transatlantic exchange of park ideals, but also goes further to highlight the wider twentieth-century connections with playground thought in Europe too. In doing so, it acknowledges international influences on playground provision, but also examines the specific social and cultural factors that shaped public play space provision in Britain. As a result, it extends existing scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century adventure playground by moving beyond the boundary fence to assess the influence of such spaces on wider playground provision.

The playground has served as a valuable site for exploring wider historical themes and their previously unacknowledged influence on the built form of towns and cities. Designed for Play has shown how the radical visionaries who reimagined and redefined spaces for play in the city were often women. From Fanny Wilkinson and Mabel Jane Reaney to Marjory Allen, Mary Mitchell and Margaret Willis, the book has drawn attention to a succession of pioneering advocates and designers who challenged established ideas about children’s place in the urban environment and shaped alternative spaces for play. Given the enduring influence of their ideas and actions, a more detailed and critical engagement with their work could usefully inform present-day calls to create more just and equitable cities.

Beyond the work of key individuals, the story of the playground provides a unique example of the long evolution of welfare interventions in the public realm and the varied outcomes they were expected to achieve. Importantly, the history of the playground demonstrates how a diverse set of actors across the philanthropic, voluntary, state and commercial sectors all sought to reimagine and reshape the urban landscape to improve childhood outcomes. Tentative efforts to introduce playgrounds as a route to childhood health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century expanded considerably in the interwar and postwar years. The playground ideal was flexible enough to form part of both municipal leisure provision in the 1920s and 1930s and mid-century social democratic welfare landscapes too. As a result, playground provision expanded substantially over the course of the twentieth century; in Edinburgh, for example, the city’s 15 children’s gymnasiums in 1914 had increased to over 160 children’s playgrounds by the early twenty-first century. At the same time, the enduring involvement of commercial equipment suppliers in shaping the form and function of public spaces for play undoubtedly complicates the place of the playground in narratives of a later twentieth-century shift towards market liberalism.

This new understanding of the history of the playground raises important questions for researchers, policymakers and practitioners. In adopting a long chronology, Designed for Play has focused less on the detailed stories of individual sites and the local political and cultural values that shaped their design and use. Where source materials have allowed, the ways in which children adapted and contested adult expectations of the playground have been stressed. Although sensitive to addressing children’s position as ‘academic orphans’ in the field, uncovering their hidden voices has barely been possible and it undoubtedly warrants further exploration. In addition, further research into the global spread of the orthodox playground ideal in the interwar period would usefully inform discussion about Britain’s relationship with its colonial past. Designed for Play has shown how play spaces in Britain were influenced by international ideas from Europe and north America and how the orthodox playground ideal and items of equipment were exported by Wicksteed & Co. However, there remains considerable scope to explore the themes uncovered here in other places around the world and archival material in Cape Town and Johannesburg remains ripe for investigation. In twenty-first-century Britain, the politics of the playground are far from settled. The Make Space for Girls campaign and Playing Out movement are rightly challenging male-dominated, car-centric approaches to public space design. Pay-to-play playgrounds in Windsor Great Park and Alnwick Gardens, with their £16 per child entry fees, raise significant questions about who can afford to access spaces for play. For policymakers and campaigners, the historical context outlined here encourages deeper reflection on the values and assumptions that shape children’s place in public space and provides a new starting point for conversations with their communities, political representatives and funders.

Designed for Play has shown that the children’s playground has long been a site where adult anxiety about public childhood has been played out. The form and function of such spaces have changed over time in response to shifting ideas about the benefits of interaction with nature, energetic exercise, entertainment and adventure. Enthusiasm for the principle of the playground has similarly fluctuated in response to changing conceptions of childhood, philanthropic funding, notions of safety and the power of utopian visions for better cities. Present-day playgrounds, along with their advocates and detractors, continue to embody and question the significance of these themes. Similarly, seemingly novel calls to re-wild childhood, reintroduce nature into cities and re-energise children through physical exercise are not new concerns; they too have a long and significant history. Situating twenty-first-century efforts to create more equitable and inclusive urban environments within the historical context outlined here will contribute to more constructive dialogue about children’s place in the city.