We might think that the playground is the natural place for children to play: swings, slides and roundabouts are widely seen as the essential features of a public play space for children. Nonetheless, the present-day playground is the culmination of over 150 years of debate about where and how children and young people should spend their time when not at school or work. For much of the last century, the principle that children need dedicated places to play has been broadly accepted, but the physical form of the ideal playground has changed a number of times in response to changing social and environmental anxieties.
Some of the earliest dedicated public spaces for children appeared in the mid-nineteenth century. In Britain, the first public parks in Manchester and Salford included gymnastic equipment for children, providing space for structured, health-promoting exercise. However, children were hardly central to the design of these green spaces. Both the girl’s playground, which provided space for skipping and shuttlecock, and the boy’s playground, with climbing ladders, bars and ropes, were hidden in the shrubbery on the boundary of the park, to prevent them from spoiling the view of the picturesque landscape or interrupting a genteel stroll. In other cities, mid-nineteenth century parks rarely included specific facilities for children. Even Charles Dicken’s involvement in a mid-century Playground Society in London was not enough to ensure its success and it only lasted a few years before disbanding.
But by the late-nineteenth century, things were starting to change. The Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard and Playground Association had considerable success in promoting and creating children’s gymnasiums. Working in London from the 1880s, it created an increasing number of children’s gardens, equipped with gymnastic apparatus, in an effort to encourage children to take part in physical exercise and to interact with plants and flowers. However, its activities were motivated less by an innate concern for children’s needs and more by the perceived impact of urban life on the strength and vigour of the working classes. It was thought that providing facilities for physical exercise would ensure that poor children developed into strong adults who could serve the British Empire as workers at home and soldiers abroad. Such spaces also embedded conservative social values into the fabric of the city, segregating playgrounds by age and gender and locating them in the poorest neighbourhoods.
The emphasis on structured and segregated playground provision was, however, challenged from the early twentieth century, most notably by the philanthropic industrialist Charles Wicksteed. Inspired by radical town planning and progressive education, Wicksteed created a garden suburb with a public park and children’s playground at its centre in his hometown of Kettering. He adopted a permissive approach to park management and created a large playground open to girls and boys, children and adults.
Wicksteed’s vision was for a play space that promoted freedom, playfulness and pleasure, and he designed and installed play equipment inspired by the thrills and names of amusement park rides. The popularity of the Jazz Swing and Joy Wheel, to park administrators and children, meant that similar playful equipment was soon installed in other green spaces and housing estates across the country. The number of equipped playgrounds increased significantly in the interwar years, as part of wider efforts to provide new public leisure facilities and to address the increasing number of children being killed and injured by motor vehicles while playing in the street. By the late 1930s Wicksteed’s company had supplied over four thousand playgrounds, while competitors also promoted slides, roundabouts and, most copiously, swings. Large and small parks would often include forty or fifty swings, leaving little room for plants and trees or alternative forms of children’s play.
Interwar criticism of this new approach – and the domination of manufactured equipment in particular – paved the way for alternative visions for play space design that sought to reclaim the playground as a space for childhood self-expression and interaction with nature. Experimental ‘junk’ and ‘adventure’ playgrounds, as well as debate among child activists, landscape designers and History Workshop participants, were part of the battle for ideas that marked mid-twentieth century playground discourse.
However, it is hard not to agree with the feeling of Iona and Peter Opie, the noted folklorists who spent six decades observing, recording and publishing the day-to-day experiences of children from the 1950s to the 1990s. The Opies saw the playground as something of an irrelevance to children’s play, finding that children were perfectly able to organise their own playful activities and adapt to a range of environments. That’s not to say that playgrounds weren’t used by children, but rather that they were just one of many places where children spent their time in the city. For the sociologist Vere Hole, writing about high density housing estates in 1966, the use of playgrounds by children displayed similar patterns of behaviour to adult use of the local pub – a fun place to socialise with friends but far from the only space where this took place.
This ambiguity about the purpose of the playground, and its value to children, continues to inform present-day debate about the provision of public places for play in art exhibitions and the media. On the one hand, if children have long been able to develop their own playful activities wherever they happen to be, then why do we provide specific places where play is meant to take place? Alternatively, as cities have become increasingly hostile to children, particularly as automotive movement has been prioritised over play and other communal street-based activities, then the designation of specific child-focused sites for play perhaps represents an important way to signify that children and young people are valued members of society. However, if that is the case, then we need to revisit our vision of the ideal playground, as it continues to be dominated by the products that Charles Wicksteed developed one hundred years ago.
I feel like what this is missing is the place of adults. Young children aren’t allowed out on their own very much so the playground is where adults can take them to play outside knowing other children will be there and the area will be safe.
In a campsite in France this summer there was a double sided slide- on one side a normal one, on the other it wasn’t a slide at all- but two stainless steel shiney bars going from top to bottom – i.e. like a normal slide with the sliding surface taken away and just a smooth bar left on the side. As I sat reading over the space of an hour nearby I noticed that the use of both sides was about 90% bar side 10% ordinary slide side. The kids basically had to climb awkwardly up and down it, contorting, balancing, judging how to get to up or down it. The other ordinary side requires none of this- just sit and gravity does the work. But the kids wanted to do the work themselves. The ‘thrill’ of the ride was minimal for those 8-10 year olds.
What makes anybody think this society really values children at all, beyond empty, performative virtue lip service? Public services and the money required for them have dried up, gone to privatized, for profit, corporate predation. Play isn’t valued, kids are routinized in school to compete with one another in a win-lose game that leaves many consigned to the underclass, and they are regularly offered up for sacrifice to a gun culture rationalized by monsters. And the national worship of the military leads many to further sacrifice in support of an American empire which consumes everything in its path, has turned its citizens into cyphers, and invites the wrath of its victims. It’s perfectly clear that materialism, profit, and greed are valued more than children. So then of course a culture fixated on death, saying it’s pro-life, needs unwanted fetuses to feed the machine.
Very much enjoyed reading this post, Jon, and shall look out your other work. But I’m also struck in reading about the 1950s I’m thinking about my own childhood playing out constantly in the street how that was a remnant of an earlier street culture which was already being seen as no longer respectable. Getting children off the street was also a kind of class initiative. Indeed in a number of autobiographies children from better off homes are always being warned against playing with the scruffy children in the street. Anyway, much more to say but thanks very much for this. And yes, when we went to the rec we carried on inventing our own games as well as using the equipment.
I remember the playground that I visited as a child and even more clearly the ones I visited with my own child years later. I submit that if researchers asked children and/or their parents if they like going to playgrounds they would get a clear positive response. A neighborhood playground will draw children and parents from all sides and set them to interacting. Parents being generally concerned for their children’s welfare keep an eye on the playground activities, often alerting one another to potential problems or locating a hidden child. The positive impact on the local social fabric seems so obvious it is painful to note the lack of emphasis in this article, and they are fun, really fun.
Used to work on adventure playgrounds in 70s-80s. The change from a space where kids could socialise build their own structures to telling us what more robust structures they wanted us to build and now to see parks where individual children mount a specific and limited metal structure not designed for social interaction but for highly supervised “play” in subsequent years was dispiriting
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and found this article because I suddenly recalled “Wicksteed” and “Kettering” from my chilhood experiences at the ‘rec’.. Whilst the merits or limitations of particular equipment may be questioned, the provision of a free-to-access public space fitted out primarily for children was, apart from the school, valuable in its validation of children as members of wider civic society. I’d suggest that all children who lived near a ‘rec’ benefitted from it, both in solitary and group play: it frequently helped to develop their autonomous identity in the absence of parental (or other adult) intervention or oversight.