Dr Jon Winder examines children’s playgrounds

· Wooden slides in Wicksteed Park, Wicksteed Park Archives, c.1920, uncatalogued.

Charles Dickens and the Playground and Recreation Society

In 1858, the author Charles Dickens helped to launch the Playground and Recreation Society in London. Dickens hoped that the organisation would create dedicated play spaces for poor children, away from the temptations and evils he felt they encountered in the street. A year later, parliament passed the Recreation Grounds Act which permitted the creation of playgrounds for children. This combination of high-profile advocacy and enabling legislation may seem like the obvious starting point for a process that has resulted in more than 26,000 children’s playgrounds across the UK today. However, by 1860 the Society had unceremoniously folded and few public spaces included dedicated recreation grounds for children.

From this inauspicious start, Designed for Play charts the rationale, form and function of children’s playgrounds over the course of almost two centuries. The playground has seldom been explicitly endorsed by central government and as a result the book draws on the dispersed records of philanthropic, municipal, commercial and voluntary actors, spread across local and national government archives, the Landscape Institute records at MERL, the British Library and Wicksteed Park Archives. Together this material highlights the convoluted journey of the playground, from obscurity to popular ubiquity and back towards a place of somewhat aimless eccentricity in the twenty first century.

In the 1890s, the philanthropic reformers created children’s garden gymnasiums, segregated by age and gender, in the poorer districts of London. By the 1920s, manufacturers such as Charles Wicksteed & Co. were selling metal swings and slides to municipal authorities who were intent on facilitating children’s carefree and energetic play in parks and on housing estates. Across the middle of the twentieth century, the National Playing Fields Association did much to promote standardised playground provision and actively campaigned against children playing in the street. At the same time, architects and landscape designers played with the ideal playground form as they created the architecture of the welfare state. From the 1970s, sociological research, anarchic thinking and the adventure playground movement all challenged conventional playground thought and practice. By the turn of the century, playgrounds were increasingly presented as a problem to be solved, often sites of danger and decay rather than childhood possibility.

Pioneering women who reimagined and redefined spaces for play

Throughout this story, the term ‘playground’ has proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate changing attitudes to childhood and diverse play space forms. At the same time, such spaces have proved to be a useful site for exploring the wider historical themes and their impact on the built environment. From landscape architect Fanny Wilkinson and psychologist Mabel Jane Reany to campaigner Marjory Allen and sociologist Margaret Willis, the playground has been associated with pioneering women who reimagined and redefined spaces for play. The long history of the playground also provides a unique example of shifting welfare interventions in the urban environment. A diverse set of actors across philanthropic, voluntary, municipal and commercial arenas have all sought to influence the built form of cities, ostensibly to shape children’s health and wellbeing, while also seeking to address urban and imperial anxieties, generate profit and gain political capital.

Politics of the playground continue unresolved into 21C

In twenty first century Britain, the politics of the playground are far from settled. High profile campaigns, including Make Space for Girls and Playing Out, continue to contest historical assumptions about children’s place in the city, challenging car-centric, male-dominated public space design. Designed for Play provides vital historical context for present day policymakers and campaigners, encouraging deeper reflection on the assumptions and values that shape children’s place in public space. It also shows that seemingly novel calls for the reintroduction of nature into cities and the creation of wilder childhoods have a long and complex history.