Room for the Imagination

Playgrounds. The Experimental Years, Ben Highmore (Reaktion Books)

I’d always assumed that adventure playgrounds were part of hippy idealism, allowing kids the freedom to construct their own makeshift walkways, ramps, treehouses and climbing frames and then take them apart to make something new. Even in 1980, when I worked at a community centre in Coventry, adventure playgrounds were de rigeur, although the timber, especially any new railway sleepers bought in as further building materials, was prone to disappearing and turning up later as garden fence posts or parts of sheds.

As Ben Highmore explains though, in this intriguing and readable book, experimental playgrounds – indeed the general ideas of spaces for play – go back further. Post World War 2 numerous bomb sites would serve as makeshift playgrounds, along with the streets that had always done so, sometimes designated Play Streets and banning vehicles during the day. The rise of the car, however, not to mention new ideas about childhood and being a teenager, would change all this.

Playground equipment had of course already been invented. Seesaws and versions of gym equipment could be installed in designated spaces or parks along with the obligatory painted lines and goals for football pitches (or basketball hoops in the States). This cost money whereas junk playgrounds which turned into adventure playgrounds later on, did not. In theory anyway. However, even back in the 70s, adults started worrying about regulating and supervising play, especially if it involved splinters, nails, fires or ramshackle dens. Although self-guided play was great in theory, according to psychologists, sociologists, parents and teachers, kids could not be trusted.

I don’t remember playworkers at Holland Park adventure playground, my nearest one, only the thrill of hurtling down huge ramps in rickety go-carts, swinging on fraying ropes or climbing nets tentatively attached to their supports with six-inch nails. I remember mud, dirt, dust and building dams in the rain; all very different to the slide, swings, roundabout and witch’s hat on the square of tarmac in a corner of the park at the end of my road. Maybe any staff just kept their heads down or I wasn’t paying attention?

The same concerned and interfering individuals, local societies and community groups would also worry about ‘life skills’. So some playground sheds and youth group halls would run sessions about carpentry or bricklaying, whilst councils often put areas of mini road systems in their parks to teach the young the realities of adult life. (These would later be commandeered by those preparing kids for their cycling proficiency test.)

However, observing how children used adventure playgrounds and council playgrounds did start to inform playground design and architecture, especially on new estates or in so-called ‘deprived areas’, where playworkers would be parachuted in for rescue attempts to control and tame young people and tempt them away from their predicted lives of poverty and crime. Specialist playground designers would be called upon to help humanise existing or planned estates, sometimes adapting what was already built, sometimes to cater for new crazes such as roller skating or skateboarding.

Fixed, unchanging and ‘safe’ playgrounds are still the norm now, complete with soft safety material under swings and overly-sanitized thrills. The witch’s hat is no more (too many broken or amputated fingers from climbing up to explore the greasy gap between the teetering cap and pole) and slides are shorter and no longer have cabins at the top that can be climbed on, but playgrounds that do not insist on single use and specific forms still exist: odd-shaped climbing frames of rope and wood, slopes and tunnels, different types of swings, areas that can be commandeered as group dens, offices or headquarters. Playgrounds that offer room for the imagination.

Recently, there has even been a move back towards offering children scrap materials to play with, with contracted firms delivering, replenishing and renewing the contents of shipping containers to schools. Tyres, ropes, nets, blocks of wood etc. are available to pupils, with the idea that children will explore and innovate each lunchtime through participatory, hands-on self-guided play. In a similar manner scrap stores provide materials for craft and art activities, mostly sourced as industrial byproducts, scraps or waste material.

This history is succinct and wide-ranging, with several specific case studies, and plenty of photographs. In fact it’s so wide-ranging, with quick writerly visits to Europe and the USA, that it sometimes loses focus on its subject matter, although Highmore reins it in at the end, with a final chapter that uses what the preceding 200 pages has discussed as evidence that we should consider the qualities of play required in today’s society. Its title is ‘Repairing the Future’ because, as Highmore sees it, ‘If a playground can be a place of youthful thriving, then it must take on the damage called by social structures’.

Play spaces can be regarded as ‘A third space – neither home nor school – shaped by experimentalism, equality and self-organization’, and although that ‘won’t cure the damage of climate catastrophe, nor the injustices of the way that our world is currently organized and experienced’, it may ‘make future generations better able to deal with what is on the horizon, to create support structures that we cannot yet dream of, to improvise and innovate in ways that will be essential to survival.’ Highmore is optimistically adamant that we need to reconsider play and its relationship to growing up, and Playgrounds provides plenty of evidence and discussion to back up his argument. He even triumphantly notes that there is a growing number of new adventure playgrounds in existence.

 

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Rupert Loydell

 

 

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2 Responses to Room for the Imagination

    1. Enjoy reading this piece Rupert 🙂👍

      Comment by Malcolm on 27 October, 2024 at 7:47 am
    2. Thanks Malcolm!

      Comment by Rupert on 28 October, 2024 at 11:16 pm

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