When you picture a playground, what do you see? Perhaps a space with slides, swings, climbing bars, and merry-go-rounds, with asphalt underneath, or maybe a bouncier, colourful surface that undulates. If it’s a bigger playground, it might have wooden huts on stilts with wood chips underneath – even a zip line, if you’re lucky.
Here’s what it won’t have: kids setting fires, sawing wood, cooking food, writing operettas, or constructing 50ft towers. It won’t look like a literal bomb site or junk yard. And it probably won’t have kids aged two to twenty.
But during the 20th century, all of these things happened. The post-war period saw “junk playgrounds” flourish as a kind of reparations for the trauma of war. They gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and in doing so, inoculate them against fascism. For a while it seemed like they were the future. Not any more.
I learned all of this from Ben Highmore‘s excellent Playgrounds: The Experimental Years, which he also discussed on the Radio 4 Thinking Allowed podcast. This post is a much-expanded version of a series of posts I made on Mastodon and Bluesky.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, western playgrounds were a contradictory mix of military academies to develop physical and bodily skills, and progressive spaces for collective effort and child-centred learning. Compared to “orthodox” playgrounds, they were designed for people of all ages including adults; they had indoor spaces for reading, sewing, carpentry, etc; and there was space for team-based games and marching.
Most importantly, they were supervised. As Luther H. Gulick, the first president of the Playground Association of America explained:
Real freedom is impossible without protection. An unsupervised playground is nominally free; in reality it is controlled by the strongest and most vicious element in the crowd. It is a dangerous place for girls and small children; it can be converted from a direct source of evil to a source of benefit by having some one put in authority, who will see that the ground is used for the purpose for which it was intended – that the older boys have their place and the smaller theirs, and that each is free within its own limits.
No bullies allowed, in other words. These supervisors would later be known as playleaders and playworkers, and were meant to be less of a teacher than a watcher – someone who would allow children to play with fire. Gulick noted:
Playing with fire is a little dangerous, and yet children cannot come to know fire except by playing with it in the same way as they have learned to know other things through play.
The idea was to encourage children to experiment, and thus to learn.
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