This pro-risk view is shared by landscape architect Jennette Emery-Wallis, designer of the award-winning Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens and the equally acclaimed Tumbling Bay in Olympic Park, designed with Erect Architecture. Photograph: Andrea Jones/Garden Exposures Photo Library ‘Make it your own’ … teepees and a pirate ship in Diana’s memorial playground. When playgrounds become really safe and boring, kids climb on top of bus shelters instead because it’s more fun.” “Climbing frames were getting smaller, roundabouts and swings were going more slowly and being designed with more restrictive movement. “The more objects that children can actually manipulate themselves, the more enjoyment they will get out of a playground.”īutler was concerned that playgrounds had become increasingly risk-averse, as a result of the claims culture of the 1990s and 2000s. “Ideas about play haven’t changed much since then,” says Nicola Butler, chair of Play England, who co-authored the charity’s Design for Play guidance in 2008 – and then discovered that Allen had written a pamphlet of the same name in 1962, outlining almost identical principles.
The very first, at Lollard Street in London’s Kennington, is still going strong.
She helped set up 17 trial junk playgrounds in the UK, equipped with makeshift treehouses, walkways, nets, ropes and rubber tyres.
His skrammellegepladsen, or junk playgrounds, were visions of creative chaos, made mostly by children themselves.
And above all, it’s a place where they can meet their friends, where they can make new friends, in a very free and permissive atmosphere.”Īllen had been inspired by a trip to Denmark in 1945, where she saw the work of architect Carl Theodor Sørensen. They can take really dangerous risks and overcome them. “They can create their own houses, their own climbing frames. “Here, they can play with very dangerous tools,” she says proudly, in a cut-glass accent.
“They’re never given any freedom to explore and experiment and find out what the world is all about.” The camera then cuts to kids rampaging around one of her wild playgrounds, full of scavenged junk and firepits. “Children are needlessly overprotected by adults,” she says in a film from the 1970s. These were later rebranded as adventure playgrounds to make the idea more palatable to nervous parents and local authorities. There’s an air of anarchy, one that children’s rights activist Lady Marjory Allen encouraged in her promotion of junk playgrounds around the same time. Their striking black-and-white images depict a bygone era of kids playing outside, using whatever scraps they could find, very much lords of the city with their catapults and toy guns at the ready. This sense of owning the streets is also captured in the postwar photography of Bert Hardy, Nigel Henderson and Shirley Baker, displayed alongside Van Eyck’s designs. When playgrounds become really safe and boring, kids climb on top of bus shelters instead Van Eyck’s work was lauded by architects and psychologists, but the idea of kids freed from fences set alarm bells ringing among the health and safety lobby in more conservative parts of the world, and his ideas were rarely repeated elsewhere. Some were even located on the central reservations of roads – forcing children and cars to be more aware of each other, making the city feel like a more equal, accessible place. As well as extending children’s sense of urban ownership, his fence-free compounds encouraged a more relaxed attitude to risk. This fun, candy-coloured romp through the transformative power of play is nothing if not wide-ranging: it explores the work of Friedrich Fröbel, inventor the kindergarten the role of ad-hoc “ play labs” set up by humanitarian organisations in refugee camps and the rarefied realm of adult larping, or live-action role-playing, for those who wish it was Halloween every day – from battle re-enactors to bonnet-wearing Jane Austen superfans.įor Van Eyck, the playground was the place where the child could be “lord of the city”. Van Eyck’s pioneering work is one of the highlights of Play Well, a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Spilling out into the city … one of Aldo van Eyck’s roadside, fence-free playgrounds.