Playgrounds

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After the Second World War, a vast experiment took place in which adventure playgrounds transformed bombsites and waste ground in the UK, creating opportunities for children, beyond the sanitised safety of more conventional play spaces with swings and see saws. Laurie Taylor talks to Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex about the range of people whose celebration of children's imaginative capacities re-invented the notion of play, from Northern Europe to North America. Designers, social reformers, and even anarchists, saw these sites of fun as the foundation for the creation of citizens and agents of social change.

What remains of those post war playgrounds, in the here and now, and what can the astonishing ambition of those spaces tell us about the power of play in an age of risk aversion?

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Traitors is back and so is that mysterious cloaked figure with the familiar fringe.
0:06.7	Yeah, it's me.
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0:18.5	What a faithful.
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0:22.3	with celeb guests, traitors legends and murdered and banished players. The traitors uncloked.
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0:37.1	This is a thinking aloud podcast from BBC, and for more details and much, much more about thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.com.com.
0:48.2	Hello. Try as I might, I can't readily recall the playgrounds I visited when I was a young child growing up in a
0:56.2	Liverpool suburb. I mean, they must have been nearby swings and roundabouts, but they
1:01.3	bring back few happy memories compared to the vast, wonderful playground that lay just 15 minutes
1:09.1	away from my suburban front door.
1:12.0	The place we called the erosion.
1:16.0	The long rows of sand dunes that lay alongside the River Mersey.
1:21.3	Dunes that were littered with the transported remains of Liverpool houses
1:26.2	that had been blitzed during the war.
1:29.0	Bricks and broken doorframes and blackened pieces of furniture.
1:33.9	And this, it really was, it was a playground made in heaven.
1:38.3	Because I mean, you could jump and roll or slide and play hide and seek
	...

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