Playgrounds spread partly to get children off streets built for cars
For most of history children played in the lanes outside their homes, as a Dutch-set painting from 1560 shows. In the 20th century streets were redesigned for motor traffic, road deaths mounted, and campaigners pushed for fenced playgrounds as much to clear the roads for vehicles as to protect the young.
The 1560 painting Children's Games crowds an imaginary Dutch town with youngsters playing across its streets and fields. As cars arrived, groups such as the National Highway Protective Society publicised traffic deaths and urged playgrounds so that roads could be kept for vehicles. In New York, a 1901 report on children run down by cars spurred the Outdoor Recreation League to fund playgrounds on park land.
The idea had earlier, gentler roots. In the 19th century educators such as Friedrich Fröbel promoted playgrounds as a way to teach fair play and manners, and a few went up beside German schools. In Britain in the 1840s, the Home and Colonial Infant School gave pupils climbing frames, seesaws and parallel bars. Thomas Carlyle's 1843 book Past and Present demanded open green space in industrial Manchester for its children, and in 1846 the first purpose-built public playgrounds opened in Peel Park in Salford and in Queen's Park and Philips Park in Manchester. London's Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, founded in 1882, campaigned for more, partly to raise healthy working-class recruits for the forces and factories. One of the earliest American examples opened in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in 1887.
From the 1920s the engineer Charles Wicksteed manufactured sturdy swings and slides and became a leading champion, and the National Playing Fields Association, one of whose founding aims was proper playgrounds for children, equated them with factory-made equipment. After World War II, Lady Allen of Hurtwood and other reformers in London popularised junk playgrounds, where children turned bombsites and rubble into structures of their own invention. Allen lobbied for play space in new high-rise estates and wrote books on adventure playgrounds that carried the idea worldwide.
Modern playgrounds typically offer seesaws, roundabouts, swings, slides, climbing frames, sandpits, spring riders and mazes, often linked into combined structures that build coordination, strength and social skills. Many add courts or diamonds for informal sport, and some serve older people with disabilities. Playscapes set play in natural surroundings. The UK had over 26,000 playgrounds in 2019.
Source: Playground
