Ben Highmore, "Playgrounds: The Experimental Years" (Reaktion, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books and Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Ben Highmore about Playgrounds, the experimental years. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Good to be here. This is a fantastic book. It's so interesting about a topic that I suppose is...

When you think about it intuitively, something that almost everybody, although I see in the book you talk about barriers to access, but almost everybody might have some experience of when they were growing up. But at the same time, there isn't really much of a kind of field around thinking about and writing about barriers.

playgrounds, particularly actually, as you call it, the experimental years. And I'm intrigued as to what kind of motivated you or inspired you to write a book about playgrounds.

Thank you. So the book came out of other work I'd been doing around the Second World War and people's experience and morale. And I came across a book called Branch Street by a Viennese woman called Marie Panath, where she describes her kind of experience with these teenagers during the war years and

And she kind of ends up by saying that the bomb sites of London should be given to children. They should be owners of these sites and that they could then make money from them by growing plants or mending bicycles. But they would have kind of ownership of this space. I thought that was a kind of really kind of interesting idea.

And then I followed it through a bit and found out that a lot of the bomb sites...

but in other cities as well, did actually become playgrounds in the 1940s and 50s. And this led to a whole movement of junk playgrounds and adventure playgrounds that really are a kind of alternative history and an alternative kind of space than the kinds of playgrounds that we most normally imagine, which is

a fairly desolate piece of asphalt with some devices, you know, swings, slides, and sometimes sand pits. You've given a clear eye guess there to what

The title is referring to as the sort of experimental years, that radical idea of, you know, giving space back over to children and young people rather than, I suppose, kind of providing for them is one of the themes that comes up in the book. Byne?

sort of interested in, I suppose, how you drew those boundaries around the experimental years. And as you've mentioned, it could have been a book that, you know, there's quite a rich moment, you know, 1940s into 1950s, but the book has got both a kind of a longer time span, but also a much more expansive kind of geographical scope as well. So yeah, what was the sort of the process of defining or deciding what the experimental years would be?

Yes, I did start off. So I started off very much with this fairly kind of heroic, well, I found it a fairly kind of heroic story of these kind of adventure playgrounds coming out of the, emerging out of the rubble of the Second World War. And then started finding other kind of examples across Europe. And I

It had been written about, and it had been written about either very critically as a kind of new form of governmentality, a new way of kind of ordering play, or else it had been written about very kind of celebratory as a kind of an eruption of kind of anarchist ideals in these playgrounds. And I wanted to do something that I thought was more material than that, which was...

Just simply kind of trace it back and think about, well, where do these ideas come from? What are the conditions of possibility that allow something like this to emerge? So I started tracing it back and thinking about, well, where do playgrounds come from? You know, who started? When were the first playgrounds?

I mean, clearly things like swings and slides are as old as can be. But the idea of a playground was kind of particularly intriguing. So one of the things I went to various archives, and there's a big archive as part of the Museum of Play in New York State in New York.

where they've got this huge collection of magazines around playgrounds going back to 1906 where the first...

big playground movement emerges. And I started reading these things like just what a playground had to offer. And I was reading things about, well, there'd be sewing lessons, there was this going on, you really needed a gramophone player for a playground. You know, there were all these adverts for

for record players, gramophone players. So that immediately made me think, oh, right, well, there's a different story going on here. This isn't just simply about devices and then people saying, okay, well, you don't need devices. It was a whole social movement, if you like. And that's how it thought of itself, the playground movement that really emerges at the end of the 19th century, partly in Germany,

was very much thinking of itself as a children's safe, you know, making children safe, rescuing children, if you like. And they were thinking particularly of rescuing working class children who were growing up in high density urban areas where there were no green spaces, where there was...

where the the opportunities for being arrested for um uh being accused of being kind of juvenile delinquent were getting higher and higher so the idea of a kind of

the children's saving movement, this playground movement, was very much setting up these spaces for children to play where they could exercise, become healthy, they could do all sorts of things like reading and so on. But within that, I think there was also this very kind of notable split that on the one hand, there seemed to be

Christian socialists who were very, very active in the playground movement, who were really thinking about, well, playgrounds could be a place for children and young people to come together, and it wouldn't be full of...

the competitive spirit of kind of entrepreneurial capitalism. This would be a way of kind of rescuing children from that kind of endless demands that capitalism is going to put on them. And they could come together as a kind of social space. And as part of that,

Team games were really, really encouraged. Cooperative things, group dancing, group singing, all these sorts of things were kind of part of that aspect of

But the other side of that, the other side of the history of playgrounds is much more to do with the military, to do with an idea of devices that would in some ways be like an outdoor gymnasium and would teach children and young people and adults actually, you know, men particularly, young working class men to play.

physically learn the attributes that would make them good for the military. So there were these vying demands, I think, on what the playground was.

I'm now right at some point thinking that actually one useful description of these playgrounds is that they're kind of caught between the funfair and the squad ground. That's the kind of dynamic going on. I guess.

The rest of the book sets up a story that is both in reaction to those two ideologies of playgrounds, if we could call it that, but also shows how various different kind of moments in the history of playgrounds are trying to do something, in some cases, really sort of unique. And maybe we'll dip into that.

a couple of examples and maybe the first one that you sort of touched on actually earlier is this idea of a sort of junk playground. And I'm intrigued by that in a variety of different ways. One is just the term, you know, usually we, we,

particularly in that kind of early history of the playground you set out there, the idea of providing junk would not be an acceptable way to either save children nor prepare them for particularly military engagements. And yet at the same time, there was a profound, I suppose, interest

child-centered idea going on in the junk playground movement so yeah what were they and and how does that slightly kind of strange and contradictory term come into being

Yes, jump playgrounds is the translation of a Danish term, which I won't try and pronounce, but it's a kind of literal translation of a space where what we would now call kind of loose parts, where tyres and planks of wood and sorts of things like that could appear. And it did very much come from...

both a kind of child-centered ideology, but also it was the brainchild of this landscape architect, Danish landscape architect called Sorensen, who had been working around...

cooperative housing estates from about the 1920s onwards. And while he'd been building the houses and arranging the grounds and building quite conventional playgrounds with swings and slides and things, he was noticing that actually the children were much more interested and enjoyed playing with bricks

sand and cement and all the stuff that you find around the building site.

So he had this idea of actually having a space that was kind of dedicated to that kind of play, more constructive play, rather than the kind of vertiginous enjoyment that you get from a swing or a slide. This was about building huts and dens that...

that he could kind of create this space within these housing states. I mean, it has a particular history to it in Denmark because Denmark

I mean, the first so-called, you know, actually named junk playground is from the 1943. And it's during a period when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis. And while to begin with, the Nazis had almost said to Denmark, you know, you carry on as you were, right?

As they started doing worse and worse during the war, they became very suspicious and very interventionist. And parents of young people and children were very worried that their children's

adventurous play outdoors and unsupervised could land them into you know terrible terrible trouble that they might be playing down by the railway tracks and and taken as subversives who are going to try and you know thwart the the the nazi um the nazi project

So part of the building of this playground was a way of kind of, so children could do their kind of adventurous play, but within the confines of a particular kind of playground.

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Okay, I have to tell you, I was just looking on eBay where I go for all kinds of things I love, and there it was. That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set. Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One of a kind. eBay had it, and now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wipers? eBay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful.

Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay. Things people love. I guess something similar is happening with adventure playgrounds, which, you know, the clue is in the name. But I was intrigued partially in this chapter because these are the sorts of playgrounds that I was sort of most familiar with from when I was growing up. But also because you...

try and sort of, I suppose, introduce the idea that these weren't just spaces for like having fun with, you know, pirate ships and kind of interesting bits of kind of building and stuff like this. But also they in turn had a series of, I suppose, again, you know, ideological ideas underneath them. And I wonder if you could tell a little bit of the story of the adventure playground. Yeah.

Yes. I mean, the Benchy Playgrounds as a kind of named project, I think is very much associated with Britain and particularly with this one woman who began life as Marjorie Gill, then married the politician Gwyneth Paltrow.

I can't remember quite his name. He was a Labour politician. Anyway, she ended up being Lady Alan of Hertwood when our husband was made a member of the House of Lords. And she was kind of like a dedicated politician.

of kind of children's lives. This was her main thing. And she wrote this essay in Picture Post in 1946 after visiting the junk playground in Denmark, in Copenhagen. And this article basically said that

all these bombsites could in fact become playgrounds. This was a kind of pivotal moment. And then lots of people start getting interested in this. And in terms of the story behind it, really I think one of the stories that gets repeated and repeated, and this is one of Lady Allen's big moments,

kind of ideas really is that the city itself, urban environments are criminalizing children. She sees that the biggest number of children, young people kind of going through the juvenile courts, and this is more than any kind of year group in kind of the adult population, is 13 to 14-year-old boys.

So something is desperately going wrong. All these young boys and some girls are getting into terrible trouble, getting a criminal record at a really young age. So the answer that she sees is,

is having the adventure playground. And the adventure playground, unlike those playgrounds that I talked about earlier that you get in North America, that were these kind of huge places for group singing and sometimes kind of military formations and things, these were particularly designed for what Lady Allen called the unclubbable.

People who didn't join the scouts, who weren't interested in the guides, who thought that the kind of religious groups that were on offer from kind of local churches and things like that were really not for them.

So these were people who were the kind of natural, if you like, social group that the police might find kind of hanging around on street corners. You know, these were working class kids who often lived in very kind of difficult circumstances where they had to just be outdoors all day because there weren't any parents at home. Both parents would be at work.

and that they were kind of getting into trouble. So the adventure playground was a kind of partly a response to this, but it was also something much more than that. And I think you get this in all the kind of literature, especially from the 40s and the 50s. And that is the idea that it's somehow going to be a reparative space.

that Europe and the world had gone through six years of terrible industrial-scale bloodshed, and that a lot of Europe was absolutely destroyed by war, and that something...

Good had to be built from that rubble. And one way of kind of repairing the awfulness was to kind of give space to children, for children to have space for themselves. So the other aspect of this is this idea that children would be free. And this is very much the idea of free play. Very heavily informed play.

by early years educators like Miriam Montessori, Freubel, people like that, but taken much further. So these playgrounds were a place of repair and for children to kind of develop autonomous lives.

Marjorie Allen and various other people really saw them as a kind of third space, that it wasn't a third space that wasn't being driven by obedience and authority. She saw the school as a place of obedience and authority. And in the 1940s and 50s, also the home very much.

like that as well. So this was going to be a new kind of place, a third space where children could become their autonomous selves. And I think that, for me, was the really interesting kind of social project. Jumping forward in time and coming back to North America is a very different type of playground. I mean, in some ways,

what we've been talking about might be familiar to listeners. Um, and obviously it's quite a shame that the podcast is an audio medium because the book is full of these quite fantastic, um, pictures and illustrations and plans of the spaces we've been discussing. But by the time the story gets to New York, um, you know, by the time we're into kind of sixties, seventies, and I guess slightly later, um,

We have a very different approach to thinking about playgrounds and what you call a kind of playground revolution that's happening in the city. And I'm interested to know what that was, but also how this moment and these interventions are kind of different from what comes before. Yeah.

Yes, I think this is a period where certainly in New York, in Manhattan, especially around Central Park, you get this kind of burgeoning set of

of new kinds of playgrounds that are designed by architects like Richard Dartner, who use the playgrounds to kind of experiment with new shapes and scales and new ways of making a kind of play landscape, if you like.

And really, I think these are playgrounds that get called adventure playgrounds, but they're very, very different from the playgrounds that I've been previously talking about as these kind of places of autonomous development.

So one way of noting that difference is to think of them more as adventure style playgrounds. They have a kind of look of adventure playground, like they have some of the

some of the wood constructions and hills and movements and zip wires and things that you see in adventure playgrounds. But often they're not supervised and they were part of a landscape. So this was in a sense taking, I suppose, the aesthetics of the adventure playground but losing the social project behind it.

not seeing this as a kind of intervention into kind of juvenile delinquency, but actually thinking about let's try and make much more creative, much more enjoyable spaces. So I think they're really useful for that. And some of them are incredibly beautiful. They have really strong kind of design ideas. Part of the design ideas are coming from this sculptor called Noguchi.

Japanese-American artist who also kind of designed playgrounds that were just completely ignored during most of his lifetime, just failed to be realised. But they were really great ideas and they combined a kind of aesthetics also with safety. So rather than have these gigantic slides that you could climb to the top of and then, you know,

potentially fall off. His slides were kind of embedded into these artificial hillsides. So there was no way you could fall off. You were just going to roll onto another bit of the hillock. So the idea of a playground could also be a kind of visual idea. I mean, I think for North America,

You do get these very prominent, very aesthetic adventure style playgrounds, but you also do get these kind of more progressive adventure playgrounds as well. And they do look quite similar to the British ones, i.e. they look ugly, like a complete junk tip. So there is that kind of messy side of it.

I end up getting very interested in that whole kind of question of aesthetics. I mean, the man Sorensen who came up with the junk playground in the first place, he wrote that it was probably the ugliest thing he'd ever invented, ever designed, but it was also the most beautiful thing.

And you get a real sense of that kind of, wow, do we have to try and kind of understand things differently? Do we have to understand kind of beauty differently? And I think you get this a lot when some of the early junk playgrounds, adventure playgrounds were being built in London that actually...

working class communities would be assuming that they were going to get a playground and that that would be some kind of beautifying act of the local area. And then when the kind of junk playground arrives and they realise it's actually going to carry on looking a bit like a bombsite, there was a lot of pushback, you know, saying, well, our community

our area looks pretty shocking as it is. Why make it even worse with these spaces? But I think that idea of beauty not simply being a kind of surface visualizing of kind of pictorial elegance to actually being something about a kind of liveliness, about a beauty in terms of spirit, is something that I really wanted to pick up on and kind of learn from.

Because I think as we're moving in relation to things like the climate change and people coming up with kind of

new ideas of kind of creating spaces, spaces where stinging nettles might grow rampant to allow insects to thrive. You know, we really do need to think again about beauty. I mean, I think we have done. I think we've stopped seeing, you know, massive, neatly mown lawns as beautiful. You know, they seem now kind of problematic. Yeah.

So I was kind of very interested in that as an aspect of the playground. I might come back to that sort of quite sticking question about the future of these spaces. But before that, one thing that runs throughout the book, but also becomes quite prominent in a specific chapter towards the end, is the sense of who gets included and who doesn't. And, you know, you've talked about the various examples of, you know,

Ideas and ideologies to bring in particular groups of young people who are seen as, you know, at risk or, you know, let loose from parental supervision for various reasons. But in particular, one of the latest chapters grapples with the question of disabilities and inclusion. I'm interested to hear maybe some examples of where this is kind of done well.

And also how, I suppose, this question of who is included and who isn't has been negotiated in the kind of history of playgrounds that you're trying to tell.

Yes, thank you for that. One of the, one of the, when, when I was very first starting thinking about this book, I was, I was talking to some, some people who were involved in history of education and social work. And one of the people came up to me afterwards and said, yeah, have I found out much about disabilities and, and playgrounds? She had a, a,

a child with disabilities and was saying how difficult it was finding the playgrounds that could kind of deal with the child's needs. And at the time I thought I hadn't really come across anything

But then I think it was like the next week I visited this archive and there was this huge amount of stuff on playgrounds for children with disabilities. And again, Marjorie Allen, Lady Allen of Hertwood is the prime mover here.

as soon as she sets up the very first adventure playground, she moves on to the next adventure playground being specifically designed with children with disabilities in mind. And

And that becomes really her kind of project from the 1960s onwards. And a number of these kind of adventure playgrounds for children with disabilities are built particularly kind of around London. And it became very interesting to think about what kind of inclusivity would mean with this in mind.

another thing that I did was, um, visit a playground manufacturer in, um, in, in Norway, a massive, you know, worldwide kind of manufacturer. And they, they specifically kind of make equipment that is, um,

usable by people with all sorts of abilities um and and i was kind of struck by the difference one is very much the these kind of designers there's an awful lot of money in this um they're they're designing things and they're designing things with all sorts of kind of safety uh features um

And of course, they're a company, they're a commercial company, they need to make money. But one of the things that's happening is an idea that if the dominant kind of playground is swings, slides, roundabouts and things like that, then you have to adjust them to make them available for a wheelchair user, for instance. Now, of course, this is...

can be very expensive for local governments to think, okay, well, now we need to have provision for these sorts of playground equipment and all the kind of needs that kind of include everyone.

But actually, that sense of a playground with these very kind of often very kind of athletic devices, monkey bars, swings, all these sorts of things require, you know, huge amounts of abilities, really.

that it's very much kind of based on the kind of normative idea that this is what a normal child is. This is the developmental stage of a 12-year-old boy or a 12-year-old girl. And actually, this is the way that this playground equipment is built. It has very, very clear developmental goals. This is a piece of playground equipment. It's ideal for kids.

10 to 14 year olds it will help eye coordination all these sorts of things

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Now,

I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen. That is one way of thinking about playgrounds. And if that is the dominant mode of a playground, then it should be available to everyone.

The adventure playground was never like that. It never imagined a normative sense of capacities, capabilities. So actually having an adventure playground for disabled children was actually no different than having an adventure playground for the most able children. In fact, they look pretty similar.

There are different kind of amenities. There's more changing facilities. There are more kind of static places for play. But really, they're pretty similar. And when Mary Ellen Mears,

set up these first adventure playgrounds for children with disabilities. You know, they were for children with disabilities, but also their friends, their brothers and sisters who...

who might be perfectly, you know, have all the capacities that you could want. So there was a kind of interesting kind of alternative kind of history to thinking about disabilities and thinking about how exclusivity happens, that actually it wasn't that certain kind of

playgrounds were naturally inclusive or not it was sometimes that the actual devices were themselves exclusive you know they were they were so kind of normative in their demands that they included they excluded lots of lots of children and what about the future then one element of you know who is included is clearly a question about the future of playground building and and

maybe the kind of philosophy underpinning playgrounds. You've already mentioned how these spaces and places will have to adapt in the context of climate change. The book also touches upon what we might think of as kind of changing trends and preferences in terms of children's leisure, particularly the rise of digital spaces that they

spending time in. It's a slightly kind of cliched question, isn't it? You know, when anyone is writing the history of anything to say, so what happens next? But what happens next? What is the likely future for the playground? Yes. I think that the future of the playground is very much

up in the air. I mean, I think a lot of playgrounds for at least the last 30 years, the kind of adventure playgrounds I've been looking at, have been hugely under threat because they're not...

kind of expensive in terms of materials, but they're expensive in terms of the people who are required to kind of supervise these spaces. They're often, you know, they employ people and local governments, local councils see that as an unnecessary expense.

when they could try and build something that didn't require any supervision, like a lot of the static playgrounds you see around. So there's that that seems to continue. And also there's a sense that, I mean, when I look at the big sense of history that you get sometimes from doing this kind of work,

You see that there are kind of changes, for instance, that the growth of TV and then kind of online and those kind of play areas, but also the huge growth in risk aversion, you know.

that actually we've kind of embedded this in a whole set of legislative rules, you know, that, that safety standards have to be, have to be kind of used and that, that playgrounds must be as safe as can possibly be imagined. And,

Often to the kind of detriment of any kind of creativity or fun that the children might want to have. When I do talks on this, I quite often show some photographs of a playground in London from the 1950s, Lollard Playground. And my...

local adventure playground uh and and both of them have a fire have the the lollard uh playground has some like seven bonfires going with like one adult you can barely see in the background uh the other one the more recent one has a bonfire going and all the children are like eight feet away from the bonfire and there's a kind of an adult kind of patrolling the area in between

So safety has become our absolute overriding concern. And I'm very interested in the way that people are now talking about risk and the necessity for risky play. There's been lots of work in Canada talking about actually the real risks for children are for...

for diseases that you can get just by not being active enough, by being sedentary, by sitting in front of a computer screen for too long. So there's a really interesting thing about kind of risk and the necessity for risky play. So I do see that there is a lot to argue for, to have kind of a venture play.

and I think that the joy of the consensuality of mud and wood and building and things like that is very important and will never go away. At the same time,

you know, the creative worlds that you can, you can kind of generate yourself in, in terms of something like Minecraft online, I just enormous. And it's really difficult to, to put them into, into, into competition. But I think, I think if I'm looking at the future, very, very, hopefully,

I want to see more adventure played out, more opportunities for children to kind of build and grow and do those sorts of things that you can do with mud and earth and bricks and wood. Partly because I think those are skills that are so kind of basic and maybe they'll be the useful skills that will come in the future when children

when flooding happens, when wind is kind of blowing our roofs off, that actually these kind of skills about dealing with our own habitats will be the important things. And what about in terms of your own work? It strikes me that...

There's probably, as you've described, both a kind of manifesto for playgrounds that is teased in this book. There's possibly a kind of playgrounds in the Eco Crisis book. But equally, maybe you're kind of bored of playgrounds having done such a kind of comprehensive history. I know you're going to be working on something different next year.

Yes, well, I am thinking maybe making a kind of graphic novel version of this book. That's a slightly kind of mad plan that I have. But now I am working on a different project, which is

sort of the history of cultural analysis and thinking about how it kind of emerges and how it's different from kind of literary analysis and how how a kind of whole new set of energies emerge when people have to start thinking about well how do we how do we go about analyzing um you know movies how do we go about analyzing tv so we're actually kind of thinking

with a kind of bigger sense of the history of that, how that kind of emerges and what future that has now in the time of ever more complexity.