and Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (2023).
Highmore applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Playgrounds: The Experimental Years, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Playgrounds, the experimental years falls roughly into two halves. The bottom half of the page consists of a photograph of a playground on London’s South Bank, which was included in the film Come Out to Play, from 1954, which accompanied an exhibition and a symposium on Children’s Playgrounds. This playground was built for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and has that mid-century modern feel to it. The photograph shows the playground from above. It consists of a model of a large concrete ship, with a set of funnels. The main part of the ship is filled with sand and about 10 children are playing in it. Nearby are a set of swings, some concrete cubes for clambering over, and a roundabout set on a raised area. In the middle there is a small cluster of mothers and a pram. The top half of the page introduces the playground exhibition and explains that it divided playgrounds into 5 types. The first type was ‘the equipped playground’. Today this might be referred to as a ‘static playground’ or conventional playground and is probably the playground that most usually springs to mind: a flat area of asphalt or concrete (or more recently, spongy rubber) with a selection of fixed devices (swings, slides, and so on). The second type was the ‘unequipped playground’, which as the name suggests was just the flat space and was usually used for playing ball games. The third type was the ‘natural playground’, which the exhibition catalogue describes as a ‘romping ground with undulation, banks, trees, bushes and other natural features’ – basically a section of a park. The fourth type mentioned is the ‘adventure playground’ which had a prominent place in the exhibition and in the debates surrounding it. The catalogue describes the adventure playground as a place where ‘destruction and vandalism are transmuted into creative effort’. Lastly, and least remembered, was the ‘traffic playground’: a miniature road system that children navigated on bikes and in peddle cars.Learn more about Playgrounds at the Reaktion Books website.
Page 99 gives the reader a good flavour of the book in terms of the prominence of images throughout the volume. But in other ways it isn’t particularly representative. The book primarily tells the story of the rise of the adventure playground and associated types of play spaces (junk playgrounds, city farms, and the like). These are playgrounds that could be seen as having a social mission. I tell the story of how a playground movement emerged in the late nineteenth century and was then revived in the immediate postwar years, as a ‘child saving’ movement. While the conventional, static playground was simply about physical play and ‘letting off steam’, the adventure playground movement saw itself as creating a safe, creative space, away from adult rules about obedience and authority. It was going to be a space where the young could develop on their own terms.
Page 99 comes at a pivotal moment in the unfolding story of experimental playgrounds. It comes at the start of a chapter titled ‘Busy Roads and High-Rise Living’, which provides the social context for understanding adventure playgrounds and the arguments that were unfolding around them. The adventure playground was a response to a set of forces that was increasingly turning inner cities into hostile environments for children and young people. The exponential rise in traffic posed a daily threat to the lives of children who had been used to playing in the street; more and more working-class children were living in tower blocks without much provision for play; and children wandering around the city on their own were being perceived by the police as potential juvenile delinquents. My book sidelines the school playground and the conventional swings and slides playground, to look intensely at the past, the present, and the future of these inspiring experimental playgrounds.
--Marshal Zeringue
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