Unbrashing the Landscape.
Or
How to Rewild Play
1 Chelsea Adventure Playground
It sat in the grounds of the Royal Hospital off the Kings Road and near CheyneWalk, an inclusive site where Children with a huge range of needs their siblings and friends were mostly bussed to us from the less wealthy corners of Kensington and Chelsea
In quieter hours, we opened our doors to other visitors from the several very expensive private schools in the area. These children would be marched in strict crocodile formation to play for half an hour or so.
These half hours were some of the most challenging times that the team worked.
The children had no experience of free play.
Their lives were tightly controlled by the constraints and expectations placed upon them by their backgrounds of wealth and privilege.
This was happening in the 80s.
‘ Eat the Rich ‘ t shirts were in vogue.
Thatcher was in her prime and We as a team were inclined to be fairly angry.
We all wanted to think of ourselves as working class. (In my case this was utter piffle.)
But watching those children play, I felt my heart twist.
They were weighed down by what they had to live up to.
I tried a thought experiment, what if I viewed wealth in terms of a disadvantage a disability. These children were not responsible for the wealth, but they were being groomed to be made responsible for it.
That made it easier for me to empathise.
Every child… this was before the UNCRC.. Every child has the right to play.
What happens if they are pressured to behave like a young gentleman, conduct themselves as a little lady, speak properly, study Latin, not knock over antiques…… where is their playhood?
And do we want these children of wealth to grow up play deprived…. and powerful?
Coz look around. That’s what’s happening.
2 France.
There is a tiny picturesque village at the foot of the Black mountains in the south of France where we have made an occasional home.
We were drawn to this village because through each of the three streets of cantilevered houses runs a rill tumbling and spluttering with ice cold water from the mountains.
Every child visiting the village plays with this water. They dip their fingers or toes in it, plough their bare feet upstream feeling the strength of its flow and watching the movement of the water as it slips around them.
They make and race boats down the current.
They raise the dam on the little reservoir and create a mini tsunami wave down the street then lower the dam quickly and watch the stream almost run dry for a few seconds.
The children who live in the village also play constantly with the water in less tentative ways, sending huge sprays kicked or thrown at each other, frozen for a split second in the intense summer light, like a firework.
The people of the village are beyond tolerant of this.
Because many of them grew up doing the exactly same things as children have done there back through the years. It is second nature..
As adults they use the streams for watering the plants, shaking way the table cloth crumbs, making little dams up and down the street to chill rosé bottles, let the dog drink after a walk or cool their heals after cycling in the mountains.
It’s never the same stream twice but it is a constant presence.
If you sit beside it on a hot day to let it refresh you. You wave to every neighbour doing the same. You nod at the children as they play.
We sit either side of the stream each night and natter. Its voice chips in occasionally.
We begin not to be aware of it it as the days of our visit stretch out, but it’s being there draws us all together. It is so much a part of this community that it is almost unseen, the playing that this water brings to every street.
These streams make the village playable.
If it had been designed into the streets of Malmö, it would be a tourist destination
But when we suggested that the village hold a fête de l’eau, as one of the regions visitor attractions in the summer, there was a great deal of forehead slapping… why haven’t we thought of this before?
Play is like a spring that bubbles up within the child. Almon
Play is a river that runs through us all. Battram
3 A Faith Community.
It nestles in the most achingly beautiful valley, tucked away modestly from the roadand the rush. A home to gentle, peaceful, good and kindly group of people.
They are pretty much self sufficient sharing the labours of the farm and woodland maintenance between them all, from the oldest to the youngest. Children wielding axes to chop firewood. Elders passing on their skills to them.
At every little knot and junction in the footpaths between buildings there is a small evidence of play.
Between the communal dining room and the school houses is a beautiful tree with dipping and swooping branches worked shiney by small feet and hands. Little treasures are laid out in the twigs and on the bare earth beneath the tent of its foliage.
We walked the perimeter of the community through deep ancient untouched woods and old old farmland.
She told me how they loved twilight walks here to watch the badgers.
She told me of the children coming here to play and building their own swings from the trees, daming, fording or bridging the streams, making little places of ritual marked with leaves or twigs or flowers laid in exquisite patterns, mandalas.
“ We don’t disturb these things that they leave behind, but we notice them and pay attention to them. It helps us understand their playing.’
Term has just finished.
Behind the school house is a clearing by a wood with a panorama overlooking the surrounding hills.
Here the community have been gathering loose parts for the children to use during their summer holiday . There are pallets and lengths of timber and planks and tyres and pots and pans, rope, fabric.
The trees are filled with climbing children.
There is running water from a hose, lots of mud and fire when they want it.
Here is everything that you could wish for in an urban play setting with the magnificent addition of free access to the surrounding paradise of the country.
These children are play literate and quietly confident. They paid very sweet attention to the adult in Playworker as he shared his ideas for the summers playing, then subtly changed the flow, like they would divert a little stream, and redirected the playing. They decided that in their play, they wanted to rif on the studies that they had shared as a whole school topic, based around castles and the communities within the castles.
So they recreated a banqueting hall, a pottery, ramparts , water and drainage systems, domestic cooking spaces and other such inventions as they felt were necessary they build this community within a community.
They were independent and strong and inventive.
At the end of the scheduled play time, though the children and I barely noticed it, little knots of parents came to gather and watch what they had been doing. They stood respectfully observing the playing, and these quiet observations continued as they headed off for their shared evening meal.
I asked my host, “Why do you place play at the heart of the community as you do? That is so unusual. I have never encountered it before.”
“Well” she replied ” We are a community that is built upon our faith in a creator God. We see play as a beautiful and important part of living a creative life in his image.”
4 Pogo Park
The first time I visited the Elm Street Play Lot I saw no play traces.
I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
I felt upon me from every direction.
Toody said that the houses around the tired and almost disused park were used for drugs and gun dealing. The crime rates in this ‘’Iron Triangle’ had recently been amongst the highest in the United States of America.
It is only a small triangle, defined by railway tracks and nestled in the shadow of the Chevron oil refinery. Pollution and leaks from Chevron have been dramatic.
The soil is highly polluted.
(Don’t make tea out of the wild fennel that comforts you with its aniseed smell as you brush past it.)
There is nowhere to buy fresh food and no money to buy it with.
But the cornucopias of the farmers markets in Berkeley are only a 15 minute drive. Chez Pannisse and The Edible Schoolyard are only a life chance away.
The community of Richmond are almost all people of colour African Americans or of latinex?origin.
They are the generations that remained after the Rosie The Riveter recruitment drive during World War Two called for called men and women from all corners of the USA to come and build war ships. And they came, escaping from Jim Crow Laws, escaping from poverty and persecution. And after the war, they stayed, not wishing to return home, unsurprisingly enough.
Years passed and guns and drugs and deliberately prejudicial policies happened and the community clenched and hardened itself against the world.
Right in the middle of this triangle Toody began to reclaim the park and support the community to re-see itself, starting with play and always, always holding it at the heart of the changes.
Her strategic thinking was flawless.
The dealing houses were bought up and rented out to families.
The park was re-designed to be fit for purpose.
Play pieces were designed and built by the children, teens and adults, all acquiring new skills together.
The neighbourhood staffed the park, deciding on rules that would enhance the playing of their children.
A second park was established, again on a well trodden route through the neighbourhood.
The same process.
Community build, Community staff.
Another project is on track to build a Yellow a Brick Road a playable safe route through the triangle to reach the primary school.
Play will take priority over cars.
Elm Street Play Lot is now lit up with fairy lights in the evenings.
The curtains twitch if any one unknown approaches, but now you are likely to get a smile or a wave.
During the daytime in holidays and weekends and after schools, children and families from round about will spend time there together.
There is food. (There must always be An Abundance Toody says.)
There is kindness and tolerance here.
Disapproval, when appropriate, is signalled with kissed teeth and A Look.
Subtle discipline, but acceptable boundaries are important here.
The children are absorbed in play, the parents are zumbaing away with great style and energy.
Little stories and big sagas are aired here.
A fire killing a family,. A boy volunteer on the playground shot dead at its gates.
Disclosures of abuse.
Tears shed over childhoods without childhood….
these things can seep out now because they can be safely held; by the neighbours; By the railings around the playspace; By the old house that sits in the Play Lot; By referrals to counselling services and welfare; By the community based policing which means that the children are growing up waving to the police who now take care of them in a Mary Poppins rather than a Sporanos way.
This place now changed.
It hold it’s head up.
It is ferocious enough and gentle enough to support play for its children, for itself.
It has Abundance.
Turns out Rosie the Rivetter was right about the people of the Iron Triangle when she said, ‘We can do it.’
5 Baltimore.
I’d watched The Wire.
I couldn’t watch too much at once though.
The naked cynicism and bald prejudice of every aspect of life within the systems of the city made me feel nauseous and trapped.
I could imagine no way for the characters to escape.
No way to be safe and live with pride and dignity and freedom.
No way to live actually.
Occasionally I found myself focussing on the acting and scripts and production values to give myself respite. And I was just watching TV
Now here I was driving through the streets of Baltimore thinking about how what I had seen on the screen would impact on the children I was going to meet.
I had to ask the inevitable question.
“ How do people round here feel about the representation of Baltimore in The Wire?”
Ben has a slow soft way of speaking.
He considers a lot chosing his words with care.
“Well I would say that we encourage people to watch The Wire so that they understand what is going on here.
In every aspect of life here,
every series,
right on the mark.”
Oh fuck. Oh fuck. oh fuck.
I wanted him to say it was an over dramatisation. Exaggerated.
Ben and Courtney were taking me on a tour of the neighbourhoods. We were driving through projects and I kept expecting to see that settee on the grass.
People were hanging round on street corners.
There were heart wrenching murals on walls, making beautiful eloquent calls for peace and justice. Memorialising young men shot on the streets, shot by police, children and mothers shot in playgrounds.
The wood frame houses were crumbling and rotting into evil mockeries of flat packs next to homes, almost more heartbreaking, with makeshift tubs of flowers and faded trim little easy chairs on the scrubbed clean front porch.
Abruptly our car turned off the main road and I found myself in an English village with a duck pond and a little stone bridge with Enid blyton style houses and shiney shiney cars carefully and neatly parked.
The world here was a million miles away from the crumbling homes, the tired shop fronts, the pleading murals and the knots of guys hanging round on corners.
A million miles? Actually a couple of hundred yards.
I am used to a more speckled life of London
But here I was like Alice walking through looking glass land.
With no warning I found myself moving from a black square to a white square at a single stride.
And I was conflicted.
I couldn’t decide which was The Good Place and which The Bad Place.
It’s what I had read about. It’s what I was expecting, the snap finger change from poverty to wealth, private police for safety, to police as a threat, white and black, Privilege and injustice.
I wasn’t prepared for how it felt though.
Courtney and Ben had started a drop in play project in the grounds of a community school on the edges of a ‘white area’ in Baltimore because they noticed that black children were using the open grounds of their nursery as a safe place to hang out on their way home from school. They would stop to play on the little tyre swing hanging from a tree by a slope or mess around on the grass because they could. They were in a white square. The neighbourhood might be racist, but it was safer to hang around here than it was where they had come from or where they were going to.
They made a play sanctuary.
The children, some of them well into their teens, seized the opportunity.
I was there to talk with the team about Playwork.
So I asked about their play memories.
One guy told me about his childhood.
“I worked really really hard to stay safe and clean and keep to the right streets.
But you have to know the word on the streets to know where is safe and where isn’t.
A friend of mine, I said Goodnight to him one evening and he was dead minutes later. It’s not safe. If you are a black kid , you are a suspect. If you’re a black kid the perception is you must be using or dealing or carrying a gun. You must be guilty.
And you have to fit in. There is serious pressure on you from your peers too. There are always folks around who try to tempt you do do a little dealing …
So complicated to stay out of trouble.
No I didn’t play out on the streets or anywhere else for that matter.’
That was me told.
My play memories exercise usually works a treat.
Not here.
I felt a little like Gulliver having the logic and etiquette of a strange new world explained to him
If parents were worried about you playing out, they weren’t being helicopter parents, they were trying to protect you from death
If children were discouraged from playing out it was because the stakes were too high
There was no freedom of movement, no right to roam or hang out for these children.
No free play, no one to even think about how the lack of play would affect the rest of their lives. The primary concern was that children should be able to have the rest of their lives, for many years to come.
In the sanctuary of Free For All Baltimore, children can play.
In Abundance.
There is food and thoughtfulness and kindness, dignity and as much safety as possible.
Like That Bit in Aliens, Ben and Courtney and people who work along side them have climbed into their armoured exoskeleton and are standing over the children while they play, protecting them from the corruption and the dirt that owns their streets and neighbourhoods.
They have started something.
As Marjory Allen said, ‘The work I have chosen to do will never be finished.
And in the words of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley
“uh oh…. I made a clean spot here. Now I’ve done it. Guess I’ll just have to do the whole thing……
6 Mile End
Eric Street is one of those corners of London where generations of families have lived since before the postwar reconstruction of the east end.
Communities birthed by the Nuns of Nonatus House, in the terraced houses that were considered sub par, and are now massively desirable. They were moved neighbour by neighbour into new glimmering tower blocks and low rise flats. Little individual garden or yard space was replaced by larger communal green areas, or slabby stretches of paving and the cars began to rule the streets.
The Play Association TowerHamlets learned that this delightfully overlooked, shitty forgotten little corner of Mile End was to be redeveloped, and started to work with with the social landlord on ways to regenerate open spaces and the community alongside the major building works.
It’s a long story, but the gist of it goes like this.
At this time a walk down Eric Street was bleak and far from enjoyable. There was scant greenery in sight.
It looked a little like a monochrome perspective drawing with straight lines everywhere.
The blossoming cherries, Virginia creeper and false acacias that had marked out in splats of glorious colour the seasons in Mile End, as surely as a Christmas wreath, had all been removed.
Seasonal variation was now dry grey or wet grey.
The odd patches of grass that remained were enclosed by locked railings, mowed bald, and used as dog toilets. True to the broken window theory, a place that had been a nifty little neighbourhood, became a most excellent setting for drugs dealing and attendant violence with machetes, guns and cars to run people over.
It had become an unpleasant experience, keep your head down and scurry through it quickly. The dental appointment of shortcuts.
The community shut itself in, drew the curtains and turned the telly up. Only going out when they had to.
We secured a £20k grant to build a natural playground from Kerygold, and identified a buzz cut area of fouled grass that we could transform.
The space was on a well used short cut, it was on many doorsteps
Tania, a local resident and force of nature with a genius for common sense and bold kindly speaking out was our hero. She knew everyone, talked to everyone, and pushed me in the small of the back in the right directions.
We had two months to make this transformation, so we acted super quickly, flying in the face of the slow play movement which was our prefered style.
We ran a play sesssion with lots of loose parts and sand and water, fabrics and stuff, and had Playworkers there both to support the children and encourage the adults to watch and see what their kids were actually doing. We made everything about this consultation as home made as possible, we wanted to have the community feel they could look at our rubbishy drawings and feel that they could do just as well.
We asked them about their own play memories, rekindling the excitement and variety of things they had done and feelings they had had.
Eric Street had lost play recently enough to be profoundly nostalgic about it. They mourned it’s passing. Like being away from home, they were play sick, they missed it. And they were on side with this project.
We told them what the budget was and how much play equipment cost and showed them alternatives that would support the children to play in ways that were not dictated by expensive tangles of bent metal. They liked that.
The quick turnaround time created a flurry of activity and interest and unlike the other laborious consultations of the last few years, which had as yet born no fruit and had wasted a playhood in dithering, this time the community could see the stuff they had asked for taking shape every day in front of their doors and their eyes.
There was also a grassroots environmental agenda at work. “We don’t see no birds or bees no more. We want a Bee Road down Eric Street.”
So we created what they asked for, a fruiting plum tree attracted a bird within moments of being planted, there were hills to roll down and climb up, water to play with, although the supply was really only for use in the growing beds in the space beside the gate.
There was native species planting that offered pollen and berries and herbs and flowers to pick and eat and play with. A great change from the municipal mahonia and pyracantha which hurt you and put you off nature.
There were seats and tables and logs to climb and scramble over and a life sized wooden cow, which had been included in the proposed plans only as a stupid thing which every one could reject, but which was universally loved.
This was a playable space, it was somewhere shared and pleasant.
A Playground would have remained largely unused, but this garden had something for everyone. (Except the drugs dealers who were frightened away by the inclusion of the fairy lights in the plum tree. The residents started leaving their curtains open so they could enjoy the twinkling. There was something of of Jane Jacobs at work here, the power of natural surveilance.)
We knew that for children to have a decent play experience, it would have to be enticing for everyone. Everyone would have to feel welcomed and welcoming.
This tiny garden changed the whole of the open space and community development on the estate. It did it by maintaining a focus on play and understanding that the community longed for play, they wanted to rewild it.
The street naturally became a play Street with drivers defering to children chalking in the car parks and little children running up and down the pavements in fancy dress without an adult in sight, but being watched from every kitchen window along the street. And there are birds and bees and outward facing people, and there was a cow, really truly, there was….
7 playkx
The development area of Kings Cross has cost about £4bn and it looks like it.
It’s home to Google and every other big prestigious, snazzy, high class bit of stuff you can imagine.
The old yards designed as trains sheds or fuel or goods houses, have been exfoliated and buffed and slicked and now have a post industrial, faux-shabby, chic.
The Heatherwick roof spanning the two wings of Coal Drops Yard, looks like some gigantic stone bird, a Roc, that has, in an achingly cool act of casual opportunism, delicately settled to roost.
The developer asked Assemble Studio to build a fixed playground in the largest of open spaces on the site.
Assemble, who some would consider to out-cool a Heatherwick roof, looked at the space and said, No.
They pointed out that a playground is actually a very poor play offer. That it is used by a small demographic for a small amount of time and that it fills up empty space which otherwise could be used for a huge variety of purposes by a huge number of people.
By way of an alternative they suggested employing a team of Playworkers and loose parts with a Playwork presence on site for the majority of each week.
The developer agreed.
This was a bold decision that would never have happened in this place with a voluntary sector play organisation. But being under the aegis of Assemble lent the right credentials and kudos enough to be acceptable.
That’s how Playkx began.
We provided fre Free play, open to everyone for a full day for six days a week for the first six months, then this was halved.
Still three full days is a lot of playing time… glass half full.
We wanted to look beautiful.
We wanted a flexible, adaptable, universally accessible play kit and a ferocious aesthetic and wit.
We wanted a glorious and robust play offer for children that would attract and please the eye of their parents, be photogenic and hold its own with Heatherwick et al.
We wanted a team of experienced, committed and passionate Playworkers working to a play ethos supported by the Playwork Principles.
Our model needed a clear fresh focus.
Most of us had worked in adventure playgrounds where parents were often excluded or made unwelcome. Yet Playworkers on these sites constantly moaned about how nobody understood them or the importance of play… talk about shooting your self in the foot.
There are are, generally speaking, only three categories of people who give a dam about play and actively seek it out.
One is Playworkers, obviously.
Two is children, even more obviously.
And three is parents of young children who see for themselves the wonders that happen during their child’s playing. This is glaringly obvious.
We decided to welcome the adults every bit as much as we welcome and respect the children.
We chat with them so they can ask all the questions that they need to; so they know that it’s ok just to watch and enjoy the playing, dipping in and out of it as needed, understanding how important it is to their childhood have control of what they are up to, remembering their own playing and finding ways to get as much of it into their child’s life as possible.
Here in King’s Cross, we play with children of the rich and famous, the wealthy, the well off, the comfortable, the ok, the budgeting, the struggling and those who are at their wits end, all at the same time.
We have children of families from families across the world, we have people of many faiths and of none, of a range abilities, different orientations and identifications.
This is the most diverse community that we have ever worked with.
We dot our playing in many locations around the development.
We work wherever people are.
The parents, the children and the Playworkers occupy space in this privatly owned place that is so perfect that it looks like an architects model. We animate it together.
We have filled up parks in the summer with picnicking, partying lingerers; explored the jewel box world of mirrors in Gasholderpark; filled to overflowing the east wing of Coal Drops Yard (though we did have a problem with a Rapunzel plait lowered over the balcony which unfortunately dangled in front of the Paul Smith shop frontage. )
We have played in front of an exhibition of covers from The Face magazine, by the fountains of a paved square and alongside a perfectly manicured and equisitely manufactured hand-made craft and artisanal food market.
In front of Central St Martins, the playing of the children mingles with the flocks of exotic-bird-like fashion students, the studious chin stroking spacial practices students, the quirky performance artists and the somewhat intense fine artists.
They all are excited by what the children are doing and see parallels their own practice. Especially interesting are the architecture students who have been given a starter project to design a playground.
They want to understand how play works
To each of them we ask,
“Where do you think your creativity comes from?
Children have the genius of play which is the root of creativity.
What follows in adult life is a sequel to that playing.
It was because of your own genius childhood playing that you are here.
Read Playwork theory. Observe and reflect.
And consider how the structure of the whole of the built environment impacts upon children. Consider for a moment why you don’t see children playing in public places all the time. Why is this project so very unusual?
We will be working with the Central Saint Martins Lethaby Gallery on their Turner prize winners retrospective starting tomorrow.
We will be playing beside the gallery and giving out Turnip prizes to every child who wants one. Photos and film of this playing will be shared by the Lethaby Gallery
The work that will be in Turner Prize exhibition is the sequel to what those amazing artists did as playing children.
And Assemble, as their contribution, are screening their film, The Voice of Children and a new piece of footage of us playing in the park in the summer.
So remember,
Every child, has the right to play.
A playable environment is a better than a zoned area of play equipment.
Take play to where people are
Support all adults to support play
Play builds bridges, it is social glue.
Remember to boldly advocate for play,
To claim the time and space for it because children cannot do that for themselves
Remember that Play is where creativity comes from.
Without it, the landscape is bleak and grey and all straight lines.
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