Penny Wilson

This article is about how the Play offer in Mile End Park has been developed over the years. Some exciting and daring ideas…..

Another piece thinking about play places in urban settings.

This is a piece that came from the PATH newsletter. It was a playful way that the former Senior Worker of Glamis Adventure Playground and I found to explore the macho nature of play place design.
We had great fun writing it. Hope you enjoy the read.

North Peckham Revisited.
South London Gallery mobile conference
2 April 2011.

The Mobile Conference traveled between three arts based projects in North Peckham, London.
These projects were all concerned with re-seeing the area, re inventing or re-discovering the use of space or objects and re- viewing the area informed by local memory and invention.

The first project, ‘Slipstream’ by David Cotterell has not yet taken place.
The project will be focused around gathered memories from residents of the area, captured through sound recordings. To accompany these recordings there will be footage taken from the position where there kitchen windows or front doors used to be before they were demolished in the clearance of the North Peckham estate. The camera, tethered to a minicopter allows us to ‘stand in the sky where we would have stood before supported by buildings.’
Cotterell is interested in flyover master plan modelling. It demonstrates, he says, the lack of knowledge involved in these super design processes. The dehumanisation of the process, the ‘lack of wallpaper’, the obliteration of the places and small, people experiences of space is complete and utter. However, He wonders at the ready blame that is apportioned for social failures to architecture, in North Peckham for example, the blame was universal and unchallenged, in complete isolation from any political or socital context. A similar ‘streets in the sky’ approach has been entirely successful in the Barbican for example.
Cotterell is keen to remind us that the estate that is held with affection in the minds of some of the people who lived their days in, days out, on the walkways and within the walls.
For me there was a strong resonance with the gathering of the play memories that have been so much a part of my work over the last few years. The small intimacies and wabi sabi everyday details of times remembered carry enormous power in our song lines.
The replacing of a remembered stable viewpoint for a recreated imaginary one, felt very much like the rush of past into the present that one gets when recalling play memories.

The remaining two projects were based in and around the Seaux Estate. This estate backs on to Camberwell Art School and the South London Gallery.

Seaux Gardens is a sixties high, medium and low rise block estate. Unusually, this estate has softly contoured green space with mature trees and hedgerows and overgrown spaces left intact. A large part of the estate is free from cars. There are a few poor quality estates play spaces with mediocre fixed play equipment in good repair. Nearby is a new playground that was being heavily used by children throughout the course of the visit.
Children were playing freely and roaming free from adult supervision in many spaces on the estate.
During the life time of this project a large fire broke out in the flats opposite the shop front and six people lost their lives. This had a great impact on the project and the work that they were able to do with the children and the wider community.

The project had been running for three years from a disused shop front on the estate, and this was the final event of that funding block. A series of Artists in residence had worked for six month blocks from the shop, each of them exploring a different facet of the playing and creativity of the children.

Febrik were hosting the final block with their ‘Making Play’ project.
In this work the shop front was converted into a Shop of Possibilities with one wall bedecked with household and every day objects or parts of objects. This was the wall of Curiosities. The opposite wall, The Wall of Possibilities, documented what the children had made and invented with these objects. Objects had accompanying instruction manuals produced by the children. For example one girl had made a friendship spoon game for new neighbours on the block. The spoons were linked in with pivoted struts so that the children could share information about who was ok to be with and how to deal with people that you didn’t know.
The whole enterprise felt deliciously like a Professor Brainstorm story, with children’s drawings and plannings and doodleings and made objects respected and valued as the creations of genius that they are. Previous projects had looked at using walls for games, had created allotments, had played word games with the adventures of the children, one had created fake rules boards and one had responded to the fire by using the residency to produce beautiful hoardings around the unusable block. The hoardings were covered with the wishes and aspirations of the estate residents.

An ongoing project with Lottie Child had explored the ways in which the children of the estate used the spaces around them. her interest had started with discipline such as Parkour which re-uses urban architecture. She had seen the ways that children use elements of the landscapes which adults no longer feel comfortable doing, do not have the impulse to do and which to the adult sensibilities feel transgressive, somehow improper.
Child took these ways of moving and asked the young people to train her in their ways of moving through the space. Having completed her own training she encouraged the young people to train other local adults, including police men and women. Through this exercise they we able to increase the shared understanding between Young people and police about what was anti social behaviour and what was play.
The project has been filmed and the young people are still engaged and supportive of the work they shared with Child.

I found that I had particular fascination and frustrations with the project stemmed from the same root.
Both Febrik and Child were creating excellent projects for the children and working in ways that were respectful to the culture of childhood and to the individuals. They were reflective and attentive to the creativity of the children. They showed a great understanding of their sensitivities and the depth of their characters.
The fact that they were not seeing their work as play based at all did not upset my purist Playwork principles at all as the work was so very meticulously child centred that the processes were the same as if they had been playworkers.
My frustrations lay rather in the fact that I knew that there was so much wisdom within Play and Playwork theory that would have helped them out so much with their struggle to analyze the content of the creativity of the children and find ways to communicate and expand on the issues that they were trying to address. There was some use of familiar Playwork terms and phrases such as ‘loose parts’ and process not product’. But I felt a little more knowledge of the playsector would have allowed both projects to explore additional areas.

This whole visit was slightly eerie for me. I had studied for three years at the Camberwell Art School immediately adjacent to the estate. The territory had been well known to me. I had been part of a victim support scheme on the North Peckham Estate, which is no longer there. The whole experience of rediscovery and re-seeing space was otherworldly because of this. Some patches of wall of roadway being so familiar that it still forms part of the landscape of my dreams.I now found whole new spaces and whole new atmospheres waiting unexpectedly around a corner or interrupting the familiar remembered scenes.

These three projects are designed in part to encourage the local residents to re-see their homes and communities in terms that go beyond the negative associations of North Peckham. They are re-seeing the familiar and re-exploring the well worn.

My current work at PATH is doing exactly that same work with the residents of Mile End. The area has most recently been typically represented by the Pulp song.

“Mile End”

We didn’t have no where to live, / we didn’t have nowhere to go
’til someone said / “I know this place off Burditt Road.”
It was on the fifteenth floor, / it had a board across the door.
It took an hour / to pry it off and get inside. / It smelt as if someone had died;
the living-room was full of flies, / the kitchen sink was blocked,
the bathroom sink not there at all. / Ooh, / it’s a mess alright, / yes it’s
Mile End. / And now we’re living in the sky! / I’d never thought I’d live so
high, / just like Heaven / (if it didn’t look like Hell.)
The lift is always full of piss, / the fifth floor landing smells of fish
(not just on Friday, / every single other day.)
Below the kids come out tonight, / they kick a ball and have a fight
and maybe shoot somebody if they lose at pool.
Ooh, / it’s a mess alright, / yes it’s / Mile End.
[mumbled mutterings… you love it…] Oo-ooh / Nobody wants to be your friend
’cause you’re not from round here, / ooh / as if that was
something to be proud about. / The pearly king of the Isle of Dogs
feels up children in the bogs. / Down by the playing fields,
someone sets a car on fire I guess you have to go right down
before you understand just how, / how low,
how low a human being can go. / Ooh, / it’s a mess alright, / yes it’s
Mile End. / (don’t do that! Leave it out!) / Bababa…
Lalala…

My work with the community led to a series of postcards ‘Greetings from Mile End’. These offer a different visual narrative and the visuals serve as illustrations to the quotations that have been provided by the residents of the area.

http://www.theinternationale.com/PATHgreetings/

This collage of the familiar and the re-invented sparked by the visit to an old familiar/unfamiliar place, compounded by fact that I was seeing a team of people struggling with concepts which I could give voice to, created a surreal looking glass impression of the day.
I was not the only one of the conference attendees to be aware of this curious sensation.

The work that we had shared from Febrik and Lottie Child (set to the backdrop of the whistfulness of Cotterell’s work, ) really did allow the adults to step through a mirror into the world of the child’s perception and rediscover for themselves the things that were once so familiar.

Perhaps my frustration with the lack of knowledge of Playwork language of the projects stemmed from jealousy.
I was certainly envious of the wonderful projects that they had done ion this estate. But more than that it recalled to me the days when I was discovering playwork and play for myself and the slow, endless stream of excitement that went along with re-discovery and understanding of the very old. It seems to me that just as play has to be discovered by every child, so adults should spend time discovering for themselves, in their own ways, the importance of play in all our lives.

This is a piece of writing that was produced as a result of the CABE Scholarship.
A study tour of Amsterdam play places allowed me to reflect on the places where my children and family friends had played throughout their childhoods.
I knew these places were successful, but I didn’t know why .
This essay considers the history and ethos behind this design.
A photo essay will follow.