The playgrounds in our public parks have a history that is as rich and important as the rest of the landscape, but they are little understood. Landscape historian Linden Groves takes us through three centuries of playgrounds in parks, to tell the story.
In the beginning, by which I mean the second half of the 19th century, the word ‘playground’ did not yet come with today’s assumptions of half a dozen pieces of equipment for children to play on. Instead, it was simply land set aside for play in a variety of ways. This mainly meant sports such as football or archery, but could also cover games such as marbles and skipping and there were also quoit and skittle alleys. Some areas boasted ‘gymnasia’, large pieces of equipment such as trapeze rings and horizontal bars to allow adults and youths to climb and swing, for exercise rather than play. Giant strides were also popular – these offered a twist on the traditional maypole, where instead of merrily weaving with ribbons, users hung onto ropes to swing exuberantly around a pole.
One of the first major playgrounds in the capital was at Myatts Fields, in South London. Myatts Fields was created as a public park in 1889 by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association and was designed by Fanny Wilkinson, one of the first professional women landscape architects. She included gymnasia with ‘giant strides swing frames’ at £38 5s – one gymnasium for boys and one for girls, as it was customary to keep males and females separate. A “very necessary” watch box for an attendant was placed in the fence between the two playgrounds, with doors opening into each.
By the start of the 20th Century the concept of playgrounds for children’s play, as opposed to being places where everyone could exercise, was fully awake. One of the things I love about playground history is ‘watching’ the grown-ups trying to do their best for children! A children’s playground was created in Kensington Gardens for the first time in 1909 (this would, much later, evolve into the Diana Memorial Playground, created in 2000). The National Archives’ records for the Office of Works, which was then responsible for the Royal Parks, show that the Kensington Gardens playground was to have a sandpit, giant stride, 20 swings, a fountain, and an attendant’s shelter. Peter Pan author JM Barrie had paid for the sandpit and swings. There was to be an attendant, as was usual at the time, whose role would be to keep the playground tidy and ensure good behaviour and safety. The kind of rules they had to oversee included, “Boys up to the age of 10 and girls up to the age of 14 only are allowed to use the Playground”, anyone who doesn’t comply with the attendant’s instructions should be excluded, and, “Women in charge of young children are admitted to the enclosure, but may not use the swings etc.”
The Kensington Gardens playground was a hit, with an estimated average of 500 children “of the poorest class” reportedly using the ground. A letter in The Times that summer proclaimed: “Anybody who cares for the happiness of children will honour the name of the first Commissioner of Works and the generous donors of the drinking fountain, &c., to the children’s playground in Kensington Gardens. Why did nobody think of this before? Spend ten minutes at the railings on any fine day, and even a park ranger would cease to be a cynic.” There was a complaint too about the playground being closed on a Sunday, which had been standard since playgrounds started to be created in the 19th century: “Lastly, but indeed not least, why close this “kids’ paradise” on Sunday? Perhaps it is necessary and right to do so during Church hours, but surely when the public houses are open the playground should be also. I am not against people having their beer on Sundays, but I am against stopping children’s harmless games.”
By the 1920s the playground was also receiving attention from Hubert Seligman, the son of wealthy German-American banker Isaac Seligman, who was moved to donate funds for new play equipment. Isaac Seligman had in 1899 – when Hubert was 18 – bought 17 Kensington Palace Gardens, then (as now) a prestigious address. It would seem that Hubert was quite fond of playground philanthropy, and the Archives are peppered with correspondence between him and the Department of Works in which they accept, and perhaps even encourage, more and more donations of playground equipment. He offered two see-saws for the Kensington Gardens playground; in the event though it was decided that a better purchase would be a plank swing, an enormously long swing that moved from side to side with multiple children on it. The plank swing given by Seligman to Kensington Gardens was supplied by playground manufacturer Charles Wicksteed & Co Ltd at a cost of £30.0.0, and was “greatly appreciated by the children” on its installation in January 1924. In 1927 another plank swing was ordered from Wicksteed & Co at a cost of £16.1.9, with free delivery.
Charles Wicksteed was one of the fir playground equipment manufacturers, developing the business from an engineering works’ sideline to an industry of its own. Through the next decades he and his firm promoted children’s outdoor play and equipment, helping ensure that today there is an assumption that parks
include playgrounds, and that playgrounds include kit.
For many years these playgrounds were largely simple, flat spaces filled with apparatus of various kinds. By the second half of the twentieth century, however, some of the best playgrounds provided a playful landscape too in which swings, slides and climbing frames could sit. One such playground was added to Alexandra Palace Park (‘Ally Pally’) in the early 1970s, and this still largely survives. Around the edge are circular brick-edged planting beds weaved through with low concrete benches or – depending on your perspective – raised pathways for adventuring and balancing! To one side is a locally-iconic concrete doughnut play sculpture, over which generations of children have scrambled. Within the main play area, which is spacious and fenced, there are more low concrete benches or balancing walkways. There is also a circular sandpit, which always teems with small children.
Perhaps the star of the show at the Ally Pally playground is a long slide which runs from top to bottom of an artificial mound, with gentle slopes of muddy grass on three sides and a near sheer face at the front down which the slide runs. This playground is a surviving archetype of the period’s design at its best. The ‘large sized hill or mound’ is perhaps the single most defining play feature of that time, coming after a century of playgrounds being notably flat.
Such hills or mounds were much admired by Drummond Abernethy, an influential play advocate from the National Playing Field Association: “Basically, this is one of the most useful facilities. The contours should be uneven: its outlines rugged and there should be deep indents. If the use is likely to be intense the surface should be hardwearing… However if it is humanly possible the hill should be turfed. This is particularly important for city children. It can be used simply for running and rolling up and down.
(Source: Linden Groves)
