When you picture a playground, what do you see? Perhaps a space with slides, swings, climbing bars, and merry-go-rounds, with asphalt underneath, or maybe a bouncier, colourful surface that undulates. If it’s a bigger playground, it might have wooden huts on stilts with wood chips underneath – even a zip line, if you’re lucky.

Here’s what it won’t have: kids setting fires, sawing wood, cooking food, writing operettas, or constructing 50ft towers. It won’t look like a literal bomb site or junk yard. And it probably won’t have kids aged two to twenty.

But during the 20th century, all of these things happened. The post-war period saw “junk playgrounds” flourish as a kind of reparations for the trauma of war. They gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and in doing so, inoculate them against fascism. For a while it seemed like they were the future. Not any more.

I learned all of this from Ben Highmore‘s excellent Playgrounds: The Experimental Years, which he also discussed on the Radio 4 Thinking Allowed podcast. This post is a much-expanded version of a series of posts I made on Mastodon and Bluesky.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, western playgrounds were a contradictory mix of military academies to develop physical and bodily skills, and progressive spaces for collective effort and child-centred learning. Compared to “orthodox” playgrounds, they were designed for people of all ages including adults; they had indoor spaces for reading, sewing, carpentry, etc; and there was space for team-based games and marching.

Most importantly, they were supervised. As Luther H. Gulick, the first president of the Playground Association of America explained:

Real freedom is impossible without protection. An unsupervised playground is nominally free; in reality it is controlled by the strongest and most vicious element in the crowd. It is a dangerous place for girls and small children; it can be converted from a direct source of evil to a source of benefit by having some one put in authority, who will see that the ground is used for the purpose for which it was intended – that the older boys have their place and the smaller theirs, and that each is free within its own limits.

No bullies allowed, in other words. These supervisors would later be known as playleaders and playworkers, and were meant to be less of a teacher than a watcher – someone who would allow children to play with fire. Gulick noted:

Playing with fire is a little dangerous, and yet children cannot come to know fire except by playing with it in the same way as they have learned to know other things through play.

The idea was to encourage children to experiment, and thus to learn.

Some years later in 1935, Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen described his idea of a playground along the same lines, but made up from waste materials:

We should probably at some point experiment with what one could call a junk playground. I am thinking in terms of an area, not too small in size, well closed off from its surroundings by thick greenery, where we should gather, for the amusement of bigger children, all sorts of old scrap that the children from the apartment blocks could be allowed to work with, as the children in the countryside and in the suburbs already have. There could be branches and waste from tree polling and bushes, old cardboard boxes, planks and boards, ‘dead’ cars, old tyres and lots of other things, which would be a joy for healthy boys to use for something. Of course it would look terrible, and of course some kind of order would have to be maintained; but I believe that things would not need to go radically wrong with that sort of situation. If there were really a lot of space, one is tempted to imagine tiny little kindergartens, keeping hens and the like, but it would at all events require an interested adult supervisor.

Sørensen built his playground in 1943 in Emdrup, just outside Copenhagen. Denmark was occupied by the Nazis and parents wanted a space where kids could play without Nazis occupiers suspecting they were saboteurs:

Emdrup was massive: 65 by 82 metres. It was supplied with stone, earth, bricks, wood, iron, clay, water, planks, wheelbarrows, and various tools. Children held “building meetings” to decide how to safely construct caves and houses, and afterwards they were inspected by the playground leader. One of the biggest projects was a 50-foot tower made by three older children. They consulted books and got help from “practical people” in town, and set up a wind turbine at the summit to provide lighting for the rest of the playground.

Naturally, neighbours thought it was an eyesore and claimed to see children hurting themselves on it. One of its builders said:

I was woken up rather briskly yesterday morning by one of my chums who shouted madly that the tower on the playground had to come down now because the people who live opposite the adventure playground had seen children falling down from it masses of times. The peculiar thing is that I, who have been on the playground from early morning to late evening, have never seen anyone dropping down. But then of course I am only a boy of 14.

This was not the last time Sørensen’s prediction that junk playgrounds would “look terrible” would cause problems.

John Bertelsen was the first playworker at Emdrup. He wrote:

I cannot, and indeed will not, teach the children anything … I consider it most important that the leader should not appear too clever, but that he remain at the same experimental stage as the children. In this way the initiative is left, to a great extent, with the children themselves and it is thus far easier to avoid serious intrusion into their fantasy world.’

Inspired by Sørensen, Minneapolis opened their own junk playground called The Yard in 1949. At first, children hoarded the resources, causing a “great depression” in building and play materials. But after a couple of days, they spontaneously banded together and began collective building projects:

When The Yard first opened, it was every child for himself. The initial stockpile of second-hand lumber disappeared like ice off a hot stove. Children helped themselves to all they could carry, sawed off long boards when short pieces would have done. Some hoarded tools and supplies in secret caches. Everybody wanted to build the biggest shack in the shortest time. Glen [an adult supervisor] watched the dwindling stockpile and said nothing. Then came the bust. There wasn’t a stick of lumber left. Highjacking raids were staged on half-finished shacks. Grumbling and bickering broke out. A few children packed up and left. But on the second day of the great depression most of the youngsters banded together spontaneously for a salvage drive. Tools and nails came out of hiding. For over a week the youngsters made do with what they had. Rugged individualists who had insisted on building alone invited others to join in – and bring their supplies along. A dozen groups tore down their first attempts and started over with fresh recruits. New ideas popped up for joint projects. By the time a fresh supply of lumber arrived a community had been born.

As Highmore notes, against images of crypto-fascist naturalism such as Lord of the Flies, the junk playground offers another image of cooperation and spontaneous democracy.

(I’m reminded of Clive Thompson’s great piece about how children playing Minecraft learn the principles of self-governance to prevent each others’ works from being destroyed. More on Minecraft later…)

Around 1953, junk playgrounds were renamed “adventure playgrounds”, to placate nervous officials. I suspect this causes a fair degree of confusion today, since when I hear “adventure playground” I imagine a bigger playground, perhaps in the woods, not a junk playground. Anyway!

The Lollard Adventure Playground in London was on the site of a bombed school and ran from 1955-60. The children wrote a magazine in which described how they “can have fires, cook, and build things”:

In a small street in Lambeth there is a wonderful playground called the Lollard Adventure Playground. You can do just anything you like on the playground. You can have fires and cook and build things. There are lots of tools. The stores where the tools are kept is one of the most important things at the playground. All the things that the boys and girls use are issued from the stores. Tents, hammers, shovels, bicycles and lots of things are there. The stores are looked after by Ted who is fourteen and who is over there every day in the holidays and every night when he comes home from school.

Older children built their own workshop and helped fix up the rooms of local pensioners. They also performed musicals, and after starting their magazine, realised they could write their own scripts. Apparently the shows “vastly improved” as a result.

The Lollard Adventure Playground was sexist – the workshop was for boys only. But the Crawley Adventure Playground had a woman as playleader, and she got them involved in building a shack and sawing wood.

During the 1950s, the Swiss team of Lederman and Trachsel built playgrounds with the goal of encouraging co-operation and negotiation. In Zurich-Wiedikon, children had:

…a homemade town of packing cases, planks and scrap materials in a perpetual state of construction and demolition, displaying a surprising sense of instinctive design in its wealth of forms. The children have their own parliament to supervise their “town” and leisure activities.

This was a far cry from today’s hyper-commercialised Kidzania, where “participation” is laughably superficial compared to this wholly co-created world.

In 1967, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander designed an adventure playground for the Montreal Expo. Originally thought of as a kind of holding pen for children, it became massively popular with over 30,000 visits, many of them returning multiple times.

Oberlander decried how “orthodox” playgrounds were sterile spaces with standardised equipment:

This is passive entertainment. There is nothing here that the child can move, change, or adapt to himself; there is nothing to involve his imagination. We must raise a generation that wants, and knows how, to be involved; otherwise they will grow up not knowing what the pleasure of involvement can be … Playgrounds should encourage absorption in activity and unselfconscious concentration, they ought to provide seclusion from disturbing influences, afford a release from everyday pressures and give to the child at play the possibility of a make-believe world.

Adventure and junk playgrounds peaked in the 1970s, but the desire to make them look pretty stripped them of their anarchic streak. Richard Dattner’s adventure playground at Central Park West 67th Street was funded by the Lauder Foundation and Leonard Lauder, who said:

What is appropriate for probably the greatest masterpiece of landscape architecture, which is Central Park and I would no more think of putting those bridges and tires and loose pieces of wood in Central Park than I would of putting in an elaborate structure in the middle of a bombed-out area.

And so while the Dattner’s playground is much better than a flat, orthodox playground, it offers little capacity for experimentation and creation. Nevertheless, Dattner understood:

The place where children play is a sort of magic circle, outside and separate from the rest of the world; it has its own time, which cannot be measured by our clocks. Within this all is transformed and controlled by imagination, and a perfect world is possible.

Proponents of experimental playgrounds believe they can be more than spaces of vertiginous, physical fun. They should be spaces of concentrated creativity, where children can visit their own make-believe worlds. Instead, the modern world has commercialised play and made boring, insurance-friendly playgrounds.

Some junk playgrounds still exist. Alexandra Lange wrote about Kodomo Yume Park in Tokyo, which lets children hammer and teens use a recording studio.

Minecraft and Roblox allow children to experiment and create their own make-believe worlds, too. Unlike real world playgrounds, they can teach programming and bring children together from around the world. But they lack the multisensory, physical experience and sheer wealth of affordances of junk playgrounds, as well as the supervisors to facilitate risky play.

As inspiring as the experimental playground movement is, it would be a mistake to nostalgically replicate it fully. It had a “loose anti-urbanism” and valorised rural life. We all know that children don’t have enough physical spaces to play in, but we can’t go back.

My current research is on the history and rise of immersive art, including larp (live action role play), which I think represents the state of the art of immersive experiences and embodied play. It’s striking that Denmark, home of Sørensen’s Emdrup playground, now has a very strong larp movement focusing on children; apparently 8% of Danish kids aged 10-14 play larp each month.

Our challenge now is to design imaginative, co-created, embodied play that can exist in cities and compete with video games.

This post only scratches the surface of Ben Highmore’s book, Playgrounds: The Experimental Years – do check it out!