Playground Prequel
Letter Zero 25
Dear friend,
Last week I described an alternate reality where safety wasn’t the top priority for playgrounds. Today I’m giving you the prequel, uncovering a history of playground design that will still feel foreign to American ears. I am going to try to answer the question that ended last week’s letter. Can play save us?
During World War II, German bombers opened their bellies above London, dropping terror designed by Hitler to break the British will. Failing that primary objective, The Blitz succeeded in decimating the cities of the United Kingdom, leaving wreckage that would take decades to rebuild. Evacuations forced four million people out of their homes and when the families returned, they were confronted by rubble – piles of bricks and ashes, twisted steal, splintered wood beams, carcasses of cars, and trains whose twisted spines no longer clung to the tracks.
This is an odd landscape to find inspiration. And yet here in the most unlikely of places you would find children playing. As the city was rebuilt, the bomb sites became junkyards, filled with raw materials that the children transformed into playgrounds. Makeshift forts, teetering towers, tunnel systems – structures whose only limits were the child’s imagination sprung up from the wasteland.
The improvisational spirit of children to play with whatever material they have on hand doesn’t go unnoticed. Carl Theodor Sørensen, a Danish landscape architect, abandoned his traditional approach to playground design after he was forced to admit that children preferred to play everywhere but in the playgrounds that he designed. During Denmark’s occupation by the Nazi’s, a new type of playground was conceived by Sørensen. Instead of a carefully manicured experience, the kids would be given a designated space where they could dig through whatever junk happened to be donated to their cause. The first official junk playground opened in Emdrup, Denmark in 1943.
Junk playgrounds found an unlikely ally in a child welfare advocate in England named Marjory Allen. Lady Allen of Hurtwood was inspired by the experiments in Denmark and asked, “Why not use our bomb sites like this?” The idea was rebranded as adventure playgrounds and eventually a thousand or more of the makeshift parks were erected across Europe.
The idea was simple but controversial. Instead of engineering a play space where children are protected from the dangers of their curiosity, an adventure playground empowers them to figure it out themselves. For parents it is a nightmare because all they see are kids covered in dirt, swinging hammers, building fires, jumping off rickety structures, and manufacturing sharp objects. And yet somehow it works. Or at least it worked in Europe when this type of thing was still tolerated. Adventure playgrounds never really made the jump across the pond, and despite a few valiant attempts to bring this idea to life in America, the playgrounds of today have been standardized to include the ubiquitous swing set and slides. To do more than that is to invite lawsuits fueled by parental outrage.
Whether it is pristine playground equipment or a pile of planks, a child approaches them as user zero (That’s the name of my upcoming book in case you missed it). Their minds, prior to being imprinted by what an object is supposed to be, they naturally question what it could be. Where adults see trash, dirt, and danger, the child sees nothing but pure potential.
Through the glass of our phones and televisions it is easy to only see the warzone, to dwell on the rubble, to long for pristine structures that are protected from bombs. But there is potential hiding among the unwelcome destruction. Some people see it, our child-like imagination whirls with ideas about what we can build with all this raw material. School, work, medicine – nearly every institution that once seemed permanent is now primed for redesign. We could withdraw into the safety of our basement bomb shelters or we can choose to play here. What we build will be better than what came before, not because it was engineered to perfection but because it was born out of necessity. Let’s get dirty, embrace the risk, and try to have some fun exploring this new wasteland. This is how play will save us.
I’ll write again next Sunday. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Adrian