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Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds
We all have childhood memories of playgrounds. But what does the evolution of outdoor play in Britain tell us about the experience of being young over the past 200 years? Jon Winder serves up a history of sandpits, bombsites and battles with cars
Published: July 17, 2025 at 9:00 AM
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A pub might seem a strange place to begin a history of Britain’s playgrounds. Yet in June 1858, Charles Dickens delivered a speech at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street that, he hoped, would transform the lives of children across the imperial capital.
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As the guests dined on seasonal delicacies and fine wines, Dickens gave an impassioned plea on behalf of the Playground and Recreation Society, an organisation that had been established just a few months earlier with the express aim of providing “playgrounds for poor children in populous places”. To the accompaniment of music laid on by the band of the 1st Life Guards, the celebrated author extolled the benefits that having a “playground near to their own dwellings where they knew their children would be safe” conferred on parents.
“I venture to assert that there can be no physical health without play; and there can be no efficient and satisfactory work without play; that there can be no sound and wholesome thought without play,” he declared.
It was a powerful argument, and one to which Dickens’ audience evidently listened – for, by the end of the following year, the Recreation Grounds Act had made its way into law. Henceforth, local authorities across the land would be allowed to create and own playgrounds for children and young people. It marked a turning point in British children’s access to play. Or did it?
Children play in London’s Lisson Green estate in 1973. Since the Victorian era, playgrounds have been seen as vital to young Britons’ physical and moral development (Image by Getty Images)
The new legislation – and Dickens’ high-profile support – could have been a Big Bang moment for the playground movement in Britain. But, despite celebrity endorsement, political backing and widespread publicity, by 1860 the Playground Society had collapsed in a heap. It had amassed considerable debts – largely from putting on extravagant fundraising dinners. More damningly still, it had failed to create a single space in which London’s children could play.
The movement was hardly in full swing elsewhere, either. While dedicated play space was set aside in Salford and Manchester in the 1840s, unaccompanied children were barred from entering some city parks – notably Saltaire Park in Bradford – altogether.
This sorry Dickensian tale contrasts starkly with the state of play in modern Britain. Fast-forward to 2025 and you’ll find more than 26,000 children’s playgrounds in cities, towns and villages across the UK. And while the best efforts of Britain’s great novelist failed to save the Playground Society from financial disaster, today more than £85m is spent on maintaining playgrounds each and every year.
No one’s arguing that playground provision in modern Britain is perfect. Far from it. In fact, it’s a live debate as to whether playgrounds remain the best places for our children to be playing in the 21st-century city at all. However, one thing can’t be doubted. And that’s that to tell the story of the British playground is also to shine a light on what it’s meant to be a child in this country over the past 200 years.
Pollution and disease
Of course, child’s play didn’t begin with the Victorians. Archaeologists have discovered rag balls from ancient Egypt and sculptures of playing children from ancient Greece. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s remarkable Children’s Games (1560) depicts more than 200 children playing in 80 different ways.
We know that most Victorian working-class children played outside, often in the streets close to home. Although children and their families faced many difficulties at this time – including overcrowding, pollution and disease – finding places to play and friends to play with was rarely an issue. As more children spent their day in education rather than work, there was also more time to play after school, too.
Children learn the highway code in a traffic playground in north London, 1947. Playgrounds loomed large in postwar town planners’ thinking – a fact that was reflected in their growing sophistication (Image by Getty Images)
And yet social elites and urban reformers increasingly imagined the street as a bad place to play, long before cars were common on British roads. For William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, poor city children had a “miserable subsistence” and their play was “curtailed to the running gutter”. For housing reformer Octavia Hill, children learnt “lessons of evil” while playing in streets and alleys. In response to this growing sense of disquiet, the elaborately named Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard and Playground Association was founded in 1882 and became the leading advocate for children’s playgrounds in the late 19th century. But could it succeed where the Playground Society had failed?
One housing reformer believed that children learned “lessons of evil” while playing in the streets
The association was concerned by the “pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power” that it saw in urban working-class children. To address these alleged physical imperfections, it set out to create “a children’s playground divided into two portions, one for boys and one for girls, both supplied with gymnastic apparatus” within a quarter of a mile of every working-class home. Strong and healthy children would, after all, create more effective and efficient factory workers, soldiers and sailors.
By the early 1890s, the association had spent more than £14m in today’s money on upwards of 50 open spaces, including 20 with children’s gymnasiums. In Southwark, Little Dorrit’s Playground – named after the eponymous star of one of Charles Dickens’ most celebrated novels – cost the equivalent of £2.4m to buy and kit out.
Such spaces bore little resemblance to the playgrounds we know today. The separate areas for boys and girls reflected the inequitable gender norms of the time. And they were fitted with equipment that we would probably associate with Olympic gymnastics, including parallel bars, vaulting horses and gymnastic rings. At Spa Fields playground in Clerkenwell, a large gravel area doubled as a parade ground for local army reservists.
Whatever the expectations of adults, children seem to have enjoyed using such spaces. On a visit to a playground in 1896, the campaigner Isabella Holmes described a boy “whose clothes were literally dropping to pieces… and he twisted himself about on the handle swings, putting his toes through the handles, and performing all sorts of gyrations which many a well-fed boy, clad in the best of flannels, would have given his all to be able to accomplish”.
While children had been busy playing, by the early 20th century adult attitudes to playground design were beginning to change. For the author Annesley Kenealy, writing in 1907, the “pitilessly meagre surroundings” of most children’s gymnasiums did little to protect children from the “unwholesome sights and sounds of a sordid, huckstering, fetid slum street”. Better playgrounds were needed.
Children in the rubble of demolished houses in Hulme, Manchester, 1965. One study found that many youngsters preferred to play beyond the playground – even if there was one available to them (Image by Mary Evans)
Not fit to fight?
Such calls coincided with concern during the First World War about unfit conscripts and juvenile delinquency on the home front. Wartime investigations into the health and wellbeing of mothers and children concluded that a playground close to home was essential for a child’s proper physical and moral development.
Voluntary organisations, philanthropists, municipal parks departments and commercial manufacturers all responded enthusiastically in the interwar period. The National Playing Fields Association became an important advocate and funder of children’s playgrounds across the country. With King George V as its patron, and regular funding appeals on BBC Radio, the NPFA had considerable success in promoting the playground cause.
This cause was given greater urgency by the growing number of children being killed by cars. In fact, such was the death toll that street play was increasingly regarded as unacceptable. One coroner investigating the death of three toddlers observed that it was “not fair to drivers that parents should allow their children to play in the street”. The NPFA even campaigned against the temporary closure of streets to enable safer play, preferring instead to encourage children into playgrounds.
By the 1930s, there were nearly 50 playgrounds managed by the London County Council in the capital, with 26 in Manchester and many more elsewhere. The burgeoning demand for equipment saw manufacturing companies adapt their production lines. The entrepreneur and inventor who had the greatest impact on this development was Charles Wicksteed.
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On the back of earlier commercial success, Wicksteed created a public park in his home town of Kettering in Northamptonshire. Disappointed that so few children visited, he decided to make it a more exciting place to play. And so he designed a raft of products inspired by Edwardian amusement park rides in Great Yarmouth and Blackpool. These included the joy wheel (an early roundabout), the jazz swing (commonly known as a plank swing today), the ocean wave (witch’s hat) and large wooden slides.
A progressive liberal, Wicksteed hoped to create healthy, happy and free childhoods. Girls and boys, children and adults were all welcome to play together in the Wicksteed Park playground. Writing in 1929, he suggested that “the poor little gutter-children with all their hardships, playing with mud in freedom, are far happier than many well-to-do children under the perfect control and sad dullness and weariness of a too-much-ordered life”. His playground equipment was designed to be so robust that children could play with it however they liked.
And we’re not just talking British children. Soon, municipalities from across the globe were placing orders with the Northamptonshire entrepreneur. In fact, by the late 1930s, Wicksteed’s company had equipped more than 4,000 playgrounds – from South Africa to Hong Kong and Venezuela to the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena.
Wicksteed’s advocacy and wider shifts in social values meant that few playgrounds were segregated by gender by the late 1930s. But playgrounds now looked the same, no matter where they were in the world.
Children at play in St John’s Wood, 1962. While many playgrounds now sought to promote creativity and self-expression, sandpits (like the one in the foreground) remained a perennial favourite (Image by Getty Images)
Natural evolution
Back in Britain, swings, slides and roundabouts became an essential feature of efforts to redevelop British towns and cities in the mid-20th century. Slum clearance schemes, including those in Caryl Gardens in Liverpool and Quarry Hill in Leeds, positioned the playground at the centre of new blocks of flats. Sites requisitioned or damaged during the Second World War were also put back into playful use. Paddington Recreation Ground had been repurposed as a municipal piggery during the war, producing more than 300 tonnes of meat. It was reopened in 1948 by Field Marshal Montgomery with manufactured play equipment, a paddling pool and a sandpit. Town planners working on Plymouth’s reconstruction designed a network of more than 100 playgrounds in public parks and on bomb-damaged sites across the city.
The playground explosion may have been a big hit with children but, to many adults, it was a little dull. In fact, in the eyes of some commentators, Britain’s new wave of standardised playgrounds – with their uniform climbing frames and stark tarmac surfaces – were “as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring”. A postwar movement of progressive educationalists, landscape architects and artists, headed by Lady Allen of Hurtwood, envisaged a more fulfilling future for Britain’s outdoor play spaces – and it was one that promoted creativity, self-expression and contact with the natural world.
As an experiment, bombsites were converted into adventure playgrounds so that children could build with scrap materials, dig in the mud, nurse fires and tend small gardens. Sculptures, decommissioned steam rollers and immobilised trucks were meant to inspire make believe. Commando playgrounds incorporated tree trunks, suspended tyres and concrete pipes to provide “not only a free and varied outlet for energy but a spur to imagination and invention”. Landscape playgrounds had undulations, banks, trees and bushes as a more naturalistic setting for creative play. In a handful of cities, traffic playgrounds provided playful amusement and taught children about road safety.
Bombsites became adventure playgrounds where children could build with scrap materials and nurse fires
Children’s responses to these play spaces were seldom recorded. Instead, we must look to the work of sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s to get a sense of how playgrounds were used. One study of nearly 6,000 children found that swings and roundabouts primarily acted as a meeting point for friends and play mates, who then went on to play beyond the playground. Another study showed that more children preferred sandpits and paddling pools over manufactured equipment.
Overtaken by the car
These doubts about the value of the playground were reinforced by events in the later 20th century. Funding cuts meant that local authorities increasingly found it difficult to maintain play spaces. In 1973, Colin James, the bishop of Stepney, felt that many councils had got their priorities badly wrong, suggesting that “it is not through malice or evil intent I am sure, but they have been overtaken by the motorcar and other matters so that play provision has been left behind”.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as social housing and state-run industries were privatised, the children’s playground remained a publicly owned and communally funded place for play – although not without its share of problems. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers reported on the risk of parasitic infection from the snapping pincers of toxocara canis (dog roundworm) and the threat posed by paedophiles. Further funding cuts meant that many playgrounds became derelict, with the journal Play Times even running a monthly award for the worst playground in the country.
National government has rarely been interested in play provision. But in 2008, £235m was allocated to local authorities across England to improve playground provision. Accompanying guidance, called Design for Play, encouraged councils and designers to think more creatively about play provision. However, the implementation of policies of austerity from 2010 saw funding and guidance withdrawn.
Despite periods of neglect, the playground remains an everyday feature of British urban life. This is hardly a surprise given our almost universal – and often nostalgic – experience of using them. Children still enjoy digging in sandpits, the rhythm of the swings, and the trepidation of scaling tall climbing structures.
But we must not let this nostalgia mask problems with the playground concept. As the campaign group Make Space for Girls has shown, there is still much to do to ensure public spaces are welcoming to all children and young people. The obsession with playgrounds, often tucked away in the corner of a park, might even be seen as a distraction from wider efforts to create child-friendly towns and cities in which children rather than cars dominate our streets.
The long history of the playground helps us to understand how we arrived in the present. But it should not stand in the way of efforts to create inclusive and humane urban environments for the future.
Ropes, pulls and a joy wheel
Five fixtures of the British playground. But which was your favourite? 1. Swings Children and adults have long swung from ropes tied to the branch of a tree, while ingenious Victorian children fashioned rope swings from lamp posts. More formal swings were often a feature of travelling fairs and circuses. In the 1890s, bylaws for Victoria Park in London limited the cost to 1d a go. 2. Roundabouts Roundabouts evolved from an Edwardian amusement park ride called the joy wheel, and were found in both Great Yarmouth and Blackpool from around 1913. The ride was a polished mechanical disc that used high speed and centrifugal force to dislodge its adult riders. Charles Wicksteed marketed a joy wheel from the 1920s. Costing £40 and made from metal tubes, it was self-propelled, smaller and included plenty of places to hold on. 3. Sandpits German educator Fredrich Froebel promoted the use of indoor sandpits in the classroom from the 1820s. Sand first appeared in Victoria Park, London in 1893 when the park superintendent reported “a novel mode of enjoyment has been provided for the little children of the East End in the form of a sea-sand pit which is apparently much appreciated”. 4. Climbing frames Victorian gymnasiums for children and adults included wooden frames that supported ladders, ropes and poles for climbing. Climbing frames really took off from the 1960s as manufacturers experimented with new materials, including Playstyle’s ‘playcubes’ which comprised a series of interconnected plastic polyhedrons. 5. Slides Slides became a common playground feature in the early 20th century. Initially made from wood, they were soon constructed from metal with safety railings at the top. In the 1920s, a grand ‘joy slide’ was installed in St James’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, paid for by Arthur Carr, owner of the nearby Peek Freans biscuit factory.
Dr Jon Winder is a historian of modern Britain at the University of Liverpool
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This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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