Children’s Play Area – No Dog Fouling

Over the holidays I was visiting my parents in North Yorkshire.  They live in a beautiful small village, from which my Mum has recently started blogging about their business making clocks, furniture and other items from local reclaimed wood.

While I was there I took some photographs of the local play area, which is a beautiful example of less being more when it comes to public play provision.  The space is part of the old village green, made a perfect island by the canal on one side and the river on the other.

To reach the play area, you follow the steps seen behind this sign and cross a stream – a nicely evocative ‘threshold’ moment, even when it’s not covered in ice.

The space itself is still mostly flat, with a few trees and no equipment whatsoever.  With snow on the ground however, there’s always lots to play with.  Big lumpy snow people and broken snowballs covered the ground, which was stamped flat in places with both big and little bootprints.

Even without the snow, though, there’s ducks to watch and feed:

Berries to collect and grind to juice, perfume or poisonous concoctions:

And places for your parent/carer/exasperated older sibling to sit in warmer weather:

It’s most importantly a place of remarkable beauty, that offers children the chance to engage with the landscape in a number of different ways.  There’s a spot on the riverbank well-stirred up with little sticks, and a path that go back along its length, towards the bridge beyond.

Finally, for those feeling properly adventurous, there’s a ford of stone paths across the river and back into the village itself.  It’s something that locals might easily take for granted, but which tends to inspire visitors with fears of getting washed away and into the freezing waters.

But my Dad said not to worry.

That hardly ever happens.

New York Playgrounds

There’s an interesting set of data maps on Sociological Images, correlating the locations of playgrounds in New York with the local average earnings.  It depicts a play landscape that the writer found surprising – one where the poorest neighborhoods were also those wealthiest in playgrounds.

It’s not really that surprising.  Areas with greater numbers of poorer people also have a higher proportion of public housing (in which those poorer people are living) and public housing projects are obligated to provide play areas.  Areas with wealthy residents, where land value is high and new builds are led by private companies, don’t tend to ‘waste’ money on places that won’t make any.  There have been some exceptions, and on-going battles in gentrifying neighborhoods to save existing playgrounds.  Over time, however, awareness of children’s need for doorstep play might change, leading more mobile and wealthier parents to perhaps seek out homes with doorstep play offers.  This could perhaps leading to family-oriented new-build communities that offer space at a premium cost – but then, don’t they call those the suburbs?

Still, it’s very interesting to see how wealth and access to services can alter over a person’s lifetime.  When young, they might live walking distance from a number of places set aside for play, then grow up to find legal aid or healthcare offers thin on the ground.  It’s also easy to assume that a playground is all it takes for children to be happy, that the space itself is the provision, but anyone who’s seen an inner-city playground knows that they are often not for kids.  Their use by gangs as recruiting stations and offices, the training of fighting dogs on rubber-seated equipment, and rampant neglect for years on end mean that playgrounds can actually become among the most dangerous places for children to be.  Public playgrounds shouldn’t have to be staffed, but they do need to be looked after, and in places where local residents are unable, unwilling, or just rightly afraid, to take on that responsibility, many children start looking elsewhere to play.

In wealthier neighborhoods I would assume that a higher proportion of children are ferried to activities, rather than playing out, or perhaps being taken to places such as Central Park that are farther away, but much lovelier.  I don’t know as much about the play habits of children in wealthier families, though anecdotally I would assume that they have a much larger expectation of homework and academic achievement, that they spend more time indoors and in front of screens than those in poorer families.

The interesting thing though, is how different publicly expressed concerns are for these two groups of kids.  The chorus of television, newspaper and blog posts on these subjects seem to boil down to two key concerns:  that wealthier children spend too much time indoors and may be growing up to be dull, uninquisitive and apathetic to natural environments, and that poorer children are spending too much time unsupervised and may be growing up to be drug-addicted criminals who will break into the homes of journalists or start dating their daughters.  Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think that much of the support for playgrounds and youth clubs in poorer neighborhoods stems from fear of these children, rather than concern for their welfare.

Because surely, if public playgrounds were designed to help children play, to explore their worlds and build new ones, to express themselves and experiment with new ways of being, to make and lose friends, to take risks and get hurt and heal stronger than before, they would look very different to the tarmac paving and metal rings that we so often take for granted.  If they were not designed for containment and ‘blowing off steam’, these playgrounds would look less like the exercise equipment in prison yards.  If they were really designed for children, rather than adults, they would look (as the saying goes) more like parks than parking lots.

“Fire don’t leave me now…

… not when I’ve loved you so much!”

In honour of the cold and overcast post-holiday greys, here’s a post on playing in the dark.

We often complain about early nightfall, the reduced numbers of children playing out and the problems associated with playwork in the darkness, and in doing so we miss the enormous possibilities.  With fewer children you can try offers that might be difficult otherwise, taking different risks.  For opening my eyes to the possibilities of darkness as a ‘loose part’ and the opportunities for winter play magic, I have to thank Penny Wilson and Kelda from PATH. 

For many people, sand pits and fires are impossible to offer for play, a state of affairs which is incredibly sad.  Children are perfectly capable of enjoying and exploring fire without setting themselves alight, and sand pits do not deserve their position as the latest health and safety nightmare.  Still, I know I was lucky to have the chance to lead on this session, in which we lit tiny fires in a sand pit (that we cleared out by daylight the following morning).  The children involved were roughly six to eleven, weighted to the younger end.

Because of the wind and the children’s lack of experience with fire, I decided to bring squares of firestarter bricks, rather than candles which would have gone out.  We put these in shallow holes in the sand, so it looked like this:

We then found that you could lean wax crayons over the flames, melting the wax without burning up the paper.

The wax could then be poured out onto a piece of paper, or flicked across it.

The greatest moments came after this, when it was too dark for artwork and the children lit fires  in curving pathways and fairy circles, which they then jumped in and out of.  Of course, there was a giant bucket of water nearby and the flames were a few inches high at most, but there was something profound for them in crossing a perforated burning line.  One older boy took great care in feeding cardboard scraps to a fire, lit off to one side, until it was quite large.  He laid sheets of paper on top, then watched the fire split them one by one into segments that peeled back from the flames.  When the paper was gone and the fire started to burn down, he was begging it to stay.