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
