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Adrian Hon

Just finished Ben Highmore's wonderful book Playgrounds: The Experimental Years.

It's all about the ambitions of 20th century junk/adventure playgrounds that gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and in so doing, inoculate them against fascism. reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/playg

Reaktion BooksPlaygrounds | Reaktion BooksIn the decades following 1945 a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings and roundabouts, the new playgrounds encouraged children to build shacks and invent their own entertainment. This book tells the story of how bombsites and waste ground were transformed into hives of activity by children […]
Jan 24, 2025, 02:48 PM·Public·Ivory for Mac
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Adrian Hon

Here's Carl Theodor Sørensen writing in 1935 about a junk playground – very different from the orthodox playgrounds with fixed slides and swings.

Sørensen notes that playgrounds dedicated to constructive play "would look terrible" – a challenge that gravely hampered their prospects later on...

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 green- ery, 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 country- side 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.
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Adrian Hon

Sørensen built his playground in Emdrup, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, in 1943. Danish parents wanted a space where kids could play without Nazis occupiers suspecting they were saboteurs.

He later wrote, "of all the things I have helped realise, the junk playground is the ugliest: yet for me it is the best and most beautiful of my works."

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Adrian Hon

Junk playgrounds had playworkers. John Bertelsen was the first in the Emdrup playground, and understood the assignment "to avoid serious intrusion into their fantasy world".

Bertelsen was the director of Emdrup between 1943-7. During that time, he kept a journal that reads like a model of self-reflexive practice. In 1945 he wrote, ‘I am of course employed as a leader, but on an adventure playground this is hardly the accepted idea of a leader and organiser who works, as it were, from the outside.”'4 He goes on to say that ‘I cannot, and indeed will not, teach the children anything.’15> This refusal of the role of pedagogue is central to the emerging practice of playwork. The relationship between the person employed to supervise the playground and the children and young people who use the playground will be consistently debated across the decades. For Bertelsen it was crucial that the playworker remain within the same imaginative orbit as the children: ‘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.16 This didn’t mean that expertise wasn’t also necessary.
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Adrian Hon

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 a began collective building projects.

One part of the account of the Minneapolis playground has become almost a fable of the social possibilities afforded by junk and adventure play-grounds, and it is worth giving space to the story. This is a story that will be reproduced in many accounts of the junk and adventure playground: 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.
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Adrian Hon

Around 1953, junk playgrounds were renamed "adventure playgrounds", to placate nervous officials. (IMO this has become quite confusing today!)

The Lollard Adventure Playground in London ran from 1955-60. The children wrote a magazine; they describe how they "can have fires, cook, and build things":

Let me introduce you to Lollard Adventure Playground, in London's Lam-beth, just off the Lambeth Walk. Or rather, let me have some children who were using the playground in 1957 introduce it to you: 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.20 This is from the first issue of the Lollard Playground Magazine, a magazine written and printed by the young people who attended the playground, who at other times might be found cooking, building, chatting and dreaming. Or tending one of the endless fires that the kids started, and which meant that wood was in constant demand. But let me introduce it to you again, this
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Adrian Hon

Older children built their own workshop and helped fix up the rooms of local pensioners.

They also performed musicals, and after starting a magazine, they realised they could write their own scripts. Apparently the shows "vastly improved" as a result.

When in 1960 the Lollard Adventure Playground Committee announced the imminent closure of the playground it provided a synopsis of its main achievements: The older boys and girls built their own Workshop and organised teams to re-paper and paint the rooms of Old Age Pensioners; gardens were created by making compost from the waste material from the Lambeth Walk Street Market; operettas were composed and acted and a Playground Magazine published. Perhaps the chief delight has been building huts and shanties, cooking meals on camp fires and offering gracious hospitality. 28 This quick list of activities reserves pride of place for the den building, but also stresses the other attributes associated with it: dens weren't just places to be planned and built they were places to occupy and practise hospitality with cooking on open fires. Alongside the hut building are a host of other activities that are less often associated with adventure playgrounds - gardening, community-directed work, animal care, cycling, painting, mechanical maintenance, hair and beauty training, writing and producing musicals (operettas) and publishing a magazine.
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Adrian Hon

The Lollard Adventure Playground was sexist – the workshop was for boys only.

But the Crawley Adventure Playground had a woman as playleader. She got them involved in building a shack and sawing wood.

The big news story for the playground in May 1958 was the completion of a second building - a new workshop that had taken many months of construction. The workshop was built with the express purpose of providing a space for the older boys to learn mechanical skills, and to work on constructing bicycles, mending motorbike engines and working on models. The reporting of its opening in the magazine is less a celebration of its achievement and more a recognition of its exclusivity: 'The boys and the help of some older men built the workshop for boys only ... The hut took about six months to build. The boys have built the new hut as a workshop. The rule is that every boy over 12 has to pay subs. If at school 6d if at work 1/-. This does not apply to girls. But girls cannot go in the workshop. Only boys can. 34 You can also see the recognition that girls were often marginalized within the playground by the decision to use a photograph of girls painting the hut for the cover of the 1959 playground brochure. It was a way of compensating for the dominance of boys in the playground and trying to be more inviting for girls. The Crawley Adventure Playground, which unlike Lollard had a woman as the playleader, took a more direct approach to challenging perceived gender roles. In their brochure a photograph of two girls involved in building a shack on the adventure playground is titled with the question 'who said girls can't saw?'
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Adrian Hon

In Switzerland, Lederman and Trachsel built playgrounds with the goal of encouraging co-operation and negotiation.

In Zurich-Wiedikon, children had an entire homemade town "made of packing cases, planks and scrap materials in a perpetual state of construction and demolition" complete with its own parliament.

An even more extensive recreational centre was built in Zürich-Wiedi-kon on a 16-acre plot of a former clay pit. The centre 'takes care of all the needs of a town population [of 30,000] for active recreation, from competitive sport to casual relaxation. Every age group from small children to elderly walkers can find a wide variety of possible activities.'! The Zürich-Wiedikon centre had a number of outdoor swimming pools, sports facil-ities, large grounds with areas of grass and woods and various buildings for pursuing any of a number of creative hobbies. In one section of the complex there was an area where the practice of den building had been raised to a whole new level of ambition. Nestled into the West side of the site was the 'construction playground' (der Bauspielplatz), which looked uncannily like a nineteenth-century frontier town as depicted in Hollywood Westerns of the 1950s and '60s. This was a children's town: '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.'! Constructing buildings, it could be reasoned, is the first step in building a democratic society, because it always involves a collective effort, and always involves the allocation of resources and the sharing of abilities.
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Adrian Hon

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

But as Sørensen predicted, no-one wanted an ugly playground. They'd rather have a clean, sterile, controlled environment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KidZania

en.wikipedia.orgKidZania - Wikipedia
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Adrian Hon

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.

Diagram of the Children's Creative Centre and Play Area for the Canadian Government Pavilion at Montreal Expo 67, featuring an undulating grass landscape full of trails and trees and climbing areas.
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Adrian Hon

Oberlander decried how "orthodox" playgrounds were sterile spaces with standardised eqiupment.

"This is passive entertainment ... we must raise a generation that wants, and knows, how to be involved."

mounds and irregularities are levelled off, trees removed, asphalt is poured over the whole thing, and standard bolted-down metal apparatus is erected, exactly like that in every other playground the child has ever seen. 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. 15 Encouraging children's involvement, for Oberlander, meant re-creating the opportunities that nature can supply. Oberlander's contribution to the Creative Centre was an outdoor playground called, somewhat prosaically, 'Environment for Creative Play and Learning'. You can get a sense of the ethos behind her playground design from an article that she published at the time of the opening.
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Adrian Hon

Ben Highmore and Oberlander note that playgrounds 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.

Today, Minecraft and Roblox do some of this very well – but not all of it.

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Adrian Hon

As inspiring as the experimental playground movement is, it would be a mistake to nostalgically aim to 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.

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

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Adrian Hon

Ben was also interviewed on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed podcast, which is where I learned of this book! bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027507

BBCThinking Allowed - Playgrounds - BBC SoundsThe social history of the playground.
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Adrian Hon

In Switzerland, Lederman and Trachsel built playgrounds with the goal of encouraging co-operation and negotiation.

In Zürich-Wiedikon, children had an entire homemade town "made of packing cases, planks and scrap materials in a perpetual state of construction and demolition" complete with its own parliament.

An even more extensive recreational centre was built in Zürich-Wiedi-kon on a 16-acre plot of a former clay pit. The centre 'takes care of all the needs of a town population [of 30,000] for active recreation, from competitive sport to casual relaxation. Every age group from small children to elderly walkers can find a wide variety of possible activities.'! The Zürich-Wiedikon centre had a number of outdoor swimming pools, sports facil-ities, large grounds with areas of grass and woods and various buildings for pursuing any of a number of creative hobbies. In one section of the complex there was an area where the practice of den building had been raised to a whole new level of ambition. Nestled into the West side of the site was the 'construction playground' (der Bauspielplatz), which looked uncannily like a nineteenth-century frontier town as depicted in Hollywood Westerns of the 1950s and '60s. This was a children's town: '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.'!
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Clive Thompson

@adrianhon We never got a full on junk playground in Canada but we got some pretty close ones in Toronto in the 70s and early 80s

There was an elementary school playground not far from my house that had a massive pile of telephone-pole-sized beams, all piled up in a weird jumble — you could crawl around inside the negative space

It was *wild*

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Adrian Hon

@clive I don't think I've ever seen one myself but it sounds like Canada was pretty keen on them in the 70s and 80s, yes! Everything is much more organised now...

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HïMY SYeD🟩:mstdn:

@clive @adrianhon The Leslie Street Spit was never within anything considered walking distance by Toronto's East End kids,

Yet,

Whenever I biked out there,

Among the debris landfilling the spit into being,

Were wonderous creations of bricks and cement blocks and rebar and tiles and poles.

That's where I made many found object Labyrinths, some as large as fifty or sixty feet in diameter.

Alas, the overpolicing of the Spit has taken even this away from Toronto's present day kid bike tripping

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Clive Thompson

@HiMYSYeD @adrianhon

that is so interesting to hear!

I should add that when I grew up in North York in the 70s, it was rapidly expanding, so within a block or two of my house there were tons of houses under construction

At night my friend and I would go into the half built houses, wander around, grab stray bits of wiring and pieces of cast-off wood and use them to make things

basically our own de facto junk playgrounds lol

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HïMY SYeD🟩:mstdn:

@clive @adrianhon YES!

TRUE for my Toronto childhood elsewhere in Etobicoke, East York.

Sadly,

I found biking around such construction sites in the late 1990s and onward,

I encountered lowly paid security guards would politely approach me and ask I NOT bike through their private property under construction.

That was likely enough of a visual deterrent to stop young kids from doing what you and I did when their age.

Alas, newer generations lose this bit of childhood self-agency & discovery

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Andrew White

@clive @adrianhon There are currently some good adventure playgrounds in Toronto. Best one is Dufferin Grove. There are planks, buckets, logs, shovels, and a hose hookup (when the weather is appropriate). Not quite the same thing as the earlier ones Adrian mentions, but my kid loved it, and it was always busy.

dufferinpark.ca/play/wiki/wiki

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Clive Thompson

@adrianhon @awhite

Oh right on! I didn’t know about that one, sounds amazing

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Clive Thompson

@ranjit @adrianhon

oooo, no, didn't know it existed!

I'm gonna check it out this spring after it warms up and there's more activity

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Stewart Russell

@adrianhon pls pls pls let this book have something about the bizarre play spaces developed by Keith Albarn (aka Damon's dad) in the 70s

City Museum in St Louis is gloriously junk playground

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HïMY SYeD🟩:mstdn:

@adrianhon Toronto, My home town, had a large city-block-sized "Adventure Playground."

Located opposite and across the small channel from Downtown Toronto's present day Island Airport.

All the childhood "politics" and self-governance and collective self-agency you describe throughout this thread existed.

I experienced and witnessed much of it.

In true Toronto-ish municipal culture,

The Adventure Playground was split into two:

One for kids aged ~12-16,

+ smaller one for younger kids ~7-15.

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HïMY SYeD🟩:mstdn:

@adrianhon There was a category of "Gentrification" to our 1970s and early 1980s "Adventure Playground" then located in today's "Little Norway Park" along Toronto's Waterfront.

The design for "Ontario Place" located west of our Adventure Playground,

Included a "Children's Village".

Which even as an 8 and 9 year old could grasp shared "something" with the Adventure Playground.

youtube.com/watch?v=jJpmk7QOq3

YouTubeOntario Place - Children's VillageBy Retrontario
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Marsh Gardiner 🌱🐝

@adrianhon @clive this was such a lovely piece—thanks for posting it. (And @clive, you always delight!)

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Clive Thompson

@adrianhon @earth2marsh

Aha, so glad you liked it!

honestly in almost 30 years of magazine journalism, it’s in my personal top five favorite pieces I’ve written, maybe in my top three

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Marsh Gardiner 🌱🐝

@clive @adrianhon I'm not surprised to hear it might make your top three, but I'm also curious to understand why it holds that spot! What makes it stand out to you, if you don't mind. :)

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Clive Thompson

@earth2marsh @adrianhon

I think it's partly the subject matter touches on so many things I have a multidecadal interest in (games and the culture of play; indie computing decoupled from central control; the bleed between computational resources and aesthetic creativity; online self-governance) ...

... while structurally/stylistically it let me engage in the sort of ideas-journalism format I love: Profiles of fascinating individuals mixed in with theory, history, etc

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Marsh Gardiner 🌱🐝

@clive @adrianhon That scans!

I'll add that you provided much-needed sense-making for parents trying to understand the phenomenon that had captured their kids' attention. It felt to me as if you had worked to explain it to yourself so that you could explain it to your parent friends, and then you wrapped it up with a cultural bow. It was personal (and quite relatable).

Reading it ~9 years later, I'm curious to know how the kids you interviewed see the impact Minecraft had on the paths they took. What affect did the Ian Bogost's (maybe @ibogost?) of the world observe, if any?

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Clive Thompson

@adrianhon @ibogost @earth2marsh

it would be incredibly interesting to make contact with all those kids and find out how things have shaken out for them! Maybe I will do that sometime, good idea

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mhoye

@adrianhon This is fascinating.

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Ben Rosengart

@adrianhon @mhoye He sounds just like D.W. Winnicott. (This is high praise as far as I am concerned.)

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