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Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.4.0-nightly.2025-04-01

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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.
Public
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."

Public
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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