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Child's Play history continued

COBBLED STREETS.

We danced and played the cobbled streets

hard brick and stone beneath our feet

our homes were terraced all in line

red bricks back yard and washing line

Our lights were gaslight our rhymes were free

we played games in our street so merrily

we spun those tops and ropes of string

we hopped and skipped around the ring

Though the dogs did bark

the cats meowed

when the nights were dark

to play out late then was not allowed

The boys played soccer ball

with goal posts of caps and shirts

the girls played chase

though some got hurt

folks knew their place

For the streets were not so noisy then

we skipped and ran

we hopped and chased

when we were young

in our play space

We danced and played the cobbled streets

hard brick and stone beneath our feet.

The whip and tops had special names such as carrot granny, window breaker and spinny jenny. The lads had iron hoops whilst the girls had smaller wooden hoops. Children usually managed with discarded bike wheels. A penny now bought twenty marbles all made of chalk,whilst the larger ones were called tallys and these were taken from the insides of glass bottles. The children carried the marbles in flannel bags.

Girls still played hopscotch and tell me true and the boys played fox and hounds and pea shooters. There were regular concert parties held in tall tents with seats called leg danglers. There were now modern picture houses which showed silent movies with special children's matinees and a local pianist who played from a pit in front of the screen. However there was still little in the way of public recreation provision at that time.

Childs play in the nineteen thirties

In 1925 the National Playing Fields Association was founded and did much in the years ahead to draw the public attention to the importance of recreational provision for children. The N.P.F.A was to be incorporated by royal charter by 1933.

Just two years earlier in 1931 the Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørenson (1893-1979) had published Park Politics in Town and Country, a book that would be highly influential for European urban landscape planning but has now been largely forgotten. In it he coined the phrase ‘Junk Playground’ from his observations of children playing on empty building sites. He decided to integrate this idea into the designs for the open spaces he and his colleagues were designing for the new Danish housing associations and parks. In a later article he describes his idea:

“Finally 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". 2Of course it would look terrible.”

By now children's lives had changed a great deal, there were huge queues at the cinemas to watch the new popular talkies and everyone wanted to travel by train whilst millions of school children were now receiving free school milk daily.

Football on the streets

In country areas the fields were still the child's playground, here village children played at making paper dollies, daisy chains, buttercup chains, and whistles from alder trees. Small boys made a variety of trucks using wheels of old prams, boxes and nails, then they went collecting manure to sell in the nearby town.

Film of a village life in 1944.

www.youtube.com/v/6QbHhm4620I&feature

Childhood on the streets of London

http://www.age-exchange.org.uk/eastend/childhoodstreets/index.html

STEVENSON'S DAYS.

Next to the bathroom at the top of the stairs

i remember as children we all said our prayers

the lines of the tables and verse oh so neat

the manners of gentlefolk we all learned to speak

there was food on the table though morsels were meek

we were strong in our culture and our language was weak

we learnt from our masters and held back our tears

as we curtsied and frolicked throughout our play years

The poets were sound then with lines oh so sweet

there were hawkers and pedlar's all run down the streets

the air it was cold and the hares they did run

the farmland was plentiful by the roar of the gun

The fables and stories we were all told

our heroes were wise men and the hills made of gold

the church bells they rang and the congregation grew

there was laughter abroad then and boats sailed from Poole.

The first real attempt to provide a family community orientated play centre was undertaken in in Peckham south east London in 1935, this was known as The Peckham Experiment. H, Pearce and Lucy A Crocket 1945

In their account they state that,

"The child has no wish to be relegated to a world of its own, the world of its parents of grown ups, is a place of mystery and enticement to it and as it grows it longs to share in it more and more".

The Streets were their playgrounds.

BBC 4 FILM click pic

This century had heralded in new children's rights, reforms and social recreations and was therefore to be remembered by many historians as being, " The Century of the Child".

Empire Day celebration 1935 Poole

PLAYGROUND GAMES DURING THE LAST CENTURY

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/playground/index.ht

Memories of childhood

http://www.speakingvolumesonline.org.uk/editorial.asp?ia_id=606#anchor328

For an interesting look back at street play visit.

http://holyname.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/street-games.

An enchanting video of kids at play in 1934.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jff123/2422899001

A nostalgic look back to earlier times in Tottenham London.

http://www.geocities.com/summerhillroad2002/streetgames.htm

CHILDHOOD IN THE WAR YEARS 1939/45

St Paul's in London during the Blitz

Children evacuated during the war years.

pic Link for children evacuated

The War years of 1939-45 held many horrors for British children who lived through the bombings of the cities. A great many children were evacuated to country areas. Children were to witness loss of family members either fathers killed in the war or relatives friends and neighbours killed in the air raids.

The whole of the city became areas of bombed sites or houses left vacant and in rubble. Children would play on these wastelands throughout these years and into the fifties and throughout the sixties. For many children they held adventure and a means of creating good from bad. Here they played chase,sang their street rhymes or built inpromtu dens out of discarded rubble,wood planking and tin sheeting. So sprung up junk playgrounds throughout Europe,which in later years became the Adventure Playgrounds of today.

VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abLgfmzTO64

A look at the war years in the cities a childs perspective

http://www.macksites.com/light.htm

THE NINETEEN FIFTIES.

During the early 1950s Lady Marjorie Allen was promoting play streets which were designated streets for children’s play in city areas. These were closed to the traffic at specific times; they were overlooked and supervised by the parents of local children. One of the most prominent and successful play streets was at Paddington in 1953

june 1965

Childs play in the 1950s and sixties

Children playing on the streets and wastelands of London in the early nineteen

Adventure Playground emerged from movements in the 1950s/60s Europe,that worked to reclaim derelict urban spaces, many caused by the devastation of World War II. These were filled with trash and debris, the sites were considered unfit even for parking cars and were therefore abandoned by developers.

CRAWLEY ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND 1954

However, children had no qualms about these forbidden sites, often playing happily in rubble heaps. They seemed to prefer the informality of dirt and scraps to formal jungle gyms. that in ten years of experiment there was not one serious accident on any adventure playground whereas by contrast the architect designed play area in Camden claimed weekly accounts of broken bones, fractures cuts and bruises".

"The cost of one adventure playground leader’s salary who supervised up to 100 children at a time is less than the cost of one child in Borstal".

The growth of adventure playgrounds was another area where Lady Allen spoke out. The planners and architects of the city saw these sites as distasteful untidy and dangerous; hence they dubbed them “Steptoe playgrounds” in response to the popular rag and bone man TV series of that time Steptoe and son.

JUNK PLAYGROUNDS

http://threatnyouth.pbworks.com/f/Junk%20Playgrounds-Roy%20Kozlovsky.pdf

Brilliant film of Kids playing their rhyming verse in London wastelands in the 50s.

Click the link. http://www.youtube.com/v/9DrGijdmBqU

"Even in Dorset in the mid fifties I recall us kids built our own adventure junk playground on wastelands alongside the Wareham lady st marys church"

."Here we created dens out of wood ,iron,linoleum and grass sods of earth,here we spent a whole summer playing battles and soldiers".

"Then in later teenage years in the early sixties we created a woodland hideout at bovington camp out of discarded galvanised pig houses,spending whole summers living in the woodlands".

"See my childhood days section on this site.

Click on pic

Eventually parents and park designers realized that these non-traditional materials inspired creative, thoughtful play. The adults and children worked together to construct the kinds of play spaces the children wanted.

The playgrounds they built were not just play spaces; they were fodder for studies by child psychologists.

Proponents for Adventure Playgrounds claimed that the play environment they provided would help kids retain resilient and positive world-views. Adventure Playgrounds continually proved the value of learning experiences outside of school. Children could use the playground for exploring many real-life activities. (and even the imagined ones). Many of the constructions were clubhouse-type buildings that fostered elaborate games of pretend. Other equipment was designed for children to create multi-media art projects.

Landscape design innovator and father of the Adventure Playground, M. Paul Friedberg confirms,

“Our problem is that", "We want the child to be living in a padded box". "But a child has to have the real world, fraught with challenges to overcome.”

Friedberg’s conviction seems to have held true in England, as full-time employees staffed each adventure playground to oversee creative activities and aid in the general upkeep of the materials.