Maisie Rowe

Wild things

Health and safety laws and New Labour targets put paid to the visionary original adventure playgrounds, but they seem to be making a comeback, says Maisie Rowe

issue 25 July 2015

Mud, timber, junk, fires, splinters, rust, daubed paint… Suddenly people are talking about adventure playgrounds again. With the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble constructing a new adventure playground in Glasgow, and their exhibition The Brutalist Playground at Riba, we’re being asked to think again about these ugly but lovable spaces.

It was the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood who saw that in these gloriously chaotic environments — with their dens, walkways, animals, zip wires and cargo nets — children could find a freedom, self-expression and self-determination that is denied to them elsewhere.

In 1946, on the way to Norway for a lecture tour, Lady Allen’s plane stopped to refuel in Copenhagen. Here, she encountered the junk play gardens set up by Danish landscape architect Carl Sorensen in a newly built housing estate in Emdrup.

‘I was completely swept off my feet,’ she wrote. ‘In a flash of understanding I realised that I was looking at something quite new and full of possibilities.

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