
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
After the Second World War, a vast experiment took place in which adventure playgrounds transformed bombsites and waste ground in the UK, creating opportunities for children, beyond the sanitised safety of more conventional play spaces with swings and see saws. Laurie Taylor talks to Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex about the range of people whose celebration of children's imaginative capacities re-invented the notion of play, from Northern Europe to North America. Designers, social reformers, and even anarchists, saw these sites of fun as the foundation for the creation of citizens and agents of social change.
What remains of those post war playgrounds, in the here and now, and what can the astonishing ambition of those spaces tell us about the power of play in an age of risk aversion?
Producer: Jayne Egerton
4.5
294294 ratings
After the Second World War, a vast experiment took place in which adventure playgrounds transformed bombsites and waste ground in the UK, creating opportunities for children, beyond the sanitised safety of more conventional play spaces with swings and see saws. Laurie Taylor talks to Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex about the range of people whose celebration of children's imaginative capacities re-invented the notion of play, from Northern Europe to North America. Designers, social reformers, and even anarchists, saw these sites of fun as the foundation for the creation of citizens and agents of social change.
What remains of those post war playgrounds, in the here and now, and what can the astonishing ambition of those spaces tell us about the power of play in an age of risk aversion?
Producer: Jayne Egerton
5,406 Listeners
1,854 Listeners
786 Listeners
157 Listeners
7,816 Listeners
284 Listeners
484 Listeners
1,782 Listeners
1,070 Listeners
904 Listeners
273 Listeners
74 Listeners
2,062 Listeners
1,059 Listeners
588 Listeners
709 Listeners
851 Listeners
245 Listeners
291 Listeners
819 Listeners
400 Listeners
81 Listeners
768 Listeners
3,037 Listeners