Playful London

When playing also meant rebuilding

Last week, we travelled to Amsterdam to discover Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds: simple, open spaces that did not tell children exactly what they had to do. There we saw a fundamental idea: a creative city is not necessarily the one that offers more things to do, but the one that leaves more things to decide.

Today, we cross the English Channel and arrive in postwar London, where the story begins in a far less gentle way.

During the Second World War, thousands of bombs fell on London. When the war ended, the city was full of gaps: destroyed buildings, empty lots, mountains of rubble and pieces of land that would take years to rebuild.

And something curious happened.

Children began to play there.

Where adults saw ruins, they found slopes, hiding places, materials, places to build shelters and territories they could transform. Many London children did not have gardens and were used to playing in the street. Those destroyed sites became, despite their dangers, new spaces for exploration.

And one woman knew how to look at this differently.

Lady Allen and another way of looking at ruins

Her name was Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood. She was a landscape architect and a tireless advocate for children’s play spaces.

Lady Allen had encountered a radical experience in Denmark, promoted by landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen. In 1943, a junk playground had opened in Emdrup, Copenhagen: a space where children could play with planks, tyres, old furniture and other inexpensive materials they could move, combine, build with and destroy. Lady Allen visited Emdrup in 1946 and spread the idea in Britain with a question that connected directly with the postwar London landscape: why not use our bomb sites like this?

The idea was surprisingly simple: the playground did not have to be finished. Children could finish it.

Lady Allen brought that philosophy to Britain. And London’s bombed sites offered an extraordinary setting in which to put it into practice.

Instead of installing only swings, slides and structures with a predetermined function, these new spaces offered sand, bricks, pipes, planks, tools and found objects. Adults were there accompanying play, the future playworkers, but they were not constantly organizing it.

The child could build a hut, take it apart, make a bridge, invent a shop, dig, make mistakes and start again.

From ByBa’s perspective, this difference is enormous. It is not only about offering a space to play, but about allowing the child to participate in creating the space itself. Play does not happen inside a finished scenery; play transforms the scenery. Creativity does not appear after design, as a use foreseen by the adult, but during construction, modification, trial and error.

Lollard Adventure Playground

One of those early places was Lollard Adventure Playground in Lambeth, opened in 1954 on the site of the former Lollard Street School, which had been destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. There, children could find sand, pipes, tools and old bricks, and the space could bring together around fifty children of very different ages.

The image is powerful because it condenses a cultural transformation. A place marked by destruction became a place where children could build. A site that adults might have seen only as remains, loss or waiting began to function as a territory for experimentation, autonomy and play.

This does not mean romanticizing war, ruins or danger. It means recognizing that there was a gaze capable of detecting, in the middle of a wounded city, a child’s need that was still alive: the need to explore, manipulate, transform, test capacities and appropriate the world.

For an adult, an old brick may be rubble. For a child, within a cared-for context, it may be the beginning of a wall, a shop, a border, a kitchen, a castle or a solution that does not yet have a name.

That passage from rubble to possibility is deeply creative.

Amsterdam and London were asking the same question

Van Eyck and Lady Allen were working almost in parallel and from cities deeply marked by war. But their answers were different.

In Amsterdam, Van Eyck built simple structures that could imaginatively become many things.

In London, Lady Allen defended places where even the structure itself could be built by the child.

One left interpretation open. The other also left transformation open.

And perhaps this is where one of the most interesting ideas in this story appears: a creative space is not necessarily the one that offers more things to the child. It is the one that leaves more things undecided.

This runs quite against our current tendency to finish everything before the child arrives. We buy the little house that already looks like a house, the castle that already looks like a castle, the kitchen that already looks like a kitchen. The object arrives with a closed identity, a predefined function and an almost written story.

Adventure playgrounds proposed something else. They did not say: “here is a house to play house in”. They said, much more openly: “here are materials; what could exist here?”.

The difference may seem small, but it changes the child’s position. They are no longer only the user of an adult design, but a partial author of their environment. They do not only enter a game; they participate in creating the conditions of play.

Playing can also mean rebuilding

This is why London adds something fundamental to the conversation we opened with Amsterdam.

In Van Eyck, the child interprets. An abstract form can be many things.

In Lady Allen, the child transforms. An available material can become something that was not there before.

Both operations are deeply creative. Interpretation opens meaning; transformation modifies the world. And childhood needs both: spaces that do not tell children exactly what to imagine and materials that do not tell them exactly what to build.

At ByBa, we are especially interested in this dimension: creativity is not only having ideas in the head. It is the capacity to intervene in a situation, reorganize what is available and produce a new form from imperfect conditions.

Playing with remains, planks, sand or bricks is not simply entertainment. It is learning that the world can be modified. That something broken can be reorganized. That a solution can be tested with the hands. That a construction can fall and be raised again in another way.

A small experiment for home

At ByBa, we propose trying this week a domestic and safe version of this idea: leave children some materials whose destiny has not yet been decided and resist, for a while, one of the adult’s greatest temptations: explaining what they could do with them.

It can be cardboard, rope, fabrics, pegs, boxes, tubes, wooden pieces, stones, leaves, clean containers or any material that is age-appropriate and safe to handle. The key is not the quantity or sophistication of the material, but the fact that it does not arrive with a closed answer.

There is no need to say “build a house” or “make a bridge”. It may be enough to ask: “what could this be?”.

And then, observe.

Perhaps Lady Allen’s legacy is not to teach us how to build better playgrounds. Perhaps it is to remind us of something much simpler: children also need places and moments that adults have not yet finished.

Because when we leave something undecided, we are not leaving an emptiness.

We are leaving space for a possibility to appear.

Clody, Lady Play @ ByBa