Who Owns the Playground? Space and Power at Lollard Adventure Playground (1954-1961)

This research aims to contribute to current debates about the reproduction of inequality through the construction of adult-implemented child-centric play environments. Using archival documents to build a case study analysis of Lollard Adventure Playground (1954-1961, hereafter ‘Lollard’), it explores how the emergence of a novel children’s rights discourse in post-war England was manifested spatially through one facet of the early adventure playground movement. The diverging interests and perspectives, spatial scales and particular sites from which the ‘right of the child to play’ emerged, reveal the contingency of this ostensibly universal object. Among other things, this thesis examines the re-construction of children as an object of knowledge, intervention and debate through the ‘practical experiment’ undertaken at Lollard. By examining how the practical work of constructing Lollard engaged wider debates and pre-existing social relations in the vicinity of the playground, this thesis also examines continuities, which a singular focus on the site as a ‘social’ experiment risks ignoring.