“The majority of existing playgrounds are still of the level asphalt type, with fixed equipment chosen from an ironmonger’s catalogue. Rarely is there grass, or trees, or flowers, or animals or any beauty. Children are increasingly condemned to live in a harsh, stark desert of hard surfacing. This antiseptic approach kills play stone dead…
It is the adventure playgrounds, where children can ‘do it themselves’, that are liberating, especially for those who live in the crowded cities and over-regulated and over-tidy housing estates. They are places where children can test themselves against new challenges in complete freedom.”
Lady Allen of Hurtwood wrote those words in her 1968 manifesto, Planning for Play. Hurtwood was an English landscape architect and one of the preeminent advocates for adventure playgrounds on both sides of the Atlantic. Finding vintage playground books can be a bit of a struggle, and the books can cost a pretty penny. But thanks to the blogger Paige Johnson, Hurtwood’s book is now available to inspire the next generation of playground designers
Johnson is a bit of a polymath; at her day job she works as a scientist studying nano-structures. In her spare time she blogs about playground design and history at Playscapes. She recently took the initiative to contact the copyright holders for a number of vintage playground books and got their permission to act as their digital publisher. In addition to Planning for Play, she is also publishing M. Paul Friedberg’s 1975 book Handcrafted Playgrounds.
Friedberg had a similar mentality as Hurtwood, as the book’s foreword explains: “Handcrafted Playgrounds is a sketchbook of designs based on two very simple premises: anyone can build a playground, and the actual process of building it can be as important as the finished product.
It gives the builders (who should certainly include the children for whom it is planned) a chance to shape their environment, to create something to answer their specific needs.”
Johnson is making the books available as PDFs for only $6 apiece, a price that indicates this is clearly a labor of love. Of course the playgrounds they show do not necessarily meet modern codes, so landscape architects are advised to take that into consideration as they try to replicate what made them work.