From Historical Terror to Personal Tragedy

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