How the UK's children lost their Play Streets

Painting the town apple green

In the summer of 1903, George Harwood, Member of Parliament for Bolton, got to his feet in the House of Commons. The new-fangled motor car was playing on his mind, in particular the speeds they could reach. He told of the sensational result of a recent experiment he had performed while being driven to an appointment. With an elegant fob watch in hand, Harwood timed the speed of the car he was travelling in and was alarmed to discover it going at over 30 miles an hour. “Car after car was racing along the same road palpitating, throbbing, turning the whole of the thoroughfare into chaos and confusion,” the former preacher thundered.

Today it is hard to imagine that the speed Jeremy Clarkson backs his Ferrari into his garage could cause such alarm. But back at the start of the last century the motor car was viewed in some quarters as a menace that needed restraining. In 1912 Lord Lamington - to this day a household name in Australia for the sponge cake named after him - demanded a 15mph speed limit inside London. Within the same speech to the House of Lords he identified that children “have not many recreation grounds in London and it is only natural that they should play in the streets”.

This was perhaps the beginning of what would become the greatest gift to London’s children you’ve probably never heard of: the Play Street. Urban playgrounds Play Streets began in the USA at the start of the last century. The New York Times of May 7 1909, under the headline ‘Plan Safe Streets for Children’s Play’ explained the proposal to readers. With 25 children recently killed playing on streets where traffic was peaking at ‘25 automobiles an hour’ the time had come to take action. Within a few years New York’s officials established 100 Play Streets across the city, creating in an instant new urban playgrounds while appeasing drivers who would no longer have to dodge children trying to play stickball or Shinny - the street versions of baseball and hockey respectively - or Potsy, a variant of Hopscotch.

It would take twenty years for the New York model to be replicated in Britain. However, by 1936 Salford and Manchester had created 200 Play Streets with a dramatic fall in child fatalities and accidents, a fact central government could not ignore. A politician with vision was needed to roll out Play Streets across the country. Fortunately the Minister for Transport in the mid-thirties was not short on vision. In just three years, Leslie Hore-Belisha was busy planting thousands of blinking orange road crossing beacons across the UK, devising the driving test and overseeing a thorough rewrite of the Highway Code; each innovation saving countless lives.

Following a limited experiment in Southwark and Paddington, Belisha was confident enough to draft a bill to make Play Streets a permanent feature in inner cities nationwide. But before the bill became law - before Kick the Can and Hopscotch could be played in safety - he had to convince both Houses of Parliament to back the idea. One negative response came from Bermondsey MP Benjamin Smith. Unsurprisingly, this former taxi driver thought streets were not appropriate places for play.

Over in the House of Lords there was cross-party support for the bill although some peers had their own peculiar motivations. Labour’s Lord Strabolgi said he supported the bill if only to end what he described as the “terrifying sight” of seeing “young boys on roller skates on the public roads”. Another peer, Lord Eltisley, was appalled to discover that during 1935 over 2,000 children were found guilty of playing in the streets: “What an offence!” he mocked. After bouncing back and forth between the Commons and the Lords, the bill was finally passed and was given Royal Assent in July 1938.

By 1950 London’s Play Streets, with their apple green kerb stripes, were up and running in the old Metropolitan boroughs of Chelsea, Hampstead, Kensington, Shoreditch and Westminster. This would prove to be the ‘golden age’ of the Play Street but meanwhile the motorcar had been multiplying and it wanted the tarmac back. And there was a loophole in the 1938 bill wide enough to drive a bus (or any other vehicle) through. The bill allowed for ‘reasonable access to premises situated on, or adjacent to, the road’.

At the time of the bill’s entry into English law, car ownership was still relatively rare, so presumably ‘reasonable access’ was a consideration for milk carts and coal deliveries. But as car ownership increased in the fifties and sixties, Play Street space was being swallowed up by residents’ parking. By the early sixties, with 750 Play Streets in England and Wales, the Minister for Transport was receiving ominous complaints about the growing number of parked cars on Play Streets.

Where once an average London street in 1950 might have had five cars parked on it, by 1970 there were 20 vehicles with more to come. In 1976, Trevor Huddleston, the then Bishop of Stepney, observed in an interview with The Times that “Britain preferred motor cars to children and showed it by cluttering up Play Streets with parked cars”. By the 1980s the Play Street was no more than a vague memory with little hope of resurrection in the face of escalating car ownership. But a good idea is hard to kill off. In 2002 Farley Bank, a quiet cul-de-sac in Hastings, was designated a Play Street. The Manchester Evening News reported in 2005 that a few housing development was incorporating ‘family orientated play streets’ into the overall design, a planning feature replicated in 2007 at a similar development in Redditch, in the Midlands.

London Play is working on bringing Play Streets back to the capital, filling in the gaps where children are desperate for space to play. It might be incautious to suggest but perhaps we may at last be witnessing the Play Street’s apple green shoots of recovery.

Paul Hocker