Adventure Playgrounds - A Brief History (Tony Chilton)

For those who haven’t heard it before, adventure playground is a playground set on an empty outdoor area, not with manufactured toys but objects, old articles or even junk available on the spot. All these stuff becomes open-ended play material with which children, under supervision of an adult “play worker”, invent and play games.

The concept has a history of almost a hundred years. The idea of “junk playgrounds” appears first in Denmark in 1930s, and then spreads in 1940s to the UK, and later to many other countries. Now, hereby we share two articles on this interesting subject.

Tony Chilton’s piece, as the title suggests, outlines a brief history of adventure playgrounds. Roy Kozlovsky’s article, which we found even more intriguing, focuses on adventure playgrounds in the UK at the WWII period, discussing them within the socio-political context of the time.