The Hantown Street Play Project

Street Play projects have become increasingly popular in western contexts where children’s outdoor free play has been in decline. Street Play projects are generally organized by adults: children play on urban streets closed to traffic. This paper reports results from an evaluation focused on the Hantown Street Play Project (pseudonym) that took place in a large English town. Hantown Leisure Trust (pseudonym) set up the project, run by play workers, and commissioned the evaluation ‘…to identify the impact of the Street Play project on participating children’s perceptions of play in their community and residents’ perceptions of community spirit’. Children aged 3-11, parents and local residents participated in questionnaire surveys (n=216) and semi-structured interviews (n=25), eliciting ten themes indicating that participants generally regarded the project positively. However, this paper argues that Street Play is a different proposition from children’s own play on the streets, according to widely recognised definitions of play

Disabilities, urban natures and children’s outdoor play

Normative, widely-circulated discourses about the value of outdoor, natural play for children overwhelmingly marginalise the experiences of families with disabled children, for whom outdoor/natural play can be characterised as a site of hard work, heartache, dread, resignation and inadequacy. This paper presents findings from research with sixty North London families with children aged 5-16 who have a statutory ‘Statement of Special Needs’. Focusing on these families’ experiences of visiting designated, newly-refurbished accessible natural play-spaces in two local country parks, the paper highlights: (i) the multiple, compound social-material ‘barriers to fun’ encountered in these spaces; (ii) the profound emotional-affective impacts of such barriers, most notably in terms of feelings of ‘resignation’ and ‘dread’; (iii) parents’/carers’ sadness occasioned by perceived ‘failures’ to ‘live up to’ normative ideals of parenting and family engagement with outdoor play and urban natures; (iv) nevertheless, the possibility of moments of family joy, love and ‘special’ time, afforded via families’ ‘hard work’ and ‘keeping going through hard times’. Through an engagement with recent conceptualisations of everyday geographies of disabilities, the paper suggests that these qualitative experiences complicate some chief, normative ways of ways of knowing outdoor play, urban natures and barriers to accessibility