When Francis Avenue in Portsmouth, on England’s south coast, was closed for roadworks during a school holiday, children in the area took the opportunity to put on their roller skates and get out their skateboards to play in the street.
The sight of her two daughters laughing and socialising with their neighbours inspired Laura Mellor to lobby her local council to trial Portsmouth’s first “play street”.
“When the road was closed to traffic it became a different street. The kids were out from dawn to dusk, having fresh air and exercise outside and I just thought this was amazing,” said Ms Mellor.
The Portsmouth play street is part of a growing parent-led movement to close off residential streets to through traffic for a few hours weekly or monthly, typically on a Sunday, so that children can play outside more safely and neighbours can socialise together. People living in the street can still drive in and out, guided by stewards.
In the UK, there have been more than 1,000 play streets over the past decade, with more than 30,000 children taking part, according to Playing Out, a not-for-profit organisation working to support street play. London Play, a charity, said 20 new regular play streets started in the capital over the past year. In Hackney alone, 50 streets have taken part in the concept since 2012, when it became the first London borough to adopt regular, two-to-three-hour-long resident-led closures for play.
In total, 74 UK councils now have a play street policy, and the trend is likely to grow after the Department for Transport in August endorsed play streets by setting out new guidance that enables residents to shut their street without councils going through the expensive process of having to advertise closures.
The movement to reclaim streets was ignited by a group of parents in Bristol, who ran the city’s first play street in June 2009. They later set up Playing Out, which has helped communities around the world, from Taiwan to Canada, to set up their own play streets. In 2019, Australia announced plans to create 1,000 regular play streets.
“I had a feeling of injustice that children had lost that right to play out where they live. We felt the main barrier to having that freedom was traffic . . . we decided to push back and start to reclaim that right and space to play outside their front door,” explained Alice Ferguson, co-director of Playing Out.
Play streets, complete with signposts to warn road users, were once a common sight around the UK but quickly disappeared as car ownership boomed after the second world war. Tim Gill, author and childhood researcher, said the growth of traffic had been the biggest barrier to children playing outside. “One of the powerful things about play streets is showing what is possible if we stop seeing streets just for cars, and start looking at them as social spaces that can be shared,” he said.
Rachel Wrangham set up her play street in the London borough of Camden three years ago, and followed it up with setting up one outside her local school, Kentish Town Primary. “It’s wonderful seeing the children rushing around and playing and hearing all the different noises. When you reopen the road and the cars come back it is quite extraordinary the feeling of threat and danger you have again,” she said.
The desire to make the capital more child-friendly, as well as more sustainable, is shared by Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor. On September 22, London took part in a global car-free day, which saw 27km of the capital’s roads closed and 385 play streets take place, up from just 80 during the same event last year.
Will Norman, London’s walking and cycling commissioner, insisted the trend was not “anti-car” but a way of tackling the challenges that every city faced, such as congestion, air quality, road danger and an inactivity crisis.
“Part of what we wanted to show was how do we reimagine our space with fewer cars. London’s got the most inactive kids in the country, we have to find ways of redesigning the streets,” he said.
Ms Ferguson of Playing Out acknowledged the play street model was just a stopgap solution, noting that children needed much more in the way of physical activity, freedom and social interaction than just a couple of hours a week or month.
“Although resident-led play streets do have a lot of good outcomes in themselves, we always intended the model as a catalyst for bigger policy [and] social change and restoring the conditions needed for children to play out every day: safer streets, more connected communities, normalising the idea of children playing out,” she said.
