The much-loved, messy, inner-city play areas of postwar Britain, called adventure playgrounds, owe their existence to a maverick peer of the realm. Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, a landscape architect educated at Bedales boarding school, pioneered a British outdoor play movement after visiting Copenhagen in 1945 and seeing secure spaces locals had created in the war-torn city centre for children to play freely — even under Nazi occupation.
The way these children invented fun and games from the debris of war convinced Allen that the Danes had hit on the key to developing young minds, bodies and souls: adventurous play. And she used her society clout in the UK establishment to lobby landlords and the government to offer their vacant land in London, Birmingham and other urban centres to create similar enterprises. Unlike traditional playgrounds, these encourage unstructured play, problem solving and elements of risk taking.
A new generation of British adventure playgrounds is now under construction, and again peers of the realm — together with royalty — are involved. But this time they are building on their own heritage estates rather than housing estates.
Those leading the charge include the custodians of world-famous country mansions such as the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (and the future duke and his family) at Chatsworth in Derbyshire; and the Windsors, at their much-loved Norfolk estate, Sandringham. King Charles III has also helped establish an adventure playground at the 18th-century Dumfries House in Ayrshire, overseen by The King’s Foundation.
Typically the sites of this new breed of adventure playground operators are spread over a couple of acres, much larger than old-school playgrounds, and cost several million pounds to design and build. But they are able to recoup these costs through visitor tickets. Simon Egan, head of project development at Cap.co, the company behind many of these new enterprises, says: “We haven’t had one that hasn’t paid itself back within three years.”
Chatsworth, set in the heart of the Derbyshire Peak District, boasts a 1,000-acre park on the banks of the River Derwent that was chiefly designed by Lancelot “Capability” Brown in the 1760s. It opened an upgraded adventure playground site a year ago for families with children aged up to 12, sparking an immediate and significant increase in footfall among families, according to Gill Hart, head of learning and engagement at Chatsworth. There were also 403 school and educational group visits last year, up from 325 in 2023.
The Grade I-listed house itself, home to 17 generations of the Devonshire family over nearly five centuries, can be intimidating for some, says Hart: “It is the fear of children making noise, touching things or even breaking things.” But playgrounds can help to break down barriers to connection, seeding feelings of fun and enjoyment that can then be built upon — into something more lasting with the house and its history. “We see families visibly relax when outside.”
Cap.co, which built Dumfries’ and Sandringham’s adventure playgrounds, has designed and constructed similar adventurous play facilities in the grounds of 24 stately homes and castles around the UK since 2015.
It is a bittersweet moment for many of those seeking to continue Allen’s legacy, however, as this new generation of adventure playgrounds — though often engaging in outreach programmes with the local community — don’t all offer the free access to everyone that was a mark of the original sites.
For the past eight years I have chaired the board of trustees for one of these inner-city sites in the east London neighbourhood of Shadwell. Glamis Adventure Playground sits on the footprint of a children’s hospital, demolished during the “slum clearance” era of postwar Britain, in a local authority ward with one of the highest levels of child deprivation in not only the capital but the whole of the UK.
The adventure playground is known either as “Glarms” or “Glamiss”, depending on whether you know your Macbeth (it’s named after Shakespeare’s castle in his Scottish play) or you follow the cockney vernacular that pronounces things phonetically. This can be a gauge of whether visitors have come from one of Shadwell’s cramped housing estates or from next-door Wapping, a riverside community now home to film stars such as Dame Helen Mirren and the families of Canary Wharf lawyers and bankers.
On a typical after-school play session at Glamis you’ll find children from both these addresses making games together, whether that be haring down the zip wire, pretending to be a pirate in the discarded boat or chopping wood at the fire pit. All of this takes place under the watchful eye of the adult play workers, who are essential to enabling the free-flowing risk-taking games to be safe. Children are also offered a free hot meal each session, cooked at the kitchens on site.
Such legacy adventure playgrounds are an endangered species, however. England lost more than half its sites between 1980 and 2021, according to research commissioned by the not-for-profit body Play England — leaving just 28. Recent research by the University of Sheffield found stark inequalities in playground provision across England.
“Adventure playgrounds are one of the few remaining models that actively challenge inequality,” says Eugene Minogue, executive director of Play England. “They provide inclusive, accessible, trusted spaces where children can take risks, build confidence and experience freedom — and they’re needed now more than ever. These aren’t just play spaces — they’re community anchors, helping tackle hunger, isolation and inequality, while giving children the freedom to grow.”
Urban adventure playgrounds have been hit by cuts to local authority funding and insurance companies going cold on coverage for places that actively encourage risk among young people (though companies such as Zurich have reversed this policy).
Glamis has made itself less reliant on funding from the local authority, Tower Hamlets, by winning bids from big charitable funders such as BBC Children in Need, Canary Wharf Group and Wakefield Tetley Trust, as well as building a network of small donors signed up to direct debits. But the charity has been hit by Tower Hamlets attempting to cut the long lease to five years and switching from a peppercorn rent to a levy of several thousand pounds a year. This not only drains funds but has a material impact on fundraising efforts because major donors generally require a minimum five years left on a charity’s lease to agree multiyear support.
Such challenges to free access to inner-city play are galling. In many ways, if local authorities aren’t willing or able to support adventure playgrounds, heritage estates can be seen to be stepping into the breach. Some, such as those at Dumfries House and Sandringham, are indeed free to access. Yet it also appears to bring us to a crossroads: where adventurous play may help save historic homes but not be saved for those in inner-city homes.
Dozens of 10 and 11-year-olds are making games around the stream running through the adventure play site at Blenheim Palace as I arrive at the Oxfordshire birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, and current home of Charles James Spencer-Churchill, the 12th Duke of Marlborough. Other children race each other on the three parallel zip wires while pre-school kids dash across the battlements of a mini fort as their parents chat on nearby benches, sipping coffees from the on-site café — seemingly a very important piece of equipment. All this despite it being one of the wettest days of the month.
The water feature is a magnet for some of the most inventive games, according to groundskeeper Joy Carroll. “They get on the boats and they pretend they are pirates, then they build sandcastles out of the gravel,” she says.
The site is managed by Carroll and her colleagues so that children can play safely without adult supervision, as with other adventure playground sites, but it also encourages parents to take part in their children’s games, according to Carroll. “It’s the dads who particularly like playing with their kids here,” she says.
Blenheim created this space, in a walled garden that once housed an orchard, as a way to attract more families, and to encourage them to stay longer — spending money in the café for lunch or an afternoon ice cream — rather than dashing home, according to Heather Carter, managing director of visitor attractions for the charity that now runs the palace.
“Children tend to only want to visit the palace once, but this is the reason for them to come back again and again,” Carter says. “We are hopefully also building audiences for the future.”
The fun at these adventure playgrounds does not come cheap, however. Blenheim’s annual family pass, allowing unlimited access to the house and the adventure playground for two adults and two children, is £165. This in part reflects the fact that the landscaping and construction of wooden structures comes at a hefty cost. The final bill for Blenheim’s adventure play site was £3.6mn. Since the opening of the adventure playground in 2023, Blenheim’s sales of family tickets have increased almost 60 per cent.
The entrance fee has been a bone of contention, Carter admits, but adds that they have adjusted the charging structure, enabling people with the standard 12-month ticket to the house to bring kids to the adventure playground for a small additional fee or to buy an unlimited year-long pass just for the play site for a few pounds for each child.
“There was some pushback locally because we were charging parents and children the same amount, so we changed that,” Carter says.
The schoolchildren that are there the day I visit are there as a treat for making it through the end-of-year exams. Twenty local primary schools and 15 special educational needs (SEN) schools maintained by Oxfordshire county council have free access to the adventure playground.
Chatsworth is aware of the need to broaden access to those with reduced means, offering a reduced price of £3 for adults and £1 for children for families on universal credit welfare payments. Last year, around 10,000 of these tickets were sold and the allocation this year has been increased to 14,000, according to Hart. She adds that some of the parkland and woodland within the Chatsworth grounds, that abuts the paid-for adventure playground site, is free to access, to offer additional adventurous play without cost.
Cap.co justifies any entry cost as a way of helping keep these historic buildings open to the public. “They might have a long and interesting history, but few 11-year-olds care,” says Simon Egan, Cap.co’s project development head. Building out the offering, especially when the design of the adventure playground connects to the historic home thematically, is a way to nurture enthusiasm for the estate.
Cap.co’s design process is anchored in place, according to Johnny Lyle, its head of marketing. “We look for the stories that are hidden within the history, flora and fauna of the place, to deeply root it to that specific site, with a sense of place that ensures it’s a one off,” says Lyle.
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At Blenheim, where the adventure playground sits next the to the main house’s kitchen garden, there are structures shaped like giant vegetables to encourage children to imagine they’ve been shrunk, Alice in Wonderland style. At Sandringham, one structure riffs on the estate’s Appleton Water Tower. “We don’t build catalogue ‘kit-of-parts’ play spaces, but rather organic, natural and sustainable structures, packed with imaginative play that we co-create with those local stories and characters,” says Egan.
The importance of access to play — and learning through play — at this technologically driven moment in history is acute. Psychologists and biologists have increasingly found links between the invention of games and human development. This makes the access problem a serious one, according to Play England’s Minogue.
“While we welcome the rise of creative playgrounds in heritage settings, we must ask: are we matching that ambition in the everyday environments where children actually live? Lady Allen’s legacy was rooted in equity,” he says. “Play should never be a privilege reserved for visitor attractions or hidden behind a paywall — it must be a right in every neighbourhood.”
In the absence of funding, the investment by historic homes in adventure playgrounds might enable the concept to survive. But is there a tragedy in this if the only way to experience them is in a planned visit, and that playing out for millions of city-dwelling children becomes a thing of the past?
Jonathan Moules is an FT writer and its newsletter editor
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