St John's Wood Adventure Playground

After newspaper articles about juvenile crime in the late 1950s, the idea of play initiatives for children developed and councils started turned unused, derelict waste ground into playgrounds. Parents and park designers realised that children had no qualms about playing in unconventional spaces and on rubble and using discarded materials and that in fact this could inspire creative play. Adventure playgrounds in the sixties and seventies were very different from those today and often contained branches from trees, cardboard boxes, old tyres and other left over construction material purposely left for the children to build with. The adventure playground in St Johns Wood has been in use by neighbourhood children since at least 1963.