The Living Museum: Adventure playgrounds were one of Lambeth’s great community inventions

Not playgrounds in the modern council sense with rubber flooring, standard equipment and neat safety surfacing.

Adventure playgrounds were something else.

They were built from timber, rope, old poles, ladders, scrap, huts, platforms and nerve. They had tree houses, aerial runways, rope swings, tyre swings, walkways, towers and dens.

They were rough, improvised, thrilling and alive.

[Above: Grove Adventure Playground in 2020]

Children did not go there for a few supervised minutes. They lived there after school, at weekends and through the holidays. For many local children, these places were part of growing up.

They were also full of character.

They were often given a splash of design in whatever paint could be found, sometimes bright, sometimes psychedelic, sometimes just gloriously odd. Old car tyres became swings, climbing features, barriers and seats. Scrap timber became platforms and bridges.

Old poles became runways and frames. In many ways, the adventure playground was one of the first great community recycling projects: turning discarded material into joy, challenge and belonging.

To understand why Lambeth’s adventure playgrounds mattered, you have to go back to the bomb sites. After the Second World War, children across London were already claiming rubble, vacant plots and leftover land as places to play.

Many had no garden and nowhere much to go. Behind corrugated sheets, on rough grass, among broken ground and discarded material, children made their own worlds.

Out of that reality came the idea of the adventure playground: not a polished space imposed from above, but a safer version of the kind of free, creative, risky play children were already inventing for themselves.

That is why the word adventure matters.

These were not ordinary playgrounds. They were child led spaces shaped by the community, and often by the times themselves.

Some grew from bomb damaged land. Some grew on cleared sites and scraps of urban ground. Some were built up by local people, playworkers, campaigners, squatters, hippies and families who understood one simple fact: children needed somewhere real to go.

Lambeth was there near the beginning of this history.

Lollard Adventure Playground opened in the 1950s on the site of a bombed school and became one of the early examples in London. Triangle Adventure Playground followed and still survives on its original site.

In Brixton and nearby, Angell Town Adventure Playground opened in 1970 before later moving and continuing its life in another form. Other local sites carried that same spirit forward.

And that is the social history here.

These places did not just entertain children. They answered a community need. They gave children freedom, challenge, friendship, confidence and territory of their own. They gave families somewhere that felt known and lived in.

They turned neglected land into shared ground.

Muddy clothes, scraped knees and the odd broken bone were part of a rougher era, but so was resilience, independence and a sense that children were allowed to test themselves in the world rather than only be padded away from it.

The point was never perfection. The point was that the children had somewhere to be.
That matters now more than ever.

Because one of the quiet truths behind the old adventure playgrounds is that they existed because people knew children cannot thrive on restriction alone. They need space, risk, imagination, community and somewhere to disappear into play.

Lambeth understood that once, and built for it. Some of those adventure playgrounds are still here. Some have changed.

Some have vanished. But they deserve to be remembered as an integral part of local history, because they tell us something serious about the borough at its best.

When children had nowhere to go, the community made somewhere.