Introduction – The Natural Habitat of Youth?

0.1 Whatever Happened to ‘Go Outside and Play’?

It has become a common worry that children in Britain do not play outside anymore. News reports highlight statistics such as ‘just 27%’ of United Kingdom (UK) children play regularly outside their homes today, ‘compared to 71% of the baby boomer generation’.¹ Columnists fret over findings such as three-quarters of UK children spend ‘less time outdoors than prison inmates’.^² This thesis studies 1980 to 2010 as a critical period over which falls in outdoor childhood play occurred in Britain, taking the baton in particular from Mathew Thomson’s Lost Freedom, which examined the increasingly risk-averse and regulated landscape of British children’s play from 1945 through to the 1970s.^³ Drawing on grey, academic and press sources throughout the period from 1980 to 2010, I examine how expert, public, and media discourses evolved and the ways in which those discourses shaped children’s lived realities, in particular how they contributed to environments of increasing restriction and social atomisation. Further to this, I aim to deepen the national-narrative approach taken by Thomson and others, such as Joe Frost and Marta Gutman et al., by using oral history and walking interviews to focus on specific local environmental contexts, exploring in detail the two North East communities of Byker and Chopwell.⁴ The evidence of this thesis rejects the ‘universal child’ trope by detailing variety in childhood experiences during this period, a variety based on demographic, social, economic, and environmental factors.⁵

Since Lost Freedom was published in 2013, contemporary fears over children spending too much time on screens and too little time outdoors have grown, often based on reports from charities and community groups concerned with children’s welfare like Save the Children, Play England, and the Centre for Young Lives.^⁶ This thesis seeks to provide crucial historical context to inform the present debate and demonstrate the importance of considering regional and local environments when writing histories of children’s experiences of play and place.

Much of the contemporary concern surrounding these issues has been channelled through influential non-fiction works that straddle the boundary between academic and popular writing, most notably Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (2005) which introduced the concept of ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (NDD) as an idea to frame children’s disconnection from the natural world as both a health and spiritual crisis.⁷ Louv wrote that ‘baby boomers or older enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact’.⁸ Last Child in the Woods was a romantic text rooted in emotive language and personal memory rather than academic study, but for those reasons it resonated with popular concern about children’s diminishing access to outdoor play and since its publication NDD has become a well-used term with UK advocacy groups, beating out alternatives like ‘cultural severance’ and ‘plant blindness’.⁹

British academics have also turned their attention to the loss of outdoor, ‘natural’, childhoods over the first quarter of the 21^st century, with engagements coming from a variety of disciplines including geography, sociology, education, social policy, and history.^¹⁰ The academic interest is by no means unique to the UK however, and global work on this topic – particularly from North America – has been frequently used as a point of reference for the British debate.

In 2017 a CNN article, which drew on Louv’s NDD concept, asks the question this thesis, in part, sets out to answer: ‘whatever happened to “go outside and play”?’.^¹¹ A similar sentiment opened a 2019 report written for the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research & Allied Science (IJPRAS), affirming that ‘kids used to play all day outside, ride bicycles, play sports, and build forts’.^¹² A stereotype of what ‘kids used to do’ is foundational for these perspectives. It offers a framing that wrongly suggests a universal experience of childhood. As this thesis explores in detail, the question about ‘whatever happened to go outside and play?’ has diverse and contingent answers.

A lot of today’s media and scholarly concern focusses on the many faces of the today’s problems (most notably fears of NDD amidst a media-saturated environment) whilst paying little detailed attention to the historical context.^¹³ Often, contemporary critics invoke play in and before the 1980s as an unchanging standard which we are now failing to live up to, without historical examination of these decades, the processes by which a decline may have occurred, or acknowledgement of variety in experience. For example, a 2018 piece in Pediatrics asks the reader to ‘Think back on your childhood, and you probably remember hours spent in active, imaginative, and outdoor play’.^¹⁴ Such statements are simplistic but commonplace and illustrate that the concept of the carefree roaming child on which they are built is particular to the white middle-class boyhoods they evoke. Hence they exemplify Roger Smith’s concept of ‘the universal child’.¹⁵ For example, girls’ access to forms of independent play has long been more contingent on parental and cultural perceptions of danger than boys’, including during perceived golden periods for childhood freedom in the 20^th century.^¹⁶ In the context of this thesis regional factors are another important aspect to consider, as local influences (most relevantly processes of de-industrialisation in the North East) have affected both children and the physical environments in which they ‘go out and play’ in historically specific ways.

Another important but often neglected aspect of this debate concerns the attitudes of children themselves. By engaging physically in their environments children become politically, socially, and economically engaged in them. Different children choose different places to shun or to embrace, even if that can mean breaking the rules. They navigate the politics of the home and the neighbourhood, negotiating both environmental and social boundaries. Some create spaces for themselves, often hidden away from the adult world, sometimes repurposing spaces intended for something else and occupying places that adults only pass through.

Bringing together the historical fields of environmental history and the history of childhood, this thesis argues that by playing games, hanging out, breaking rules, making myths, and forming groups a child can shape and be shaped by their environment in ways different to their elders but just as significant. It charts how changes in play activities between 1980 and 2010 were influenced not only by national trends (the rise of the car, moral suspicion of urban landscapes, stranger-danger, video nasties), but also local neighbourhood factors (de-industrialisation, crime, environmental management policies, car parking provision) and the choices of individual parents and children. This is achieved by first tracking the ways in which environmental changes fed into national discourse, both expert and public, that came to impact physical and social environments on the ground for Britain’s children. Second, the two North East case-study communities of Byker and Chopwell are explored using oral history and walking methodologies. Hence, I introduce new regional and local examples to show how childhoods were affected differently in different local contexts.

This thesis is structured so that each chapter builds upon the last to develop a layered understanding of how national discourse, local context and environments, and individual experiences intersected to shape the lives of children during this period. The remainder of this introduction positions my work within historiographical context and explains its relationship to key texts in the fields of environmental, childhood, de-industrial, and North East history. I then justify the methodological approach taken, with particular attention to the use of oral and walking history methodologies as a means to access source material that is both relevant and novel.

Chapter One examines expert discourse surrounding children’s environments in Britain between 1980 and 2010. It identifies three key perceived threats – cars, strangers, and technology – and explores how policymakers and academics responded to these issues. I apply Paul du Gay et al.’s ‘circuit of culture’ framework to analyse how representations of childhood vulnerability were produced, consumed, and regulated, often through the lens of a universalised child model that obscured differences of class, gender, and region.¹⁷ Using the same model, Chapter Two turns to public discourse, particularly the role of the media in shaping moral panics around childhood safety. It analyses three defining scandals – the Orkney ‘satanic abuse’ case, the ‘stranger-danger’ panic, and the ‘video nasty’ controversy – to show how media representations constructed certain environments as dangerous or corrupting. I find that these narratives contributed to a cultural geography of fear that redefined where children could and should exist, privileging middle-class domesticity while marginalising working-class urban spaces.

Chapters Three and Four present detailed case studies of Byker and Chopwell, using oral history and walking interview methodologies to explore how national narratives were experienced, resisted, or reinforced at the local level. For both, I frame my analysis in terms of ‘destruction’ and ‘construction’, using these terms to talk about the different forms of childhood interaction with environment during this period that were ‘lost’ and ‘gained’. In Byker, an urban estate in Newcastle, I explore how children’s play and community cohesion were impacted by its demolition and famous transformation under architect Ralph Erskine in the 1980s, followed by its social and environmental decline in the 1990s and 2000s, alongside environmental changes surrounding cars, crime, and council management. The estate’s problems with dilapidation and crime during the 1990s especially fed into national stranger-danger fears and led parents to limit their children’s access to the outdoors. The growing fear of youth crime and anti-social behaviour, codified under the Blair government through the introduction of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO), also intersected with new technologies such as the installation of security cameras across Byker during this period. The chapter focuses on how Byker’s de-industrial and post-industrial landscapes invited novel forms of climbing and den-building play, and created space (physically and socially) for children to play a central role in forming a new Byker community identity.

Chapter Four turns to Chopwell, a semi-rural former mining village, to explore how de-industrialisation and suburbanisation reshaped childhood experiences and spatial freedoms. Using the same destruction/construction framing, I detail how Chopwell’s rural context and designation as a ‘category D’ village resulted in a very different and longer-lasting industrial legacy than in Byker. I observe how neoliberal values of individualism in the national context contributed to community fragmentation and closure of local services, pushing children’s play to the margins of the village and thereby encouraging certain forms of marginalised play often viewed with suspicion by adult residents. I then examine how natural sites near the village – Chopwell Wood and the River Derwent – came to be sites of continuity across generations that allowed differing levels of childhood freedoms from Byker and also became central to the formation of a new Chopwell identity.

These chapters demonstrate how children acted as sociological explorers, navigating and shaping their environments in ways that were often overlooked by adult planners and policymakers. Throughout, this study is guided by several key themes: the decline of outdoor play, the rise of safety-conscious parenting, the impact of de-industrialisation, the myth of the universal child, and the agency of children as historical actors. By integrating environmental history with the history of childhood, and combining national analysis with local oral testimony, this thesis seeks to offer a new perspective on how children’s lives were shaped by – and helped to shape – the changing landscapes of late 20th and early 21st century Britain.

0.2 Historiography

This thesis builds upon a diverse body of scholarship across environmental history, the history of childhood, de-industrialisation, and the regional history of the North East. It draws together national narratives and local lived experiences to explore how environmental change shaped childhood in two North East communities – Byker and Chopwell – between 1980 and 2010. Thomson’s Lost Freedom serves as a foundational reference point. His exploration of post-war childhood in Britain provides a critical framework that I adopt for understanding the broader ideological shifts and national policy platforms that shaped children’s lives. In particular, Thomson traces how – both physically and ideologically – British childhood between 1945 and 1980 was reshaped by new psychological theory and anxieties about cars, sexual danger, and media influence, leading to a more regulated and protected experience of growing up.¹⁸ He draws a key distinction between ‘the landscape of the child’, ‘the landscape for the child’, and ‘the child in the landscape’, that being the difference between environments children choose, those adults make for them, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks by which they are understood.¹⁹ The separation of these ideas (rather than simply thinking about children’s play spaces as a singular category) is key for understanding how and why the changes in children’s activities and environments described herein occurred and interacted with one another.

Bringing Lost Freedom’s framework of historical analysis into the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s allows us to understand the longer-term impacts of factors identified by Thomson, including how they evolved in later decades. A notable example is the tension between cars and childhood freedoms that Thomson identifies as rising post-war, and which I identify as playing a critical role in the following three decades, with the 1980s in particular seeing the largest increase in traffic volume of any decade before or since.²⁰ The technologised landscape of the television (TV), which Thomson tells us was initially thought of as a ‘solution to the dilemma of providing both safety and freedom’, also evolved massively between 1980 and 2010. In this period the introduction and growing availability of more TV channels and advertisements, home video, video games, computers, CCTV cameras, the internet, and mobile phones significantly altered the scale and substance of technology use in children’s lives.²¹ Cultural fearfulness and regulation of and for children grew more restrictive under new neoliberal political norms of the Thatcher, Major, and Blair administrations. This period also included the heyday of tabloid journalism, closely entwined with emerging moral panics over ‘stranger danger’, urban danger, ‘hoodies’, and new technologies, as well as – as Jennifer Crane has argued – growing challenges to traditional sources of expertise on issues of child health and safety from media collaborations with members of the public and pressure groups.²²

I also build upon Lost Freedom’s methodology, introducing experiences of real children to Thomson’s top-down history-of-ideas approach toward ‘the child figure’. Using oral histories and local source materials I embed narratives of national change within the lived realities of two specific communities in the North East region of England. An on-the-ground approach allows this work to synthesise Thomson’s policy-driven analysis with localised experiences, highlighting how national factors catalysed in the two North East regional contexts, as well as key differences between an urban and (semi)rural community. The impact on children’s activities of de-industrialisation in the North East during this period is a key point of analysis for this thesis, and moving beyond a Britain-wide study is important for demonstrating how histories can differ not only by regional context but also by neighbourhood, by street, by house, and by child.

0.2.1 Histories of Childhood and Environment

Thomson’s work exists within a wider literature of post-war childhood histories thatexamine forces in Britain during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that influenced moves toward a more safety-conscious society in which ‘the child’ was increasingly viewed as vulnerable. Helpful for Chapter One of this thesis’ assessment of expert discourse, several works have considered how educational policy changed post-war toward a new ‘child-centred’ approach geared at making the child a ‘fit citizen of the welfare state’.²³ Although well-intentioned, this new pedagogy ultimately meant children were conceptualised as fundamentally separate from adults – ‘incomplete and incapable’.²⁴ Thishelps to explain the shifts in educational and social policy up to 1979 that contributed to the conceptual basis on which many of the spatial and social restrictions observed in this thesis were founded.²⁵ Other works looking at pre-WW2 discourse surrounding pedagogy and ‘the child’ also provide useful context for this thesis.²⁶ The legacy of expert discourse and policy surrounding children’s built-environments is also addressed, with Roy Kozlovsky’s The Architectures of Childhood proving particularly relevant for its coverage of the development of schools and playgrounds, wherein post-war ideas about catering to ‘the child’ as supposed to ‘children’ led to certain groups being excluded from supposedly inclusive environments.²⁷ I apply this insight to my assessments of Byker and Chopwell explaining, particularly in relation to gender, how a given environment – including one made or thought of as ‘for kids’ – could end up becoming predominantly the domain of certain children rather than others.

Jon Winder’s Designed for Play has also highlighted the evolution of children’s play spaces and the way their design has been linked far more to adult anxieties, values, and urban politics than children’s desires.²⁸ The tension between children’s spontaneous play and adult attempts to regulate it emerges as an important one in this thesis, supported by the works of Winder, James Greenhalgh, and Valerie Wright.²⁹

Historians such as Roy Kozlovsky and Ben Highmore have considered how children repurposing bombsites as playscapes fed into the adventure playground movement of the mid-20th century. Highmorewrites about children’s play sites as important reflections of wider social issues, arguing that ‘the [bombsite] landscape literalised a set of analogies for damaged youth’.³⁰ I find that the sites of ruination left in the wake of de-industrialisation served a similar purpose in the late 20^th century, picking up on Highmore’s exploration of the idea that a ruined space ‘encourages fantasy because it is, in so many respects, an unmade and unfinished image’.³¹ Beyond thinking about how images of children playing among environments of de-industrial ruination symbolised decline for adult observers, I also consider how the unclaimed liminality of many such places was a key attracting factor that allowed some children to enter them, explore them, adopt them, and find joy.

Useful for Chapter Two of this thesis, several scholars have examined how images and ideas surrounding childhood evolved during this period in the national press.³² Of particular relevance is Martin Conboy and Adrian Bingham’s Tabloid Century, which analyses the way the tabloids were ‘woven intimately into the fabric of Thatcherite political culture’, and their role in promoting neoliberal values of family and individualism that I identify as contributing to increasingly insular childhoods during this period.³³ Tabloid papers like the Sun and the Daily Mail during the 1980s and 1990s exerted hefty political influence, and by working with public campaign groups and focussing on particular ‘signal crimes’, I argue they were a key driver of public discourse and moral panic surrounding narratives relating to children, stranger-danger, urban suspicion, and new technologies.³⁴ Historians have also explored the important role the press played in discourse surrounding child abuse during this period, highlighting how news outlets ‘discovered’ and increasingly covered stories of child abuse during this period, but ignored or overlooked others.³⁵ The use of media sources has also been identified as a good method by which to explore these histories, given the difficulties of using oral history to detail such sensitive and emotive material peppered with ‘silences’.³⁶ I link this coverage to a growing moral suspicion of urban and public environments during this period alongside a moral faith in rural and home environments. Rising moral panic over ‘stranger-danger’, and paedophilia in particular, thus helped to obscure instances of abuse from familiar, known figures, which constituted the majority of child abuse cases but the minority of reporting.³⁷

The commercialisation of modern childhoods is another key theme in the literature covering this period, often associated with its role in reinforcing gender stereotypes.³⁸ This was especially important material for understanding the later period of this study (the 1990s and 2000s), where children’s worlds were increasingly moulded by new neoliberal social tendencies toward individualism, which both enabled and was enabled by new technologies and the commercialisation of childhood. Helping to describe this, John Gillis’ epilogue to Designing Modern Childhoods in 2008provided the useful term ‘islanding’, which Gillis defines as ‘not only the insulation of children’s spaces from those of adults but also the separation of one child’s space from another’s’.³⁹ Gillis suggests that, new environmental factors, such as the widespread adoption of the internet, meant it had become easier for commercial interests to find or create individual target markets, most obviously seen in the widening gender gap in toy-marketing around the turn of the 21^st century.⁴⁰ The turn in parenting practices toward paid, timetabled, activities and clubs is another example. Furthermore, as Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society and Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind observed, new technologies helped to facilitate islanding simply by giving children more things to do in indoor environments.⁴¹

Processes of islanding observed in this thesis were strongly reminiscent of Judy Wajcman’s observation in Feminism Confronts Technology that working-class women in early 20^th century Britain were ‘literally left stranded in… cities designed around the motor car’.⁴² Wacjman’s work is corroborated by Krista Cowman’s research on ‘play streets’which argues that increased traffic was a major factor in the decline of ‘working class street sociability’, strongly connected to children’s ability to play in the streets.⁴³ Taking this thread forward into a time and place where de-industrialisation was dissolving traditional working class communities from their economic core, I document the ways in which the growing necessity for both parents to work and insular architectural trends reduced the number of passive ‘eyes on the street’ and therefore the perceived safety of letting a child out to play. Indeed, women’s and children’s histories have long been intertwined historiographically as well as historically. As mothers are considered to be the default caregivers, many historical forces affecting children’s independent mobility have affected women in interlinked and acute ways. The ‘play streets’ movement identified by Wacjman is a clear example, where predominantly working-class women campaigned for an alternative vision of how childhood environments could be managed.⁴⁴ At the same time, as Gabriel Moshenska’s Material Cultures of Childhoodpoints out, children’s histories have often been subsumed into the (wartime-reminiscent) category of ‘women and children’. To do so, Moshenka argues, removes historical independence and agency from both groups and can give the impression that events simply ‘happen to children’ rather than considering them as historical actors.⁴⁵

This thesis considers children as important actors with historical agency, doing so in the light of the 2020 American Historical Review debate surrounding Sarah Maza’s article ‘The Kids Aren’t All Right’ and the wider debate over agency within the history of childhood. Maza, along with David Lancy suggested that children are best employed as ‘a point of entry into another issue’ and academics would do better to focus on the ways children operate within constraints and under the control of their elders rather than the ways they display independence.⁴⁶ I agree more with Ishita Pande and Robin Chapdelaine, who, in their responses to Maza, argued that a focus on agency can behelpful as it allows historians to talk about historical processes involving children which adults may not think of interest or importance.⁴⁷

However, as an environmental history, this thesis is not only a study of agency but also of shifting relationships between children and the environment; relationships in which restriction and independence constantly interplay. Both sides of the agency debate informed this thesis’ approach: children’s individual historical agency is acknowledged and studied, particularly in attention to moments of transgression. At the same time this is also a history about, overall, a set of decades where children’s independent mobility was often curtailed by forces beyond their control. Indeed, the body of evidence in this thesis, most importantly the oral testimonies presented in chapters Three and Four, is a demonstration of the ways in which children may push boundaries and act independently within a context of regulation and restriction. Furthermore, by considering the historical agency that environmental factors can exert upon childhoods, this thesis asserts that children do not always have to be considered in relation to adults, be that either in obedience or defiance of them. Many decisions made by both the adults and children studied in the following history were environmentally stimulated. For example, processes of de-industrialisation created environments of ruination that were often inviting for children and at the same time worrying for adults. This stimulated many parents to introduce restrictive rules for play around those sites and many children to defy them. Both reactions are examples of how acts of agency were prompted and bounded in response to local environmental changes.

0.2.2 De-Industrialisation and the North East

Works that focus on longer-term impacts of de-industrialisation, rather than initial moments of decommission or collapse, have been influential in shaping this thesis’ analysis of how children interacted with their environments during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. I employ Sherry Lee Linkon’s ‘half-life of de-industrialisation’ term in particular, which captures the idea that de-industrialisation is not just a historical event, but an ongoing condition that displays both visible environmental and non-visible economic, social, and emotional symptoms.⁴⁸ For understanding those physical worlds, Alice Mah’s definition of landscapes as ‘an ensemble of material and social practices, and as symbolic representations of these practices’ is helpful, and suggestive of how, in this thesis, I understand environments as active agents within communities that influence and embody them.⁴⁹ Beyond this, taking an environmental approach also means this thesis acknowledges the ways in which aspects of an environment can stand independent from the people that inhabit it, or embody different things to different groups. For example, the oral testimonies presented here describe how elements like geography and weather informed the ‘practices’ that made up the landscape differently for children and adults.

I also take note of the close association some scholars have drawn between de-industrialisation history and oral history. Steven High, Lachlan Mackinnon and Andrew Perchard’s introduction to The Deindustrialised World, for example, explains how because ‘much of [industrial] wreckage is hidden from view’ oral history becomes ‘a useful methodology and an important counterpoint to voyeuristic ruin gazing’.⁵⁰ The warning that The Deindustrialised World gives to avoid thinking about ruins and instead consider ruination echoes Mah and Linkon. Their afterword also recognises the value in small-scale studies amidst the global nature of the topic. Indeed, the assertion that the ‘direction forward’ for the field is in ‘connecting personalised experiences of closure and of a loss with an awareness of the broader trajectory of industrialisation and global capitalism’ sets a course that I follow by placing local oral histories of place into dialogue with national expert and public discourse.⁵¹ Ewan Gibbs’ Coal Countrywas an influential example in this approach. Gibbs connects the process of de-industrialisation to a host of social, economic, political, and cultural activities that were altered or ended during the 1980s and 1990s. These are the same ‘islanding’ forces of individualisation discussed by Gillis, Kozlovsky, Clarke, Wajcman, and Sweet that, Gibbs concludes, led peoples’ ‘employment and social lives to be less connected with their neighbours and work colleagues’.⁵² He comments that scholarship of the period has tended to lose sight of the ‘long-term dynamics’ of de-industrialisation, attracted by the more immediate impacts of ‘the 1984-5 miners’ strike and the economic policies of the Thatcher government’.⁵³ Particularly relevant to my study of Chopwell, Gibbs discusses how housing developments built toward the end of the century ‘contributed to the rise of commuter towns and the decline of relatively autonomous industrial settlements with interlinked residency, work and social life patterns’ which ‘intensified deindustrialization [and] disembedded the economy from communities’.⁵⁴ This was a process happening at a national-scale pointed out in Coal Country which I study an example of in Chopwell.

The adoption of new de/post-industrial community identities in Byker and Chopwell in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and the role children played in them, is a key area of interest in this thesis. Previous works in this field have charted how loss of industry in Britain contributed to a breakdown of popular belief in the connection between work, place, and identity and how neoliberally-informed social forces led to a blurring of traditional class boundaries as ideas about deference to social superiors were replaced with values like authenticity and individuality.⁵⁵ Jon Lawrence’s Me, Me, Me? has similarly explored how post-war British culture, facilitated by new technologies, moved away from communities based around proximity and toward communities of shared interest.⁵⁶ For children, in particular, I argue these new forms of non-contiguous community identity often had the result of leading to greater restrictions on independent mobility.

In the North East context, several works have provided relevant material that can be used to link evolutions in community social patterns during this period to environmental change.⁵⁷ Daniel Nettle’s Tyneside Neighbourhoodsidentified several factors that separate childhoods in deprived neighbourhoods such as those studied in this thesis from more affluent ones, with a key finding being that low trust and high paranoia are more likely to ‘represent an immediate response to being in an environment full of visual cues of disorder’, as opposed to being acculturated or engrained characteristics in a community.⁵⁸ This is the same conclusion as Robert MacDonald et al.’s Cycles of Disadvantage Revisitedwherethe authors zero-in on Rutter and Madge’s identification of a ‘common social environment’ as the key constraint on opportunities for working-class families living in deprived and marginalised places.⁵⁹ These findings help this thesis to identify the links between environmental change and the formation of new social identities in the half-life of industrialisation in Byker and Chopwell.

One work from the de-industrialisation and identity literature which proved particularly informative for this thesis was Alice Mah’s Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place. Mah notes that Newcastle’s de-industrialisation has been ‘studied less than that of other Northern Industrial cities’ and her interview work provided a clear framework for discussing de-industrialisation with participants during the oral history sections of this thesis.⁶⁰ Furthermore, her assessment of the long-term legacy of de-industrialisation in Walker (an adjacent neighbourhood to Byker) offered the clear insight that the most lasting element of its shipbuilding past were the community and ‘living memories’ that had formed around it.⁶¹ I also found this to be a significant element of Byker and Chopwell’s industrial legacy, extending Mah’s analysis about the significance of these lasting communities into children’s worlds. The focus on children is a natural extension of Mah’s discussion of intergenerational legacies of ruination which are ‘related to inheritance, historical traces, and generational change’, finding them to be distinctly more complicated than simply hand-me-down nostalgia.⁶² For example, she found that a contemporary ‘direct socio-economic’ relationship with industry was more important in determining whether a person was nostalgic for the old industries than how old they were.⁶³

Other scholars have gone further in exploring de-industrial legacies on Tyneside. Jonathan Finn’s PhD thesis Ghosts on the Tynelooks at the ways in which memories of coal mining and ship building continued to influence those too young to have ever worked in them in the 2000s and 2010s. Finn describes a collective understanding of ‘the norms, myths, stories, and values’ of the industrial era that still pervades, especially the idea of long-term, stable ‘good work’.⁶⁴ Interviewing young men from Walker, Finn finds that whilst people are very aware of how ‘dangerous and dirty’ mining and shipbuilding work was, they still long for the infrastructure that came with it, particularly the social infrastructure such as trade unions and working men’s clubs. Such works from Finn, Nettle, Brown, and Brannen provide evidence of the North East’s unique regional history, but even within a region, histories – including those of childhood – can differ greatly. Caitlin Williams’ research Bush Tracks and Backyardsprovides a refreshing example of this. In her analysis of ‘lived play experiences’ using oral interviews in one small Australian community, Williams ultimately identifies a place that did not see increasing restrictions in the same way as the majority of the country because the ‘immediate community [and] environment’ were more influential than greater societal trends.⁶⁵ This is a clear vindication of local differences within regional, national and, indeed international narratives of decline, and an endorsement of oral history methodology as a way by which to access such marginal histories.

0.3 Methodology: Getting into the Weeds

The first two chapters of this thesis respectively focus on expert and public discourses surrounding children and environments of childhood between 1980 and 2010. They adopt a methodological approach rooted in Ruth Wodak et al.’s concept of ‘critical discourse analysis’ and Sina Leipold et al.’s implementation of it to environmental narratives, drawing on a wide range of national-level sources including policy documents, academic literature, media reports, and campaign materials.⁶⁶ This builds directly on Lost Freedom’s approach, helping to expand upon the longer-term impacts of many of the historical phenomena identified by Thomson surrounding growing societal dangers and fears over cars, strangers, and new technologies. It is also critical for situating the local and individual experiences explored in the following two chapters on Byker and Chopwell within broader frameworks of national debate and cultural change.

In relation to expert discourse, the first chapter’s use of government reports, white papers, academic publications, and policy statements enables a detailed reconstruction of how policymakers, planners, and academic experts conceptualised childhood environments and responded to perceived threats (cars, strangers, and technology) between 1980 and 2010. These sources reveal not only the intentions and rationales behind policy shifts, but also the underlying assumptions about childhood, risk, and social order. By applying du Gay et al.’s ‘circuit of culture’ framework, the analysis is able to trace how representations of childhood vulnerability were produced, circulated, and regulated, often through the lens of a universalised child model that obscured differences of class, gender, and region.⁶⁷ In turn, the second chapter draws on national and local press coverage, television programming, and public campaign literature to examine how media representations and moral panics shaped public perceptions of childhood safety and risk. Focussing on certain defining scandals (the Orkney ‘satanic abuse’ case, ‘stranger-danger’ panic, and ‘video nasty’ controversy) allows this thesis to demonstrate how the media helped to actively construct cultural geographies of fear and redefine the boundaries of acceptable childhood environments. Furthermore, it demonstrates the interplay between expert, media, and public forces and how these discourses could produce not only new perceptions but also material changes, such as the reconfiguration of public and private spaces and the values placed in them.

Adopting a dual-focus of first analysing top-down discourse literature before turning to bottom-up oral testimonies allows this thesis to provide necessary historical context for contemporary debates about childhood, play, and environment, showing how current anxieties are rooted in – and depart from – those of previous decades. It also allows an examination of how broad cultural narratives and policy frameworks were mediated, resisted, or reinforced in specific communities. Investigating the discourse literature helps interrogate the construction of the ‘universal child’ in expert circles and to challenge simplistic narratives of decline or loss in public circles. It also allows this thesis to expand the historical record by showing how certain dangers (such as strangers and technologies) became the focus of public anxiety, while others (such as cars or domestic abuse) were comparatively neglected. Furthermore, it enables me to contribute to the literature on moral panics, risk societies, and social constructions of childhood in the neoliberal era by demonstrating how discourse itself shaped material environments and everyday practices. Such a layered analysis is essential for understanding both the specificity and the generality of environmental change and childhood in late 20^th and early 21^st century Britain.

The research approach of the last two chapters of this thesis utilises oral and local source materials because of those sources’ strengths in accessing historical narratives that are difficult to reach through other types of sources. Already mentioned is High, MacKinnon and Perchard’s endorsement of the approach in the context of studying de-industrialisation, a process defined by destruction and removal of the record of built history.⁶⁸ Traditional sources like local newspaper articles are used in conjunction with oral history sources, but they are not sufficient to discuss many of the inherently intimate and undocumented stories of childhood activity described in this thesis. The qualitative nature of oral history also matches this research’s focus on the important environmental consequences of how thoughts, feelings and attitudes changed over time. A focus on how participants felt about childhood and environment – reflected in the testimonies they communicated unconsciously as well as consciously – helped to form a history of what was valued within the communities studied.

The memories that participants shared with me clearly demonstrated that environmental childhood experiences have the power to shape a person’s understanding of the world around them and their place in it, with classed experiences of living in a community being one important example. Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling’, and in particular David Byrne’s application of it to North East industrial heritage, explains how memories of an industrial past can play an active force in the present.^⁶⁹ Especially for the in-place interviews, the embodied nature of some of the shared recollections was also closely related to issues of class, both in terms of the de-industrialised environments about us and the feelings of loss which permeated many testimonies. These feelings were often linked to a sense that a communal ‘way of life’ had been lost, founded on a strong sense of community. All the participants – including the younger ones – expressed a feeling that the heritage of their community was important and worth preserving, even if they could not articulate exactly what it was. It is noteworthy therefore that I found overall structures of feeling surrounding new post-industrial identities formed in Byker and Chopwell (from 1980 and onward) to clearly draw on older community identities (of the 1960s and earlier) at the same time as moving past them. Methodologically, this is evidence that oral testimony is a good way to understand continuities in a community even through periods of radical change. Even when buildings, streets, economies, records, and people are lost or changed, stories and communal memory can be preserved.

The interviews I conducted with current and former Byker and Chopwell residents were largely unstructured to allow freedom to the participants to choose the tracks (both physical and conversational) we would take – sometimes bouncing between subject matter – and thereby gain a richer sense of memory. Such unstructured interviews are part of the wider methodological attempt within academia, outlined by Peter Jackson and Polly Russell, to democratise the production of knowledge and to ‘give a voice’ to marginalised communities.^⁷⁰ As Keith Punch argues, such looser forms of oral history enable scholars to understand not only ‘the participant’, but also some of the context they exist within, and ‘can help greatly with understanding how… social context gets played out in individual lives’.^⁷¹ Because participants were allowed a significant amount of space to direct the conversations, not all the testimonies provided insights into the same topics, but some revealed information I would never have thought to ask for. Some participants wanted to talk on subjects of my choosing, but equally some came to the interview already determined to talk about a particular topic they thought was important, and this approach brought me to many new and interesting conclusions that I had not considered going into the project, as well as to a collection of stories ranging from the funny to the upsetting. This approach is supported by Elizabeth Miller, Edward Little, and Steven High’s Going Public, whichfinds that such practices can break ‘the disciplinary illusion of the omniscient historical narrator’.⁷² Methodologies like oral history are about learning with interviewees rather than about them, and I found High’s reflections in Oral History at the Crossroads were grounding and valuable in reminding me that academics’ ‘focus on tenure and promotion, even ethics compliance, sometimes distracts us from what is really important… the telling of stories that matter to people’.⁷³

0.3.1 Methodological Challenges

The highly sensory nature of memories of childhood shared in this study, combined with the expression of a palpable sense of loss related to specific circumstances of de-industrialisation and the demise of communal ways of life associated with it, means that nostalgia played an important role in the oral testimonies gathered for this thesis. This applies in post-industrial working-class contexts in a specific way, in that happy memories are often shared with little reference to the backdrop of poverty and danger in which they often took place. Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies identify nostalgic memories to possess four key characteristics, that being they are sensory, formative, relate to a very familiar and small environment, and convey a yearning for something lost.^⁷⁴ Concepts of ‘loss’ and ‘gain’ are complicated in this context. The inclination to ‘diagnose’ nostalgic memories, or to categorise them into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ types of nostalgia, such as Svetlana Boym’s distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia, is rooted in the notion that certain forms of nostalgia completely dismiss the present in favour of the past, ignoring negative aspects to emphasise an idealised history.^⁷⁵ This is why, as Davies argues, ‘nostalgia is always suspect’, because it is a ‘betrayal of memory’.^⁷⁶ This analysis, however, proposes that nostalgia is not reliable but memories are. Furthermore it ‘throws the baby out with the bathwater’ for it judges the value of memory as a source in terms of its veracity, failing to recognise its nuances and the ever-important historian’s truism that every source has its biases. As Susannah Radstone argues, a better way to consider the use of memory as a source is to think about it as a form of negotiation between past and present.^⁷⁷ Nostalgia, therefore, can be understood as a useful tool employed by individuals and a community used to identify what is of value in the past. This allows those cherished aspects of the past to be embraced and integrated into the present, fostering an active sense of the future. This interpretation of nostalgia acknowledges the intricate relationships we have with the past, positioning the negotiation of change, or the loss of continuity, as central to the act of remembering. Consequently, the vivid and sensory quality of the nostalgic memories I gather and explore serves as a testament to their personal and collective significance.

Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki’s Who’s Afraid of Oral History?traces the development of oral history since the 1970s when there was a ‘move from understanding an interview as an archival document… to understanding it as a narrative construction’.⁷⁸ Ever since then ethical concerns have been raised about ‘the fluidity of memory as a site of study, the intersubjectivity of the oral history encounter and its impact on the histories recorded, or the power dynamics between researchers and narrators that determine what gets said and what goes unsaid’.⁷⁹ This thesis adopts Sheftel and Zembrzycki’s response, which is to say that one can have ‘an objective relation to one’s own subjectivity’ and can use this self-scrutiny to deepen understanding.⁸⁰ Ultimately, in this work I have also attempted to follow these authors’ advice, which is most importantly to ensure that ‘interviews were worthwhile for their narrators and, ideally, empowering’.⁸¹

There is also a particular salience in using oral testimony as a source for exploring both histories of childhood and de-industrialisation. The in-between, liminal nature of childhood memories – a period of life that is seen as more dynamic and ‘becoming’ than the fixed world of adulthood – rhymes with the processes of de-industrialisation which acted particularly strongly on communities like Byker and Chopwell in the North East during the period of study. These communities were forced to reinvent themselves for a new age whilst still very much in the shadow of an industrial past, creating liminal space both socially and physically in the environment. Thus, for example, abandoned buildings symbolised both what had been lost and the uncertainty of the future. The stories herein reveal how many children – interested in finding spaces ‘unclaimed’ by the adult world – found an excitement and freedom from adult supervision in de-industrial landscapes, similar to Carie Green’s observations of children seeking to ‘gain control’ over the places they inhabit.^⁸²

The exploration of national context in the first two chapters allows these oral histories to avoid becoming too parochial or not focused enough on society as a whole.⁸³ It also must be said, however, that critiques of oral history as parochial miss the importance of handed down, personal, everyday memories that Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka term ‘communicative memory’, and the potential for dissonance and resistance in these everyday memories to the wider norms intrinsic in ‘cultural memory’.^⁸⁴ Whilst personal memories may not last as long, they allow us to access aspects of things occurring ‘beneath the surface’ of what traditional historical sources, as well as social or cultural memory, can offer. There is meaning to be found in the intersections of different types of memory, particularly in the spaces where personal testimonies are conveyed through oral storytelling. These interactions reveal which stories are cherished and which are overlooked within the cultural memories of a community. The children of the working-class communities studied in this thesis are one such group, whose stories would otherwise be lost to the historical record, whose experiences matter, and whose memories can be used to inform the future of their environments.

The stories chosen by participants in this study were often told to be representative of key values or meanings, and the texture of the memories helped to reveal details about place. For example, all of those interviewed about Byker in the 1980s spoke about how everyone was ‘the same’, and this commonality of experience signified for them a deeper sense of a shared past with those other people grew up alongside them. But whilst this fostered a profound sense of place and belonging, it also necessarily excluded those not deemed to ‘fit in’; those who didn’t play with the other kids, or who moved in at a later date.^⁸⁵ It must be acknowledged that such voices were largely silent in my research. The self-selecting nature of the participants led to an absence of voices from those who did not consider themselves ‘part of the community’ enough to come forward and speak on its history. Individuals who agreed to participate in interviews were those who believed they could contribute something valuable to narrative of place and heritage. Indeed, the primary means by which I recruited participants is illustrative of this point. I used a variety of methods to find participants in the two communities I studied, including putting up posters on notice boards and shops and asking people directly. Most effective however was advertising online, specifically on local interest Facebook pages. Users of Facebook fell into the right age demographics for people I wanted to speak to, and the nature of these groups gave me access to a more concentrated pool of locals which I knew had some interest in local heritage. Once I had recruited a few, I snowballed to finding the rest through recommendation. I note now that the effectiveness of this method was revealing about the processes of social atomisation and technologization which I study, showing how acts of community remembrance had moved into ‘islanded’ online spaces. It is the case, therefore, that there is space for further and complementary histories to be written that access oral testimonies from those less inclined to come forward and speak or like local interest pages on social media – though this poses obvious methodological challenges.

Because I started work on this thesis in 2020, the Covid pandemic presented a major operational challenge to its progress. Conducting in-person oral interviews, which as the following section (0.3.2) explains is central to this thesis’ methodological approach, was impossible or tricky for almost two years. Even when official restrictions lifted, some participants were understandably warier of such an encounter than they may have been in years prior. Other sources were also harder to access during this time with the closure of many local archives, libraries, businesses, and events. During this lonely time, this work adapted in ways that significantly shaped its final structure. Most notably Covid led to a change in balance between the chapters looking at the national picture using ‘traditional’ source material and those looking at local case studies using oral history. Where the initial proposal had been to include a third community in addition to Byker and Chopwell (the coastal village of Horden in County Durham), this was cut in favour of expanding and dividing the material on expert and public discourse. The result is a work that holds a finer balance between its analysis of national and local factors and this has meant the thesis’ final shape better engages with the existing historical literature which is largely national in scope. In particular, it has allowed me to build upon Thomson’s work and smoothly blend its use of top-down traditional source materials with bottom-up oral history methods.

0.3.2 Walking Interview Methodology

Walking interviews are a key methodology used in this thesis and used as a way of accessing and blending histories of physical spaces with memories of childhood. In contrast to a purely oral interview which is likely to focus on the chronological story of a person’s life, moving through space makes it the container of the past. Participants may freely wander around this container, accessing memories when relevant, and a multitude of events and interactions between people and landscape unfold as it is recalled and reimagined. This is of course especially applicable for those with an interest in environmental history where human/non-human relationships are a primary concern. Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust describes how, because the act of walking is both physical and meditative, it inclines people to reflect at the same time as distracting them enough to think about the interviews as formal, allowing more casual and free-flowing chat. Solnit describes how ‘the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking [provoking the idea that] the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it’.^⁸⁶ I also found walking interviews to have a levelling function by placing interviewer and participant on more equal terms. In fact, with participants generally choosing the routes they gained the authority that comes with being a ‘host’ showing somebody around. The casual conversation of simply moving through place is also very equalising, ‘this way?’, ‘watch out for that’, etc. Walking offers a shared experience of the physicality of being in a place, creating a different atmosphere compared to interviews conducted in more formal environments.

As Lauren Elkin explains in Flâneuse, a key element of walking is that it foregrounds sensory experiences, shifting attention away from spoken words and reallocating importance to all the senses, which are engaged by the landscapes the walkers encounter.^⁸⁷ This multi-sensory stimulation meant that during some walks, participants were prompted about stories from their childhood by things they saw, heard, and felt, rather than just what they remembered. In particular, those who recalled spending unstructured and unsupervised time in a local environment possessed a comprehensive understanding of place that was not the result of any specific intention. I found this to be important for childhood memories of place specifically because of differences in knowledge production between adults and children. In several cases, participants only remembered something about a place when they were actually there because the initial memory they had formed there had been more sensory than intellectual. For example, the significance of a specific wall which Lisa (1990s) used to play on only came up in conversation as we passed by it, whereas before it was either forgotten or not thought of as worthy of note. Where an adult might be more inclined to remember the name of a place, a child is more likely acquire physical knowledge of the same environment whilst not necessarily remembering any ‘facts’ about it.⁸⁸ The physicality of walking interviews provided participants with the opportunity to ‘inhabit’ place as a means of memory. By revisiting and recreating childhood routes, habits, and everyday practices, the interview process shaped memories while traversing landscapes that were influenced not only by present realities but also by legacies and perceptions of the past. Everyday details of interactions with place and the past can be difficult to express or may seem unworthy of discussion. However, being present in a location enabled participants to engage in those conversations and reflect on ‘how things have changed’.

The significance of habit and repetition in children’s play is referred to by Paul Connerton as a means of ‘incorporating’ memory, whereby a memory itself can lie largely within a physical practice limited to the moment it occurs.⁸⁹ Connerton describes this in terms of ‘ceremonies of the body, proprieties of the body, and techniques of the body’.⁹⁰ By taking people to places of their youth, walking interviews therefore prompt these habit memories which Connerton frames as ‘re-enactments of the past in our present’ that ‘sediment [memories] in the body’.⁹¹ This definition of memory is appropriate for this study as it positions memory as a process and highlights the interconnected nature of remembering within the landscape. The people use the environment to formulate their sense of identity, and the environment becomes meaningful through its use, as supposed to being an inert museum piece. This has also been described by Kathleen Stewart as a ‘surplus of meaningfulness vibrating in a… cultural landscape’.⁹²

Morag Rose argues that landscape and individuals are ‘mutually constructing’, arguing that an environment is not only there to be seen, but is rather ‘an intimate collections of material sensations’ that prompt what Rose calls ‘dreams of presence… dreams of who we are, of where we belong, and of how we get on with life’.^⁹³ Whilst this description initially reads as somewhat insubstantial, it does a good job of emphasising ethereal qualities of remembering, and conceptualising this as dreamlike captures how the past can appear to drift in and out of consciousness while spending time in a particular environment. With this understanding of place and memory, it becomes clear why participants of walking interviews focus less on chronology in their testimonies. Rather than only telling their life story, it was natural for them to also tell the story of the place itself; the container of history which presents different periods of itself non-chronologically as you walk about. This has been described by various academics from across the humanities and social sciences as ‘dwelling’, ‘immanence’, or ‘flirting’ with space.^⁹⁴ All of these terms focus on framing landscapes as active places. As a historian, testimonies that are bound up with space and individual meaning can be taken together to build up a narrative of the changing relationship between a place and its young residents during the period of study. They can be used to speak to the significance of the relationship between child and place in specific terms, thus highlighting real, practical, and communicable answers to present day questions over children’s loss of engagement with ‘the outdoors’.

In bringing together national discourses, local environments, and individual memories, this thesis aims to move beyond simplistic narratives of decline or nostalgia that can dominate public and academic discussions about childhood and play. By situating the experiences of children in Byker and Chopwell within the broader context of shifting expert and public discourses, it becomes possible to see how national trends catalysed in specific places and times through local dynamics of class, community, gender, fear, and environment. This approach not only continues to challenge the myth of the ‘universal child’ but also foregrounds the diversity and agency of children as historical actors, whose lives were shaped by – and in turn helped to shape – the changing landscapes of late-20^th and early 21^st century Britain. A key contribution of the work is a more nuanced understanding of how environmental change, social policy, and cultural narratives intersected to produce both new constraints and new possibilities for childhood. By integrating critical discourse analysis with oral and walking history methodologies, it offers a layered account that connects the macro-level forces of policy and media with the micro-level realities of everyday life. In doing so, it not only enriches the historiography of childhood and environment but also provides historical context for ongoing debates about children’s freedom, safety, and belonging in a rapidly changing world.

Chapter 1 ->

References

1 OnePoll, ‘National Play Day Survey,’ commissioned by Play England, Play Wales, Play Scotland, and PlayBoard NI, August 2022, https://www.playday.org.uk.

2 Damian Carrington, ‘Three-Quarters of UK Children Spend Less Time Outdoors than Prison Inmates – Survey’ The Guardian, 25 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/25/three-quarters-of-uk-children-spend-less-time-outdoors-than-prison-inmates-survey.

3 Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

4 Joe Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments (London: Taylor and Francis, 2009); Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith, eds., Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

5 As set out by: Roger Smith, A Universal Child? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

6 OnePoll, ‘National Play Day Survey,’; Helen Dodd, Findings from the 2022 Playday Survey: Trends in Children’s Street Play, Play England, 2023; Ben Firth and Rachael Powell, Everything to Play For: A Plan to Ensure Every Child in England Can Play (Centre for Young Lives, June 2025), 4.

7 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (London: Atlantic, 2005), 3.

8 Ibid, 33.

9 Ian Rotherham, Cultural Severance and The Environment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), V; James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, ‘Preventing Plant Blindness,’ The American Biology Teacher 61, (1999): 82–86.

10 Examples in the same order: Paul McCrorie et al., ‘Risky Outdoor Play in the Early Years: How Are Parental and Practitioner Perceptions of Danger and Benefits Associated with Young Children’s Outdoor Play Experiences?,’ International Journal of Play 14 (2025): 120–138; Daniel Nash, The Construction of the Decline of Children’s Outdoor Play as a Social Problem in the UK (PhD diss., Canterbury Christ Church University, 2018); Sue Waite, ‘Losing Our Way? The Downward Path for Outdoor Learning for Children Aged 2–11 Years,’ Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning 10 (2010): 111–26; Mary Clare Martin, ‘The State of Play: Historical Perspectives,’ International Journal of Play 5, no. 3 (2016): 329–339; Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 8.

11 Josh Levs, ‘Whatever happened to “go outside and play”?,’ CNN, 2 October 2017, accessed 14 April 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/22/living/let-children-play-outside/index.html.

12 Nehad Ahmed Ibrahim Zahra and Ahuad Abdulrazaq Alanazi, ‘Digital Childhood: The Impact of Using Digital Technology on Children’s Health,’ International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research & Allied Sciences 8 (2009): 144.

13 Elizabeth Vendewater, ‘Digital Childhood: Electronic Media and Technology Use Among Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers,’ Pediatrics 199 (2007): 1007.

14 Matthew Lynch, ‘Consequences of the New Digital Childhood,’ The Tech Edvocate, 6 July 2018, accessed 10 June 2020, https://www.thetechedvocate.org/consequences-of-the-new-digital-childhood/.

15 Smith, A Universal Child?.

16 Karson Kung, ‘Gender Differences in Children’s Play,’ in The Wiley‐Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development, 3rd ed., eds. Peter Smith and Craig Hart (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2022): 316.

17 Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1997), 3.

18 Thomson, Lost Freedom, 7, 17.

19 Ibid, 5.

20 Department for Transport, Transport Statistics Great Britain: 2011, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/8995/vehicles-summary.pdf; Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 202.

21 Thomson, Lost Freedom, 106.

22 Jennifer Crane, Child Protection in England, 1960–2000: Expertise, Experience and Emotion (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 66-68.

23 Most important for this thesis: Laura Tisdall, A Progressive Education? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 248; Crane, Child Protection in England, 3; Also see: Gregory Baldi, Ideas, Institutions, and the Politics of Schools in Postwar Britain and Germany (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Audrey Osler, ‘The Long Struggle for Educational Equity in Britain: 1944–2023,’ Daedalus 153, no. 4 (2024): 165–183.

24 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 10.

25 Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner, Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907–1950 (London: Routledge, 2004); Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

26 Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Expanded 40th Anniversary Edition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Keith Cranwell, ‘Street play and organized space for children and young people in London 1860-1920,’ in Essays in the History of Community and Youth Work, eds. Ruth Gilchrist et al. (Leicester: Youth Work Press, 2001), 39-71.

27 Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 18; See also: Robin Moore, Childhood’s domain (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 14, 223.

28 Jon Winder, Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010 (London: University of London Press, 2024), 10.

29 Ibid, 9; James Greenhalgh, Reconstructing Modernity: Space, Power, and Governance in Mid-Twentieth Century British Cities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Valerie Wright, ‘Making Their Own Fun: Children’s Play in High-Rise Estates in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970,’ in Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain, eds. Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor (London: University of London Press, 2021), 221-246.

30 Roy Kozlovsky, ‘Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction,’ in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 171-190; Ben Highmore, ‘Playgrounds and Bombsites: Postwar Britain’s Ruined Landscapes,’ Cultural Politics 9, no. 3 (2013): 324.

31 Ibid, 333.

32 See: Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015); Kevin Williams, Read All about It!: A History of the British Newspaper (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009); Maria Leedham, ‘“Social Workers Failed to Heed Warnings”: A Text-Based Study of How a Profession Is Portrayed in UK Newspapers,’ The British Journal of Social Work 52 (2022); David Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992); Aimee Wodda, ‘Stranger Danger!,’ Journal of Family Strengths 18, no 1 (2018); Jenny Kitzinger and Paula Skidmore, ‘Playing safe: Media coverage of child sexual abuse prevention strategies,’ Child Abuse Review 4, no. 1 (1995): 48.

33 Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, 89.

34 Ibid, 84-85; Martin Innes, ‘Signal crimes’: Detective Work, Mass Media and Constructing Collective Memory (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 63.

35 Adrian Bingham, ‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade’: the British Press and Child Sexual Abuse, c. 1918–90,’ History Workshop Journal 88 (2019): 89–110; Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Aimee Wodda, ‘Stranger Danger!,’ Journal of Family Strengths 18, no 1 (2018); Steven Collings, ‘The Impact of Contextual Ambiguity on the Interpretation and Recall of Child Sexual Abuse Media Reports,’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 17 (2002): 1063–1074; Nick Basannavar, Sexual Violence against Children in Britain since 1965: Trailing Abuse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

36 Adrian Bingham, Lucy Delap, Louise Jackson, and Louise Settle, ‘Historical Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales: The Role of Historians,’ History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 426.

37 Wodda, ‘Stranger Danger!,’10; Bingham, ‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade,’ 106.

38 Alison Clarke, ‘Coming of Age in Suburbia: Gifting the Consumer Child,’ in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 253–271; Elizabeth Sweet, Boy builders and Pink Princesses: Gender, Toys, and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century (Thesis: University of California, 2013), 36.

39 John Gillis, ‘The Islanding of Children: Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood,’ in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children, ed. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 301–315.

40 Elizabeth Sweet, Boy builders and Pink Princesses: Gender, Toys, and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century (Thesis: University of California, 2013), 88.

41 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 10; Todd Oppenheimer, The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology (New York: Random House, 2003), 218.

42 Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 129.

43 Krista Cowman, ‘Play streets: women, children and the problem of urban traffic, 1930–1970,’ Social History 42, no.2 (2017): 233.

44 Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, 120.

45 Gabriel Moshenska, Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain (London: Routledge, 2019), 6.

46 Sarah Maza, ‘The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians and the Problem of Childhood,’ American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October 2020): 1263; David Lancy, ‘Unmasking Children’s Agency,’ AnthropoChildren 1, no. 2 (2012), 13-14.

47 Ishita Pande, ‘Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right,”’ American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October 2020): 1300–1305; Robin P. Chapdelaine, ‘Little Voices: The Importance and Limitations of Children’s Histories,’ American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (October 2020): 1299.

48 Sherry Lee Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 95.

49 Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place, 201.

50 Steven High, Lachlan MacKinnon, and Andrew Perchard, eds., ‘Introduction,’ in The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017).

51 Steven High, Lachlan MacKinnon, and Andrew Perchard, eds., ‘Afterword: Debating Deindustrialization,’ in The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 356.

52 Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland (London: University of London Press, 2021), 96.

53 Ibid, 5.

54 Ibid, 97.

55 Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 8; Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940: The Politics of Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 242; Emily Robinson et al., ‘Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1970s,’ Twentieth Century British History 28, no. 2 (June 2017): 269.

56 Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 19-21.

57 Including: Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 16-18; Lawrence, Me, Me, Me?, 169; Daniel Nettle, Tyneside Neighbourhoods: Deprivation, Social Life and Social Behaviour in One British City (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015) 3; Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 25.

58 Nettle, Tyneside Neighbourhoods, 112.

59 Robert MacDonald et al., ‘“Cycles of Disadvantage” Revisited: Young People, Families and Poverty across Generations,’ Journal of Youth Studies 23 (2020): 22.

60 Alice Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 25.

61 Ibid, 88.

62 Ibid, 13.

63 Ibid, 88.

64 Jonathan Finn, Ghosts on the Tyne: ‘Smokestack Nostalgia’, Class Heritage, and Surviving Austerity in the Post-Recessionary Present (PhD Thesis, Newcastle University, 2022), III.

65 Caitlin Williams, Bush Tracks and Backyards: Intergenerational Changes and Challenges for Children Claiming Play Spaces (PhD Thesis, Western Sydney University, 2017), 10, 81.

66 Ruth Wodak et al. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, Third Edition (London: Sage, 2015), 13-15; Sina Leipold et al., ‘Discourse Analysis of Environmental Policy Revisited: Traditions, Trends, Perspectives,’ Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning 21, no. 5 (2019): 447.

67 Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3.

68 High, MacKinnon, and Perchard, ‘Introduction,’ in The Deindustrialized World, 4.

69 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132-133.

David Byrne, ‘Industrial culture in a post-industrial world: The case of the North East of England,’ City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action 6 (2002): 279-289.

70 Peter Jackson and Polly Russell, ‘Life History Interviewing,’ in The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography, ed. Dydia DeLyser et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010), 172.

71 Punch, K.F. (2014). Introduction to Social Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches. Sage: London, 157.

72 Elizabeth Miller, Edward Little, and Steven High, Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), 11.

73 Steven High, Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014), 28.

74 Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies, ‘Nostalgia and the Shapes of History,’ Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 184; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 6.

75 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia.

76 Atia and Davies, ‘Nostalgia and the Shapes of History,’ 180.

77 Susannah Radstone, Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

78 Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, ‘Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety about Ethics,’ Oral History Review 43, no. 2 (2016): 345.

79 Ibid, 345.

80 Ibid, 346.

81 Ibid, 345.

82 Carie Green, ‘“Because We Like To”: Young Children’s Experiences Hiding in Their Home Environment,’ Early Childhood Education Journal 43 (2014): 327.

83 From such examples as: Erin Jessee, ‘The Limits of Oral History: Ethics and Methodology Amid Highly Politicized Research Settings,’ The Oral History Review 38, no. 2 (2011): 287–307; Curtis Brewer and Elisha Reynolds, ‘Oral History as Critique: Memories Disrupting the Dominant Narrative,’ in Handbook of Critical Education Research, ed. Brad J. Porfilio and Derek R. Ford (New York: Routledge, 2023).

84 Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,’ New German Critique 65 (1995): 128.

85 As we will see, this would cause problems down the line as new people moved into the area who were not considered ‘part of the community’.

86 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London & New York: Verso, 2001), 6.

87 Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse (Vintage, London, 2016), 21.

88 Juliana Nogueira Pontes Nobre et al., ‘Environmental Opportunities Facilitating Cognitive Development in Preschoolers: Development of a Multicriteria Index,’ Journal of Neural Transmission 130 (2023): 65.

89 Paul Connerton, How Society Remembers (England: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73.

90 Ibid, 79.

91 Ibid, 72.

92 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 549.

93 Morag Rose, ‘Pedestrian Practices: Walking from The Mundane to The Marvellous,’ in Mundane Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 211.

94 Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the landscape,’ World Archaeology 25 (1993); Stewart, Ordinary Affects; David Crouch, ‘Affect, Heritage, Feeling,’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).