I am currently uploading my doctoral thesis to this website, chapter by chapter. A copy will soon be uploaded to the British Library EThesis Catalogue. When it does I will link to it here.
‘Why don’t kids play outside anymore?’
I conducted my doctorate, or ‘North East Childhoods Project’, between 2021 and 2025 at the University of Northumbria, with funding from Northern Bridge for the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The thesis synthesised traditional historical analysis of newspapers, grey literature, and academic literature with 35 oral history testimonies.
I conducted interviews with participants from the North East communities of Byker and Chopwell, asking about experiences of growing up in those places between 1980 and 2010. Many of these interviews were ‘walking interviews’, and the purpose of them was to understand how relationships between people and place changed across this period.
Building primarily on Mathew Thomson’s Lost Freedom, the project grappled with the question ‘why don’t children play outside anymore?’, and focussed on three key factors: cars, strangers, and technology. It purposefully negotatiated the pitfalls of dealing with nostalgic memories of ‘golden years’ as a source whilst acknowledging the very real falls in outdoor play across this period that those memories highlighted. It did this by focussing on the novel and valuable aspects that the testimonies brought to the history, whilst acknowledging their limitations and cross-referencing with other primary source materials.
Read the Thesis
Chapter 1 – Changing Childhoods and Changing Britain: Expert Disourse and the Universal Child
Chapter 2 – The Fearful Outdoors: Moral Panics, Media Discourse and Normative Childhood Geographies
Chapter 3 – Byker: An Oral History of Outdoor Play Amongst Modernist Dreams and De-Industrial Ruination
Chapter 4 – Chopwell: An Oral History of Outdoor Play Amongst Natural Dreams and De-Industrial Suburbanisation
Conclusion – Continuities of Experience in Adaptive Environments
Bibliography
Oral History Ethics
To make sure the oral history component of the doctorate was conducted ethically and with appropriate academic rigour, I attended training with the Oral History Society. I also had accomplished oral historian Dr Laura Tisdall as a secondary supervisor on the project. The main result of this was a set of information sheets that participants were required to read/sign before interviews took place:
Photographs
Taken in Byker and Chopwell between 2022 and 2025.
Byker
Chopwell
Dr Louis Lorenzo 