Note Jan 2026: I will be updating this page soon with more details of the project, and the written work it produced.
‘Why don’t children play outside anymore?’
I conducted the North East Childhoods Project between 2021 and 2025 for my PhD in history at the University of Northumbria, with funfing from Northern Bridge for the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The outcome of the project was my doctoral thesis, which 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 Matthew 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.
Participants were required to read/sign the following sheets:
Dr Louis Lorenzo 