Tag: Environmental

Chapter 3. Byker: An Oral History of Outdoor Play Amongst Modernist Dreams and De-Industrial Ruination

3.1 Introduction: A Neighbourhood Re-Placed

During the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Byker provided a specific and formative environment for the children who called it home. In contrast to Chopwell – and indeed most North East communities – Byker’s physical landscape saw rapid change in this period. The beginning of the 1980s saw the completion of the project to knock down the ‘old Byker’ of Victorian terraces and back lanes (see Fig. 1) and construct a ‘new Byker’, with its circuitous network of roads, paths, and greens (see Fig. 3). The scale of this project was notable nt only for the sheer size of the 200 acres that was redeveloped, but also for its modernist ambition.^¹ The new estate’s most iconic feature was the ‘Byker wall’, a winding contiguous low-rise block of flats that enclosed the inner dwellings to shield them from a planned motorway. This not only differed from the red-brick terraces of old Byker, but the romantic styling and use of varied colour and texture also stood in stark contrast to the brutalist architectural conventions of the period.^²

The scheme was the brainchild of British architect Ralph Erskine, who had a particular interest in the relationship between architecture and the natural environment, and based his Byker design on an earlier idea of his for an ‘ecological arctic town’.^³ Erskine’s inward-facing design followed the advice of contemporaneous architects and planners such as Nicolas Taylor, author of The Village in the City (1973), who advocated for neighbourhoods to act like self-contained ‘villages’ within an urban environment. A fellow architect on the project stated that the purpose of ‘vehicular separation’ in the design was to ‘allow for a dense and village-like character’, with a clear intention to blend ‘private gardens, via semi-private courtyards, to the public realm’.^⁴

The buildings and streets were not all that changed with the advent of New Byker. The people changed too, with only 20% of the original population ultimately moving back into the new development, despite plans to retain 50%.^⁵ A report written for the Department of the Environment critiqued this low-retention and concluded that ‘One is only left to speculate what would have happened had the policy not been to retain the community’.^⁶ It is difficult therefore to understate the change that Byker underwent during this period, as it lost not only its buildings, but the people within them, on top of the existing loss of traditional places of work at the shipyards and the economic and social structures intertwined with them. That the transformation of the area was so total is evidenced in the use of the still-popular framing device of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Byker, connoting a rift in the continuity of the community. The area hadn’t simply changed, it had been ‘re-placed’; its identity as an environment and community had been overwritten.

Figure I. Old Byker, Carville Road, looking toward city centre, 1969.⁷

Figure II. Map of Byker in 1970.^⁸ Note the already bulldozed streets (dot-outlined) to the north, making way for the new development.

Figure III. New Byker, looking toward city centre, 2016.^⁹

Figure IV. Map of Byker in 1980.^¹⁰

Academic work on Byker has tended to focus on the architectural merit of new Byker rather than the experience of Byker’s population. Much of this literature, particularly that written between the 1970s and 1990s, considered the estate as a ‘good example’ of modern urban design, not least because the estate was developed in close consultation with its future residents. For example, in 1976 architect Alison Ravetz observed that the integration of features from the old Byker ‘gave the feeling of Portmeirion without Portmeirion’s hollow disappointment and sham, because this is for ordinary people to live in’.^¹¹ In 1987, architect Mary Comerio argued that Erskine’s ‘concern for public participation’ was the key to the scheme’s success and would allow them to ‘rehouse [residents] without breaking family ties, patterns of life and neighbourhood traditions’.^¹² As already noted, however, this optimistic assessment did not reflect the reality of the low retention rate of original residents. Architectural historian Elain Harwood also praised Erskine’s achievement, in 2000 noting that the establishment of a ‘tree bank’ which ‘ensured a continuity and that the landscape element was not cut from budgets in subsequent phases’.^¹³ However, notwithstanding the valuable academic work on Byker, children were never the focus – or even a sub-category – of analysis.^¹⁴ This is surprising given the apparent child-friendliness of new Byker’s pedestrianised spaces, colourful balconies, and varied green spaces. But this absence of children in the literature also reflects Erskine’s own tendency to frame his work as ‘people friendly’, without specific reference to children. You may take any work from Erskine, his team, or those writing about them and will find many references to designing for ‘people’, but scant or more likely no reference to children. His interest in Nordic-style social-democratic principles inculcated a design philosophy wherein every person was considered an equal user of a space, but this approach failed to consider how different categories of people use a space differently.

3.1.1 Children in the Planning and Building of Byker

An example of how children were conceived of by the architects can be read in Michael Dradge’s 2008 reflections on the project. Dradge, one of Erskine’s original architectural team, talked up the successes of Byker with particular reference to community engagement. Dradge says that at its peak in the mid-1970s the architects had an on-site office of ‘fifteen staff, plus four clerks of works’, which allowed them to keep residents informed about the ongoing works and solicit feedback.^¹⁵ Dradge recounts how the architects hand-built a ‘prototype children’s play area’ outside their office and ran a children’s drawing club to help ‘break down barriers and get parents talking to the architectural team’.^¹⁶ It is clear here that the architects recognised how children can act as key facilitators of community involvement, as indeed they would go on to do when New Byker was complete. It is also revealing of the way children would be expected to behave in the New Byker; as users of prescribed play equipment and activities by adults. That New Byker’s plan included playgrounds and a school was implicitly understood as ‘planning for children’, yet the myriad of resident complaints that soon arose around noise, climbing, landscaping and more, in relation to children shows how the plan did not account for what young people would actually value in the environment and how that may come into conflict with the values of adult residents.

It is also noteworthy that Dradge speculated that it wouldn’t be possible to do make the prototype playground and drawing club ‘today’ (in 2008) because they were living in ‘more litigious times’ and a ‘less innocent age [where] all kinds of formalities and checks would, no doubt, apply’, referencing new developments such as the establishment in 2002 of the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB, precursor to the DBS) which required background checks for those working with children.^¹⁷ Aside from neatly demonstrating the change in parenting culture between the 1980s and 2000s, Dradge’s speculation highlights how the sorts of handmade informal play structures they erected would come to be considered a problem by residents when children later built them on their own terms.

Despite the emphasis these writers placed on consultation, Byker’s design was similar to Erskine’s ecological arctic town concepts of the 1950s, and also to the millennium village project he later worked on in London. This suggests his ideas about what constituted good urban design were quite decided, bringing into question the extent to which Byker residents had the power to influence the designs. Dradge makes it clear that when it came to community involvement ‘the aim was always to demystify the process’; the key purpose, therefore, being to explain and convince residents of the architects’ plans rather than devise these plans in equal collaboration with the Byker populace, which is the impression sometimes given by both the contemporary and academic literature.

Figure V. Erskine’s Millenium village built in the 2000s.^¹⁸

Figure VI. Inside The Wall, built in the 1980s.^¹⁹

Figure VII. Plan for ‘An Ecological Arctic Town’, 1958.^²⁰

Figure VIII. Aerial view of the western section of New Byker, 2016.^²¹

Indeed, despite his overall positive evaluation, issues on the estate were evident to Dradge by 2008. He noted five problems: ‘the assimilation of new residents’, ‘people wanting to park right next to their houses’, ‘need for the restoration of hard and soft landscaping’, and ‘a greater demand for privacy’.^²² As Dradge conceded, Byker had not fulfilled the promises promoted by its architect-planners and fallen into disrepair. His concerns were emblematic of a new wave of academic research that began to re-evaluate Byker, challenging the optimistic accounts of the architect-planners.

Most thorough was architect Robin Abrams’ Byker Revisited (2003) which followed up on his first visit in 1983. In the 1980s Abrams had already begun to spot problems arising on the estate, noting ‘more incidents of vandalism’ in the less desirable area of south Byker.^²³ Due to the landscaping being too expensive to maintain it ‘quickly became overgrown’ and, Abrams says, elderly residents feared the children and teenagers who hid in, or set fire to, the shrubbery. Furthermore, tree sap dripped onto parked cars, and people were cutting down trees and shrubs in their gardens that blocked the light. Others complained that the sound of birds kept them awake at night.^²⁴ For the residents of old Byker (and those older residents who had moved in from other areas) who were used to a far more orderly terraced environment, the natural elements of new Byker could often be an annoyance rather than a joy. The beauty of the communal network of natural landscaping, conceived of for ornament rather than function, rubbed up against the realities of working life. This was not the same as a leafy, wealthy suburb where greenery is largely kept and maintained in private gardens. Instead, some residents felt like their house was an island within a landscape of unkempt wilderness very different from the romanticised understanding of ‘the wild’ that Erskine’s design evoked.^²⁵

With Byker Revisited in 2003 Abrams described a community in a far greater state of distress than 20 years earlier, and outlined more clearly the failures of design that had contributed to the area’s challenges. As first observed in the 1980s, one factor was that residents had ‘an inherent understanding of where the preferred housing clusters are’. The northern section or top of the hill was better, as had been the case in Old Byker. This meant the old residents chose to live at the top, near the wall, relegating newcomers to the lower areas. They also chose to shop on Shields Road rather than the new shopping area in south Byker, as this was also what had been done in old Byker. This expedited the decline of south Byker in favour of the north, and represented a rejection of new Byker’s self-contained design philosophy from its residents. Even though the environment encouraged people to stay within the ‘village’ to go shopping, many chose to cross the wall due to social and economic factors, and thus demonstrated a desire for urban connectivity that their children would have witnessed and – due to their limited independence – often been denied.

The dilapidation of Byker’s public spaces during the 1990s and early 2000s was a manifestation of the failure of Erskine’s socialised concepts of space to match the prevailing inward turn of the neoliberal era, leaving communal areas abandoned to those who had nowhere else to go. For many children, of course, this was often a different story. With little attachment to the old landscape or the ways of living that came with it, young people instead were presented with an environment that many described to me as a place great for exploration, play, and hiding from the adult world. It was a place to build dens, hide scrap, start fires, or try other things their parents wouldn’t want them to. As adopters of Byker’s public space, many of its children were kept away from it simultaneously because adults worried it could pose them a danger and that they could pose a danger within it.

In 1993, a field study by a team of American architecture students found that most parents expected that their children would leave Byker for ‘better areas’.^²⁶ They compared the relatively stable community of north Byker to a housing cluster in south Byker called Bolam Coyne that, they concluded, was under ‘serious social stress’.^²⁷ Bolam Coyne was in certain respects a microcosm of the new Byker development. It was an inward-facing courtyard structure troubled with vandalism, anti-social behaviour, drug-use, and crime and became somewhat infamous locally for it. In the early 2000s, the Byker housing office polled residents and found that they wanted it pulled down and replaced with a car park.^²⁸ The insularity of Bolam Coyne locked residents into a social contract with troublesome neighbours, and necessarily restricted opportunities for roaming, discovery, and connection with residents outside their complex. Seeing Bolam Coyne’s demise, Abrams called it ‘a canary in a coal mine’ for the whole project, and identified the root of ‘the problem’ to be that all the housing was ‘designed for a single economic class, and a single ethnic group, and then a surrounding wall was built’.^²⁹ Thus the very poor wanted to get in to the area, and those that achieved greater prosperity considered it a mark of success to leave.

Twenty years on, a different perspective can be offered that challenges the gloomy prognoses of the early 21^st century: Byker is neither utopian dream nor dystopic failure. Bolam Coyne was not demolished for a car park but was listed and eventually given an award-winning redevelopment.^³⁰ In 2008 the council began estate-wide refurbishment works, which later continued after 2012 when Byker at large was taken into a community trust and saw the restoration of its exteriors, interiors, and landscaping with financing available to the trust as a charitable enterprise. Byker today still has many problems. By the standards of the North East, it has comparatively high unemployment, a high crime rate, and low levels of education, but it is arguably in a more settled state and no longer attracts the same levels of regional or national attention it once did.^³¹ To borrow a biological term, this loss of status as a ‘charismatic’ (or flagship, emblematic) estate is likely why there is far less recent academic literature on the area. As a local historian born in 1998 who was not aware of any academic ‘Byker debate’ growing up, this makes it easier to assess both the successes and failures of the estate in the round without being required to either defend the place, or to reproach it. For the participants too, it was a simpler exercise to be reflective on the area’s past without needing to first address any larger discourse that surrounded Byker in previous decades.

The interviews I have conducted with Byker residents show that those Byker residents who grew up during the 1980s recollected much excitement and joy in the process of redevelopment. Both the condemned old buildings and construction sites of the new were excellent places for exploration and play, and when complete the new homes had more facilities and were in better condition than the old terraces, which had been condemned as early as 1953.^³² The new Byker also featured more pedestrian-only and green spaces, which provided opportunities for different types of play. The disruption to daily life and the displacement of the old community that many parents mourned had little impact on the children who were at the vanguard of forming what would become a new Byker community.

As my discussion of the secondary literature implies, there appears to have been a decline in optimism among Byker’s youth during the 1990s and 2000s, as the community continued to change environmentally, socially, and economically. The interviews herein reveal how the national trend of decreasing child mobility manifested itself in Byker, which despite featuring car-lite design also saw a fall in free outdoor childhood play. This tells us that we cannot only look at environmental factors when assessing children’s relationship with the environment; they must be placed in social and cultural context. The national concerns established earlier in this thesis, such as ‘stranger danger’, new technologies, and the threat from cars combined with and catalysed area-specific factors surrounding poverty, drugs, environmental management policies, and local features of Byker’s urban fabric. Child mobility is known to be linked to community cohesion, and the fall in child mobility during this period reduced social connectivity in a vicious cycle of restriction and isolation.^³³

While Byker’s physical form was fully reimagined for a post-industrial era, its economic, social, and cultural structures were not, and they carried the vestiges of the North East’s de-industrial half-life into a new era. There was thus a significant mismatch between the broader rapidly changing economy and society of the 1980s and 1990s that could be described as ‘post-industrial’, and that of Byker and the North East at large, that could be described as ‘de-industrial’, resulting in rising unemployment, poverty, crime, and parental fear.

In this chapter I explore the different needs and values Byker’s young people sought in their environment during a 30-year period of upheaval in the shape of North East childhoods. At times, these needs and values resulted in unforeseen and unintended environmental uses and consequences, as well as undesirable conflicts of desires between generations. Part 3.1.2 of this chapter will explain the interview process and the participants I spoke with. Part 3.1.3 will then contextualise the research undertaken by exploring the ‘Old Byker’ against which ‘New Byker’ was popularly framed. Parts 3.2 and 3.3 comprise the majority of the work, using 20 oral testimonies to explore and engage the stories of Byker’s children as they grew up amidst a rapidly changing world of new technological, economic, social, and environmental realities. Part 3.2 will focus on the theme of ‘destruction’, and 3.3 on the theme of ‘construction’ to draw out narratives of how change was negotiated – physically and intellectually – during the period. Within this bisected structure, parts 3.2 and 3.3 will divide their analysis by topics that illustrate key forms of interaction between environment and child. Under the theme of destruction, I consider de-industrialisation, cars, drink and drugs, and pranks, fights, and crime. Under the theme of construction I address climbing, dens, and weather. Through talking to ex-child residents I seek to draw a close, intimate, and complex picture of how children negotiated destruction and construction: attempting – and sometimes failing – to make the landscape their own; often against the odds. Hence, I will be reevaluating Byker’s iconic streetscape from a new angle, one long disregarded in the planning literature.

3.1.2 The Participants

I asked for volunteers who had grown up in Byker between 1980-2010 and conducted interviews with 20 Byker residents between 10 May 2022 and 19 December 2022. Participants were gathered through a variety of methods. First, I postered noticeboards at the community centre and in the windows of local shops as well as soliciting volunteers in various businesses and shops. These approaches proved to be ineffective however, and I only recruited one person by them. More effective (and less physically tiring) was recruiting through local Facebook groups – mostly the ‘Bygone Byker’ group, which is used as a hub for communal remembrance, commemoration, and investigation of Byker’s past. I recruited half a dozen participants this way and from this starting point recruited the rest by snowballing. The interviews were arranged according to the needs of each participant, with five being conducted online, and the rest conducted in-person at people’s homes, cars, in local cafes, and around the neighbourhood in walking interviews.

The final participant in this process was me. I was born in North-East England in 1998 and grew up a 10-minute walk from Byker in adjacent Heaton. I have been and still am in the neighbourhood often, usually to go shopping on Shields Road, and I have friends who live in the area. However, I was not well known in Byker at the time of this research and none of the participants knew me personally before the interviews. Therefore, although I knew the estate well from both personal and research experience going into the interviews, I was rightly considered an outsider by the interviewees. In my position as ‘somewhat local’, I agree with Moser’s argument that personality traits generally superseded positionality when it came to the interviews. Whether I was considered local or not by the participants was less important than the strength of the interpersonal connection between us, the tricky interplay of civility, humility, curiosity, and humour.^³⁴ As Hammersley and Atkinson suggest, effectively handling ‘field relations’ requires a mix of ‘patience, diplomacy…and occasionally boldness’.^³⁵

Although there were many things I knew of Byker’s past academically, participants often still had to explain to me various aspects of the estate’s geography, history, and terminology. For example, where a certain street was or what the name of a childhood game meant. I would argue that my unfamiliarity with the estate can partly be explained by the insular characteristics of the Byker wall, which Erskine deliberately designed to disincentivise non-residents from entering. With no convenient crossing points, many times I entered the area by crossing Byker bridge at a well-used gap in roadside fencing. It is also true that Heaton and Byker have two different school catchment areas (a primary school opened at the centre of the new Byker estate in 1982) and that Heaton is a richer neighbourhood, being quite literally ‘on the other side of the tracks’.

The interviews were semi-structured, and I asked each participant a range of questions on themes of play, safety, community, and technology. Within these themes I asked participants about de-industrialising playscapes, games and pranks linked to particular environmental features or events, perceptions of safety and negotiation of restrictions, communal child-minding, the social role of shops, animals, nature, and weather, differences in gender activities and parenting; den making; vandalism; drugs; and technology. Interviewees were also asked to consider how growing up in Byker has changed since they were young and – for those participants that were parents – how they raised their children in comparison to how they were raised. Conversation often progressed onto topics outside of my pre-set list of questions, and I was happy to allow participants to talk about what seemed important to them about growing up in Byker, making space for ideas I had not yet considered. The main objective of this focused, local case study was to deepen understanding of how the children of Byker perceived, experienced, shaped and were shaped by their environment over the three decades of study.

The twenty individuals interviewed represent men and women who were children in Byker across the period of study, though with a skew towards women and the 1980s. This self-selecting sample also represents long-term residents who identify strongly with Byker, and therefore does not represent those who feel unincorporated into the area’s social fabric. All the participants gave permission for their testimony to be used for research purposes, though three did so under condition of anonymity and five under use of their first name only. In total, fourteen women and six men were interviewed. The greater willingness of women in Byker to be interviewed is interesting because this was not the case in Chopwell, where an almost equal split was achieved. The character and self-selecting nature of the testimonies gathered suggests that this was due to a difference in feeling of connection to, and ownership of, place. Because those that came forward to speak with me were those with the most interest and investment in talking about Byker’s history, this suggests that in the round Byker’s women felt a greater sense of connection to their environment than men. The estate’s troubled history throughout the period of study was brought up by all participants, in which unemployment and disillusionment among men in particular grew with the loss of traditional industry. In contrast, whilst enduring the same hardships as the menfolk, many of the women I interviewed grew up in a period in which it was felt that their economic and social horizons were broadening. Even though girls throughout the period of study were given less opportunity to play out and engage with their local environment than boys, they still did so, and built a lasting sense of belonging that decades later would influence their decision to respond to my call for an interview.

This chapter will compare the decades these people grew up in whilst acknowledging that neither their childhoods nor the studied environments were constrained by arbitrary annual boundaries. Nevertheless, participants tended to identify themselves as being ‘a child of’ a particular decade, by which they referred to the decade in which they began to find independence and discover tastes and hobbies outside of their parent’s sphere of influence (around age 8). Those interviewed also fell into the broader categories of ‘generation x’ and ‘millennial’, but when talking about childhood specifically a decade-bound framing is more common in the British popular imagination and was naturally used by the participants. This proved to be a deeply practical way of organising the gathered material. In the table below, therefore, is listed the participants’ ‘Child of’ decade. Of those interviewed, one was a child of the 1970s, eight of the 1980s, six of the 1990s, and five of the 2000s. Also listed is the format of each interview.

PARTICIPANTS, BYKER
Name	Gender	‘Child of’ Decade	Interview Format
Pauline Alnwick	F	1970s	Online
Alan Robson	M	1980s	Walking
Anonymous Byker 1 ‘Sarah’	F	1980s	In-Person
Amanda	F	1980s	Walking
Denise Nichols	F	1980s	Online
Shelley Landale Down	F	1980s	Online
Susan Whittaker	F	1980s	Walking
Michael Scott	M	1980s	Online
Val	F	1980s	In-Person
Bill Richardson	M	1990s	Walking
Dan	M	1990s	Online
David Green	M	1990s	In-Person
Lisa Richardson	F	1990s	Walking
Lynne Steele	F	1990s	Walking
Yvonne Leaney	F	1990s	Walking
Andy Miller	M	2000s	Walking
Anonymous Byker 2 ‘Jamie’	F	2000s	In-Person
Anonymous Byker 3 ‘Rebecca’	F	2000s	In-Person
Kate	F	2000s	Walking
Sophie	F	2000s	In-Person

3.1.3 Old Byker

‘Old Byker’ was often invoked in my conversations with people for this research, even though most of the people I talked to have only ever known its successor. However, by fortunate mistake I ended up speaking with a child of the 1960s and 1970s, Pauline Alnwick, about what it was like to grow up in Old Byker. This proved to be very useful as it provided valuable context and a baseline by which to assess how childhoods changed in Byker in subsequent decades, and as a result I decided to conduct a similar interview in Chopwell. Before the bulldozers moved in, Byker was effectively considered a ‘slum’ by the council, with many dilapidated and abandoned buildings due to the decline of shipbuilding and other heavy industry. Pauline described the enormous communal bonfires they would have on bonfire night to get rid of all the scrap that was lying around:

Everybody in Byker was filling the lanes and streets around this open fire. It was right next to Raby Street, just like in the back lanes of Raby Street. Oh my gosh, it was so huge that windows were smashing, you know, the light, the streetlights as well… The kids were mostly like, you know, excited and just kind of you know, getting involved in this sort of, I don’t know, the mania of it. (Pauline, F, 1970s)

This is an example of the many dangers of old Byker for its young residents, who would play in and on the condemned terraces, and were drawn from across the estate to the Raby Street bonfire. In a game of chasey ‘there was no barrier to where you went, so if somebody went on top of a roof or a wall, you had to get up there too’. Notably across the decades the games of ‘chasey’ described to me (otherwise known as ‘ratcatcher’ or ‘ratty’) had increasingly small bounds. Whereas Pauline says ‘there was no barrier’ to the game in the 1970s, Lynn told me that it was ‘confined to kind of short areas’ in the 1990s.

One thing Pauline loved as a 1970s child was the TV, telling me she was ‘a complete television fan… I didn’t really have books when I was little. The TV was it. TV and music.’ This demonstrates that the story of the decline in outdoor childhood play is not a simple one, so often blamed today on screens and new technologies. Technologies such as the TV were a huge presence in Pauline’s 1970s childhood, as computers and video games came to be for those I interviewed during the 1980s and mobile phones during the 2000s. New technologies cannot simply be cited as the cause of the decline in children’s free play when the halcyon days many recall were saturated with screens.

The economic and commercial landscape of Byker massively changed between Old and New. In Pauline’s youth most mams worked part or full-time in the home, meaning there were many adults around to keep a passive eye on the children. Pauline remembered that ‘you always had grannies and mams looking out for the kids, no matter where you were’. As Wajcman observes, this casual network of mothers able to watch, and even discipline, each other’s children was a long-established way of life for working-class people in Britain and was facilitated by an economic model that forced women to stay at home.^³⁶ The density of the housing and the economic ability of the community to support a network of walkable local shops was also key to this, as this facilitated the necessary network of ‘eyes on the street’ to safeguard Byker’s children.^³⁷

Because everything was in walking distance and most people did not have the means to travel much outside the area, growing up in Old Byker was an all-encompassing experience. As Pauline described it: ‘I had a very sheltered existence, really. My whole world was there’. This meant trips outside the area were rare to non-existent. Pauline didn’t ever remember being taken out on a trip somewhere apart from ‘being took to Whitley Bay once and my oldest sister would take us to Heaton Park if she was in a good mood’. The collapse of this world then, broke down barriers for Byker’s young people. At the same time, Pauline recalled how young people mourned the loss of their ‘safe space’.

Even as kids we felt sad about all those places being taken out, you know, places that you would have been playing in. (Pauline, F, 1970s)

The children’s concerns for the old streets must have been partly a reflection of the wider concern of their parents and the community, which was vocally against Erskine’s redesign. This was vocalised in The Byker Phoenix, a community newspaper that campaigned on behalf of residents and attempted to influence the shape of redevelopment in Byker.

Figure IX. Page from Byker Phoenix, date unknown.^³⁸

The construction of new Byker changed everything first and foremost because it meant people had to be moved out to other areas of the city while the place was demolished and rebuilt. Pauline recalled how this fragmented the old community:

Once Byker was done, we were all expected to go back… but people were like so unhappy they didn’t want to go back because it wasn’t Byker anymore. (Pauline, F, 1970s)

This context is useful to understand when considering childhoods of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, because the legacy of Old Byker lingered on. For example, a 2008 report found the North East to be one of the most sociable regions of Britain.^³⁹ Pattison argues this was due to the ‘half-life of de-industrialisation’ in the region, whereby lingering environmental and social structures of the industrial era created ‘a strong and federated sense of mutuality’ that persisted.^⁴⁰ Nostalgic narratives across de-industrial communities in Britain today paint many aspects of post-war working-class life as superior to the modern day whilst underplaying the associated hardships and inequalities, but the fragmentation of community and sociability is one narrative that this thesis supports. Indeed, the decline of ‘community’ in Byker from a time in the 1980s when ‘everyone knew everyone’ (that so many participants in this project noted) is a clear trend that tracks alongside the national ‘loss of childhood’ that this thesis seeks to explain in the North East context.

Pauline mourned a perceived loss of sociability in Byker, and so too did every other participant I interviewed. Desire for a return to a more communal environment can be seen to be part of the process of the half-life of de-industrialisation: a mourning for the social structures that were lost with the end of traditional industrial employment on Tyneside.^⁴¹ Whilst the redeveloped Byker brought positive change in terms of improved living and working conditions for many, it did not replace many of the non-physical factors that were lost with the end of shipbuilding and manufacturing, such as jobs moving out of the area, or the increasing need for two adult incomes to support a family.

3.2 Destruction: Attractions and Fears of Dangerous Environments

Walking around, walking around this town…

What’ll be left, when the old streets come down?

Byker, you’ve born and bred some men…

If they tear you down your time won’t come again.

‘Byker Song’.^⁴²

3.2.1 De-Industrialising Places as Play Environments: Trash and Treasure

Broadcast on Tyne Tees Television in 1974, the lamentation of two unnamed musicians in Byker Song that ‘if they tear you down your time won’t come again’ proved to be true for most residents of Old Byker that were moved away during the redevelopment and never returned. Many children, however, found much to be excited about amidst the ever-changing environment of destruction and construction during the 1980s. Indeed, the more settled and orderly Byker of the 1990s and 2000s provided fewer opportunities for outdoor play, exploration, and transgression.

The newly built Byker of the 1980s possessed a liminal quality. New people moving into the estate had not yet formed an established community and the de-industrial process meant it was difficult to categorise as either ‘industrial’ or ‘post-industrial’.^⁴³ The concept of the ‘half-life’ acknowledges that industrial ruination is a lived process, enduring and complex, for people occupying the in-between spaces of post-industrial change. In this, Linkon’s concept agrees with Mah who wrote about Walker – an adjacent neighbourhood to Byker with similar heritage – in recognising the de-industrialised sense of being caught between two phases, negotiating a transition that lacks a clear end point.^⁴⁴ Strangleman also highlighted the half-life as characterised by ‘temporal open-endedness’.^⁴⁵ Because of the scale of its environmental change, I argue that Byker moved faster through the half-life process than other communities, but the evidence of my interviews also suggests that some structures of feeling remain today – decades after the loss of industry. This new liminal neighbourhood was not yet settled by any adult community. This provided an opening for children to move in and claim dominion. In remembering the redevelopment works, Susan described playing on the big rubble heaps that would pile up:

[The rubble heaps] were death traps really. But as a kid, they were just brilliant, they were just like disneyland you know?… We used to slide down them, winter when they were snowy and it was icy. Brilliant. (Susan, F, 1980s)

By acts of play such as this, Susan and her friends found value in environments that the adult world had deemed valueless, and her retrospective assessment of the rubble heaps as ‘death traps’ demonstrates the change in her value system since youth. This dissonance in values between children and adults – even between an individual’s younger and older self – refutes a simplistic narrative of destruction, turning these processes into matters of perspective. Where an adult sees wasteland, a child can see ‘disneyland’. Trash and treasure.

Demolition sites were not the only environmental reminders/remainders of Old Byker during the 1980s; the site’s steep geography also carried through. The top end of Byker is one of the highest points in Newcastle, from which you can get magnificent views over the city. In Old Byker Victorian gridded streets led directly downhill to the shipyards and although the redesign had replaced these with a more circuitous network, they did not eliminate all steep streets such as St Peter’s Road completely. This geography facilitated forms of play – namely any form of sliding or wheeling – that would be less interesting and less dangerous in flatter neighbourhoods.

I thought of how great it would be to skate down the bank… not knowing that I would pick up speed. And this is the first time I’d ever done it… Well, all lumps and bumps are literally flying all over and I realised, you know, straight away, I was in trouble… (Shelley, F, 1980s)

Equipped with a new pair of roller blades (a 1980s trend in Byker as elsewhere), Shelley’s curiosity got the better of her and only by grabbing onto a lamppost and crashing to the floor did she save herself from speeding further downhill to a potentially ruinous fate. This topography is another example of play at the ‘rough edges’ of a place. Rough edges that would be sanded back with time – as rubble was cleared and barriers erected – precisely to discourage (self)destructive behaviours like those recollected by Susan and Shelley.

It is important however in the context of de-industrialisation that environmental factors are not considered without also factoring in the estate’s economic and social strife during this period. De-industrialisation and ruination are processes and understanding the Byker landscape as a site that contained, reflected, and drove change is key to understanding how and why the nature of childhood evolved during this period too. In contrast to, for example, nearby ruins of Hadrian’s Wall preserved and maintained by heritage organisations, de-industrialising communities are not ruins; they are involved with processes of ruination that encompass much more than only environmental factors. For example, in the 1990s Byker experienced unemployment rates of 27% and was the third most deprived ward in Newcastle.^⁴⁶ The estate, typical of many social housing developments during that time, faced issues of anti-social behaviour and crime, resulting in a high number of empty tenancies. A Community Appraisal of Byker in 2001 highlighted it as having the highest and fastest termination of tenancies in Newcastle.^⁴⁷ These economic and social problems led to abandoned and derelict streetscapes which came with associated stigma and the area earning a reputation as ‘sink estate’ in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The story of the ‘Byker Rat-Boy’ – who escaped police by hiding in The Wall’s ventilation – became notorious and synonymous with the area.^⁴⁸ Overall, fear both for and of children drove parents’ reluctance to encourage unsupervised play in such an environment, compared to when ‘New Byker’ was genuinely new, clean, and full of modernist promise. Robin Abrams, an architect who visited the estate in 2001, said this:

Throughout the community, upper and lower, there were burned, boarded up houses. The incidence of untended gardens far outnumbered the tidy ones. All shops in the lower shopping precinct were boarded up. Portions of the Byker Wall appeared to be abandoned – previously secured entrances were open, the lobbies covered with graffiti. The landscaping was ragged or in some cases missing altogether; litter and graffiti were rampant. The entire community, not just the lower areas, projected an image of desolation and despair.^⁴⁹

2001/2 CRIME RATE STATISTICS BY WARD
WARD	CRIME RATE PER 1,000 POPULATION
Benwell	141.6
Blakelaw	108.0
Byker	211.6
Castle	48.8
Dene	58.7
Denton	86.8
Elswick	211.7
Fawdon	71.5
Tyne and Wear (Overall)	106.1
England and Wales (Overall)	110.5

Figure X. Table showing 2001/2 Newcastle crime rates for some wards. At 211, Byker’s is considerably higher than the overall Tyne and Wear and England and Wales rates.^⁵⁰

By 2010 Byker was certainly in better condition than in 2001 after seeing investment and efforts to ‘tidy up’ and increase tenancy, but many pre-1990s features of the estate never returned. Indeed, some people I interviewed described contemporary Byker in Abrams-like terms such as Lisa (F, 1990s) who said ‘everything’s, like wreck and ruin now compared to when we were kids’. Note, however, that as a child of the 1990s, Lisa still remembered the Byker of that decade as better kept than that of the 2020s. Given the descriptions of ‘desolation and despair’ that Abrams described Byker being left in just after the 1990s, this must at least partly be seen as nostalgia. However, the sense of a ‘loss of place’ expressed by Lisa and other participants I talked to was not only the product of rose-tinted spectacles. Whilst Byker was ostensibly ‘tidied up’ from the mid-2000s onward, this did not reverse the steady decline in working-class culture and community. Traditions of communalism and multi-generational employment have strong roots in North East England and this ‘structure of feeling’ was part of that legacy.^⁵¹ Over time however, as Lisa observed, this legacy and connection to industrial communalism weakened. Furthermore, the tidying up of New Byker in the 2000s commonly resulted in degradation of the play environment to facilitate a more orderly environment. Damaged shelters and play structures weren’t replaced, fences, spikes, and CCTV cameras were erected, and trees and shrubs were uprooted. The excitement that many children took in the demolition of Old Byker demonstrates that their relationship to its destruction held a different character to that of their parents. Thirty years later the efforts to tidy up New Byker can also be seen, from certain perspectives, to be a form of ruination.

One key indicator of decline identified by participants was the closure of local shops over the period. New Byker was built with dedicated spaces for small shops but, as Abrams observed, by 2001 ‘all shops in the lower shopping precinct were boarded up’. Residents preferred to shop outside the estate on Shields Road because it was seen as the classier option and the opening of large supermarkets nearby continued to draw footfall away from local businesses. The economic destruction of many small shops in favour of fewer larger ones impacted Byker’s built form and the social aspect of the shop and shopping street as places of encounter. The sense of loss attached to participants’ testimonies on shops was not necessarily about economic prosperity, but rather the positive social and environmental spaces shops created, strengthening kinship ties between friends and families.

It’s completely changed now. When I was a kid there was plenty of nice shops, there was Beavans [a local department store] there was shops… butchers, post office… y’know, you didn’t have to go far. Everything was just there. (Val, F, 1980s)

Figure XI. Signage for Beavans, the old department store, still preserved today.⁵²

The type of urban fabric that disappeared during the period of study had helped to facilitate an environment of child safety by encouraging walking over driving, leading to more people and eyes on the street to keep passive watch over the kids, as well as fewer cars on the road to endanger them. Val’s memory highlights how the accessibility of these shops also gave children more independence as they could go to browse and buy things for themselves. New Byker’s reduced population density meant it could support fewer local businesses. Furthermore, whilst Erskine’s design was pedestrian friendly in one sense – if you wanted to move within its confines – it made travelling beyond a more attractive proposition by car.

3.2.2 Cars: Unplayable Streets?

‘Kids would play in the road, they wouldn’t be scared of cars. You could play out and have like an hour on Allendale Road – which is kind of a main road – for an hour on an evening time and maybe not see one or two cars.’ (Yvonne, F, 1990s)

This memory comes from a generation of Byker children who were some of the last able to play out on the street in this way without the constant fear of traffic. As my interviews show, the 1980s was the decade that marked the end of a centuries-long norm, already declining in decades prior, that the street could be used as a site of play. Yvonne’s memory of the 1990s however, demonstrates that mostly car-free outdoor play did persist in Byker into the 1990s, a working-class area in a region where rates of car ownership were slower to rise than the national average (in 2001 Newcastle had 3 cars for every 10 people, compared to British average of 5 for every 10).^⁵³ The increase in car ownership and traffic in Britain explored in Chapter One fundamentally altered the landscape of childhood play, as the added risk and reduction in quality of the outdoor environment led children to play either elsewhere, or simply less.

Compounding this the new dangers posed by cars caused parents to increase restrictions on children’s outdoor activities. This in turn contributed to a tearing of Byker’s social fabric, as children were less likely to gather and play together in the streets. The sense of community that was fostered through these interactions began to erode, leading to a more fragmented and isolated environment for adults as well as children. Over time, this problem was entrenched as infrastructural changes were made to accommodate the growing number of vehicles, prioritising the needs of drivers over the safety of pedestrians and cohesion of communities. Unlike the destruction of de-industrialisation, cars were a form of destruction that repelled rather than attracted young people to the outside realm.

Byker, however, was designed to be different. Erskine’s vision for Byker was of a car-lite neighbourhood, with many pedestrian-only streets and squares. Yvonne’s recollection of car-free play persisting into the 1990s is testament to a mark of success of this design philosophy. However, further evidence demonstrates that as car numbers in the North East continued to rise Byker, too, became overrun. The Wall shielded its residents only a little from the large forces at work across Britain during this period of individualisation, fear of strangers, de-industrialisation, and expansion of road infrastructure. It is also the case that Erskine’s walled design – skirted by a high-speed road – incentivised car adoption as much as the pedestrianised interior disincentivised it. Walking around Byker today there are still many areas that are inaccessible to cars, but also several small streets and squares that have come to serve primarily as car parks. In 2002 Byker residents petitioned to have the Bolam Coyne housing cluster pulled down and replaced with a car park, although unsuccessfully.^⁵⁴ During a walk Susan pointed out to me a car park on Brinkburn Close that had been a playground before it was removed in the early 2000s, and when I asked subsequent participants about this some of them also remembered its existence. It is telling, however, that most people had forgotten the existence of this playground, as it demonstrates the power environment exerts on memory. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ very much applies in the context of children’s infrastructure where those who used it soon grow out of it. To emphasise this point, a playground by Laverock Court was removed which no participants mentioned to me.^⁵⁵

Figure XII. Brinkburn Close car park, previously a playground.⁵⁶

When considering why children over time had come to feel less ‘at home’ in Byker’s outdoor spaces, participants of all three decades talked about how children wouldn’t be allowed or ‘wouldn’t get away’ with the sort of roaming and play activities archetypal of the earlier period. This has been a recurring narrative across generations that is reflective of three things in the context of 1980-2010. Firstly, childhood nostalgia played a role as participants tended to focus on positive experiences over negative ones. Secondly, the desire for secrecy in many children’s activities – highlighted often within the testimonies of this thesis – naturally results in adults often not being aware of the full extent of young people’s activities, especially those most transgressive. Thirdly there was a real and significant loss of freedom for children over these decades, driven significantly by an increased parental and societal focus on safety and a changing urban fabric unfriendly to the young. Cars were (and continue to be) a major contributing factor to this. Even in a neighbourhood designed to be car-lite, cars slowly pervaded the space and, unlike other factors limiting child mobility, were readily accepted as immutable facts of life. For instance, Tracey told me that despite growing up in the 1980s and feeling the urban landscape was entirely safe she still drove ‘to most places now’ and wouldn’t let her children play with as much freedom as she had. For many older participants, their understanding and appreciation of Byker’s heritage was gained through unsupervised exploration and personal experiences of the place. This opportunity was lost for younger generations amidst a vicious cycle of more cars meaning fewer people meaning more cars meaning fewer people.

3.2.3 Drink and Drugs: Environments of Familiarity and Fear

The problem of drugs in Byker came to the fore in the 1990s alongside rising unemployment, crime, and dilapidation. At the same time, alcoholism had always been an issue during and before the 1980s that led to violence and anti-social behaviour, making the streets less safe for children. The key difference between the impact of drugs and alcohol was that drinking was an accepted normal function of community, and even its negative externalities were somewhat overlooked. The difference in participants’ perceptions of drink and drugs was clear in our conversations. As is the common view across Britain, in all the interviews I conducted there was a sense of warmth towards drinking culture never extended to drug culture, despite drink undoubtedly being the longer standing and more pervasive aggravator of anti-social behaviour. Denise described how public drunkenness was a common sight in the 1980s:

All the blokes drunk really regularly. Then most of the women drunk on the weekends with the blokes, so drinking and drunkenness was quite common. You would see it. You still see it now. But there was a lot more pubs then. (Denise, F, 1980s)

Drinking and drunkenness was, and continued to be, a fact of life. Women being party to the culture was important as it meant – being held primarily responsible for children – they were less likely to see its dangers as serious. Scenes of drunken fighting, squabbling, and teasing were less threatening to parents when they knew the people involved, and with whom they may well have been drinking with themselves. The closure of local pubs also changed this dynamic, as it moved drinking out of the locality or into people’s homes.

You’d see fights. People scrapping outside the pub you know you might get shouted at… But it was usually you’d be home for your tea by then… ‘Cos when I was a bit older I’d go myself. Not that much older mind you! (‘Sarah’, F, 1980s)

This quote again demonstrates there was a tangible ‘danger’ alcohol culture posed to children, but that in the 1980s it didn’t much influence parenting practices in a society where drunkenness was normalised. For older children, underage drinking in pubs was also a means of communal socialising that tied them closer to their community and allowed for far more adult oversight than the subsequent drug culture. Indeed, for all Byker residents it was true that its communal drinking culture was important to community cohesion, which – I must emphasise – was critical to allowing the degree of childhood independence Byker saw in the 1980s. In moderate amounts alcohol itself helps facilitate social bonding, but more importantly it was a shared ritual in the community, facilitated by the communal environment of the pub.^⁵⁷ This is one reason why it is important to consider environment in these questions. Denise remembering that there was ‘a lot more pubs then’ emphasises the mixed legacy of that drinking culture.The venues were nexuses of connection for the community, providing ample opportunity for social drinking and reminiscences that would come to define Byker’s communal memory of its ship-building past. At the same time this culture led to increased incidents of public disorder and anti-social behaviour. For girls in particular, the regular presence of drunken men on the street each night contributed to their parents’ desire to get them home before dark.

If it was time for dinner I could hear my mam calling, or some other kid would come calling.

[and would you always go home, or would you ever disobey and stay out late?]

Not really, not at that age. I’d be tired! But yeah my mam was more lenient with my brothers I think. (Susan, F, 1980s)

Even if rules for boys and girls were the same on paper, the implementation or enforcement of those rules could still result in gender imbalance. Susan’s brothers were also expected to come home when called, but a more ‘lenient’ approach was adopted to the boys who were not understood to be implicitly in as much danger. Drinking culture played an important part in founding these fears, as drunken men did pose a real danger to teenage girls especially. These dangers shifted with environmental changes during the 1990s and 2000s – namely the closure of pubs and other ‘third places’, degradation of public spaces, and increase in car use. Drunkenness had moved into the home. Without community pubs (increasingly only those on Shields Road beyond the wall, across the busy road, and accessible to a much wider general public) the environment afforded fewer opportunities for social bonding. Fewer people walked the streets and over time a drunken person became more likely to be a stranger. As discussed in Chapter Two, the 1990s and 2000s saw a massive increase in public awareness and concern over domestic child abuse – sexual abuse in particular. However, as I have shown, that press attention largely portrayed abusers as one-off ‘monsters’ and thus avoided some of the trickier questions these incidents brought up around wider societal issues over the relationship between sexuality, masculinity, and power.^⁵⁸ In Byker none of the participants I talked to brought up domestic abuse as a factor of fear that caused children, parents, or the community to alter their restrictive practices, even with increasing levels of domestic drinking and the statistics clearly demonstrating how much more common domestic abuse was than attacks on children from strangers.

The existing drinking culture in Byker made it easier for drugs to take root. What began as a community tradition of social drinking evolved into a more dangerous mix of alcohol and drugs, leading to increased addiction and related issues.

In the 90s it went downhill, and people started getting access to stuff like that [drugs] more and more. But a lot of the drink came from, you know, it was our culture to drink. With the dads, and a lot of our lads got hooked on the drink, but then a lot of other stuff got mixed in with it. (Lynn, F, 1990s)

Methadone and ecstasy grew massively in popularity during the 1990s in Byker as well as many other places across the country. Heroin and cocaine also grew in popularity and new ways were developed to take them. Whilst a national trend, certain areas were more affected than others, and Lynn’s quote shows how Byker’s drinking culture contributed to the foothold drug abuse gained in the community. Poverty, unemployment, and social atomisation played an even greater role however, as evidenced by the correlation between drug-abuse epidemics and working-class communities across the country.^⁵⁹ Indeed, Byker’s drinking culture was itself a vestige of its own working-class industrial heritage.

Having fewer children and eyes on the street during the 1990s, as well as several abandoned buildings in the community like Bolam Coyne, allowed people to take drugs in public spaces where previously they would have not felt comfortable. This further stigmatised the public realm and the anti-social environment facilitated anti-social behaviour. Many participants described a ‘change’ that came over the neighbourhood with the introduction of drugs. For example, Michael recalled the absence of drugs during his youth in the 1980s, and their introduction during his teenage years:

There wasn’t much in the way of nastiness between the kids. There was always fights, but there was no such thing as drugs, right? Just wasn’t there. I was about 15 or 16 before I would have heard of anybody with drugs. (Michael, M, 1980s)

Drugs were a national concern during the 1980s when Michael was growing up but were not ‘felt’ in Byker by the participants I talked to until the 1990s. Largely this was due to changing perceptions around drugs with the advent of more socially acceptable forms of party drugs like Ecstasy and Ketamine.⁶⁰ Thus, fears of ‘new’ forms of drug abuse that had begun growing during the 1980s began to fully manifest in the 1990s. Many participants who grew up around the turn of the 1990s described it as a ‘pivot point’ in time, marking the beginning of the end for Byker’s de-industrial community cohesion. Drug-abuse problems were both a contributing factor and a symptom of that degradation. Yvonne described a collective understanding in the community of the threats it faced:

We felt the change in Byker, especially in the early 90s… a lot of drugs started hitting and the people started using pot, it felt like the start. The Byker Wall became a bit of a dumping ground, and that’s a horrible start with people. (Yvonne, F, 1990s)

During the 1990s and 2000s council money was continually reduced for maintenance of the estate – the most expensive to maintain in the city – which further contributed to deterioration of the public realm, and consequently the morale and cohesion of the community.^⁶¹ The prevalence of drug users and drug paraphernalia like discarded needles also made children more wary, for example, of crawling into bushes. Whilst walking along Gordon Road I asked Kate if she played much in Byker’s foliage growing up:

We did yeah like hide and seek and that… but I wouldn’t dare now. There’s probably all sorts of stuff in there. (Kate, F, 2000s)

Kate’s testimony and those of her contemporaries confirm that they did play out less than older generations, but the impression must not be taken that they stopped altogether. Rather, changes to the environment around them changed the balance of activity in their lives. Litter in the estate’s foliage as a reason for reduced outdoor play is an interesting case to examine because this had been a long-standing problem in New Byker. In earlier decades, children had used the estate’s shrubbery to hide and keep all sorts of materials and build dens. At that time adult residents had complained about this which is one of the reasons why the estate’s greenery was cut back.^⁶²

In the 1990s for Byker Revisited Abrams talked to a woman called Nancy who told him that ‘The council did away with all the men who used to come around and clean the streets’, which allowed drug-users to leave their stuff lying about on the street for days and even weeks. They get their needles from … It’s just beside Shields Road… one time, they had mattresses, settees and everything around there you know… You were scared to go down the back’.^⁶³

Drugs were not only seen as a hazard, however. Particularly for older children drugs offered a potentially enticing experience of escape and excitement that they could no longer get from unsupervised outdoor play. As Alan told me, the severe impacts of drug addictions that began in childhood lasted far beyond the 1990s and 2000s:

It was going downhill, in the early 90s, it definitely took a nosedive pretty quick. And kids who I went to school with a lot of them died from drug and alcohol misuse. Loads of them. From the 100 kids that I know, I’ve been about 40 or 50 funerals. The most recent one was maybe last year one of the lads my age died of a heroin overdose. And he was an alcoholic for a lot of years. (Alan, M, 1980s)

The North East region has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in England, with Byker having the highest rate within Newcastle.⁶⁴ Alan’s quote again demonstrates how Byker’s social drinking culture contributed to its drug abuse epidemic. Furthermore, I argue, the unhealthy relationship that many Byker residents developed with drink and drugs during the 1990s and 2000s was environmentally stimulated. It is clear that the simple availability of a potentially dangerous substance does not inevitably lead to abuse of that substance.^⁶⁵ Rather, this comes when people find they have nowhere to go and nobody to turn to. Children in particular are a group with a unique lack of control over how and where they spend their time, and the testimonies I have collected lead me to conclude that many of them turned to dangerous activities in seek of excitement, independence, and community. Without the clear and predictable pathways into secure and reliable employment that had been at the centre of Old Byker’s industrial community, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s saw a waning of socialised drinking culture in favour of a far more atomised drink and drugs culture. This contributed to shifts in perceptions of many areas in Byker from familiar to fearful with the most out-of-the-way and run-down environments attracting problem users, exacerbating existing economic and cultural pressures, degrading the public realm, discouraging (permittance of) outdoor play, and encouraging further dangerous behaviours.

3.2.4 Pranks, Fights, and Crime: Children as Victims and Perpetrators of Destruction

According to police statistics, the absolute crime rate in Britain peaked in 1995 before falling.^⁶⁶ This trend was true at the national and regional level, with Byker having one of the highest crime rates in the North East throughout this period.^⁶⁷ It is very likely that the increase in drug use on the estate partly contributed to the sharp increase in crime in Byker during the 1990s, largely through a rise in theft.^⁶⁸ The unpredictability and threat of drunken and drugged people on the streets deterred parents from allowing outdoor play in an increasingly safety-conscious society. Children were not only victims of these forces however, themselves being commonly involved in dangerous behaviour. In the 1980s loud and violent behaviour among men and boys was generally understood as a ‘fact of life’ in the community. David, for example, recounted the normalisation of fighting amongst young people:

We were always fighting, and I thought it was fairly normal. But I really started realising that for a lot of people, it wasn’t. And for us it were because we were in that tiny little bubble so it was dead normal for us, but outside fears about it are something slightly different than what it was. It wasn’t violent and it wasn’t nasty. It was brilliant. (David, M, 1990s)

When Michael said ‘there was no such thing as drugs’in the 1980s he also noted that ‘there was always fights’, casting it as a routine part of life. David remembered fondly a culture that saw it as play rather than genuine conflict. Behaviours that may have been considered problematic by outsiders were understood as normal, not problematic but symptomatic of a strong community. If the 1990s marked the beginning of a shift toward promoting child safety (at the unintentional expense of health), this is a great example of what parents were reacting against.

Nobody was seriously hurt from fighting. There was a young kid killed just on our street there, where a car came through and got run over. But that was just playing hide and seek. (David, M, 1990s)

Firstly, the acceptance of cars and their dangers is telling in David’s quote, supporting the argument that the physicality of cars and car infrastructure meant they quickly came to feel immutable, unchallengeable sources of danger. Secondly my interviews suggest that fighting was far more common in the earlier period of study in Byker, but because it was of the community it was not understood as a threat toward it. Further to this, as children spent less and less time outdoors together and fighting reduced, this was yet one more factor leading to the dissolution of communalism and eyes-on-the-street that previously had deterred serious violence taking place in such public spaces. ‘Jamie’ told me about a time, growing up in the early 2000s, that her home had been robbed by somebody she knew from the estate:

There was one time. We got our windows broken in and stuff taken.

[Interviewer] You got robbed?

Yes, the TV the… and we knew who it was, yeah. It was a neighbour.

[Interviewer] How did you know who it was?

Because they’d taken stuff before, from other people. There was all loads of junk out the front as well. Their garden was, it was a tip. (‘Jamie’, F, 2000s)

Community fragmentation created the social conditions wherein Jamie’s neighbour could commit this type of violence, providing more opportunity than in prior decades for people to commit such an act against those who lived so physically close to them.^⁶⁹

This is not to say, however, that violent or nasty behaviour in earlier decades did not occur or was without negative consequence. The prevalence of fighting amongst Byker’s boys is testament to that. Rather, the nature and forms of violence changed over time, whereby increasingly Byker residents knew fewer of the other people who lived on the estate, and could therefore more easily view them as targets of suspicion or violence.^⁷⁰ The trend this thesis observes is a shrinking of the Byker ‘in-group’ over time and thus a growing number of people considered strangers, even if they live close by. This ‘strangerisation’ was especially important for children because it both fed and was fed by fears of stranger-danger. As I have argued, New Byker’s unclaimed liminal quality during its early years was one of the factors that made it such an excellent environment for children to adopt. During its early years then, children made up a central part of the New Byker ‘in-group’, and greater independent mobility led to outdoor play that helped to connect families within the neighbourhood. Over time reducing independent mobility contributed to the feelings of community distrust and decline that many participants described to me.

However, whilst childhood play did overall function as a vector for community connection, children in the 1980s could also use their status as New Byker ‘insiders’ to exact forms of violence against those they considered outsiders. An especially badly treated group in the 1980s was the disabled. The negative consequences of a culture more accepting of dangerous behaviour can be seen in the stories relayed to me of pranks and abuse children would carry out against members of the public, who generally were singled out for having some kind of mental or physical difference. In this way, children became forces of destruction in the environment by making spaces feel unsafe and vandalising property. Alan described some ‘characters’ of Byker in the 1980s that many children enjoyed ‘tormenting’. These ‘characters’ were thought about by the children as people who were curious or funny in some way, and they would give them nicknames.

You’ll see all kinds of stuff going on. But we had people around here and there one was called Jackie Shite-er. And he would get called ‘a half a dwarf’… if you got a chance to see Jackie you’d shout ‘Jackie Shite-er! Jackie Shite-er!’ And you know what? He was fast so he would run after all you chasing you. (Alan, M, 1980s)

This was a rough-and-tumble social environment wherein the line between harmless fun and abusive behaviour was blurred and often crossed. Another figure was treated similarly:

And there was Jimmy the brick. When he was born, one leg was shorter than usual, right? So that’s the thing what they did was to give him a special pair of shoes, you know, in the bottom of the shoe, they got this big bit of wood. So that was the brick that was the thing. And he would chase you as well. (Alan, M, 1980s)

New Byker’s environment facilitated these interactions as its car-lite spaces were friendly to all people who didn’t or couldn’t drive, including children and many disabled people as well as the general proportion of Byker’s population at this time who did not own a car.^⁷¹ Testimonies of such ‘characters’ and the taunting of them reduced significantly throughout the period of study. Children spending less free time outdoors is one evident reason for this, but the other is that adults were affected similarly. In a car-oriented world with growing distances between amenities it became increasingly impractical to walk places – and this posed even more of a barrier to many with physical or mental differences. The mention of Byker’s ‘characters’ to other participants brought out further colourful stories and descriptions, and it became clear that these characters were well-known by children throughout the community.

Sandshoes Sam, he was just a bloke, older guy, who used to go running at night… But we all had these theories about Sandshoes Sam… We’d say ‘oh you better be careful or Sandshoes Sam will get you’, but he was just a bloke who was out exercising. But for some reason it got into everybody’s head that Sandshoes Sam was some kind of child abductor or something. (Denise, F, 1980s)

This testimony demonstrates how societal and parental fears over ‘stranger-danger’ manifested themselves within Byker’s childhood culture. Indeed, the general childhood fascination with – and antagonism towards – people in the community who stood-out in some way clearly reflects the public messaging of the period surrounding this moral panic. As detailed in Chapter Two of this thesis, media portrayals of ‘the stranger’ generally portrayed the figure as strange, ugly, or otherwise unusual. Such perceptions had real consequences as Shelley remembered:

Poor guy [‘Sandshoes Sam’]. He would have his windows smashed, multiple times, yes, kids threw rocks through his window. I feel so bad for him, because probably he hadn’t even done anything. (Shelley, F, 1980s).

The victim in this case was perceived within Byker’s childhood culture of the 1980s as a sort of bogeyman because he stood out in a way deemed menacing. Notably, he did not have a disability the children were aware of meaning that any ‘outsider’ in the community could become a target. Meanwhile other ‘characters’ were seen more warmly and were left relatively alone:

We would see Kung Fu Geordie on Commercial Road. Yeah. And he used to karate chop the busses. Yeah! The number 34, and the busses used to just continue on… I don’t know whether it was drink or mental health problems, but it was something going on with him and everyone would see it. (Amanda, F, 1980s)

On the one hand this recollection and many of the others like it are clearly fond ones. Evidently, the participants felt a sense of loss for a time when you would see people more often out in the community, including those with physical or mental differences that so interested many children. When Alan told me that ‘you’ll never ever see those type of characters again ever, they’re gone’ it was clear he felt it was a shame that Byker’s environment no longer supported those sorts of interactions. On the other hand, these characters were often persecuted by the children, from rumour-spreading and name-calling, to smashing windows. Whilst those children who were part of an in-group were brought together by these acts, ultimately, they damaged the fabric of the community. Furthermore, all the participants who remembered being involved with pranks, taunts, and fights as children said that they would now discourage their own sons and daughters from the same behaviour.

In later decades, as all people but especially those with physical and mental differences were increasingly isolated from one another, stories of their ‘torment’, as Alan described it, stopped. However, the influx of new residents to the estate during this time provided a new group of ‘strangers’ to fear. From the mid-1990s onwards the council increasingly decided to house new, often troubled residents in the Byker Wall, which had free flats available. This influx led to tensions between long-term residents and newcomers, contributing to a sense of displacement and instability within the community. As Yvonne explained:

They would put people in there, and the good people that were inside felt like they were getting forced away. (Yvonne, F, 1990s)

The expansion of the estate’s diversity was not only due to the council rehoming people but also global migration patterns and Newcastle’s designation as an ‘Asylum Seeker Dispersal Point’ in 1999, with 70 housing units in Byker allocated to asylum seekers in the first year.^⁷² Mallinson’s 2006 interviews with asylum seekers and council staff reveal that Byker was seen from the outside as an unwelcoming place for new immigrants, a support worker commenting that ‘they haven’t had a big population of ethnic minorities before and locals aren’t used to seeing people from different countries in their streets’.⁷³ One migrant living in Newcastle’s West End (another neighbourhood with a proportionally large migrant population) said ‘It is ok here. Better than Byker – that’s a racist area’.⁷⁴ These sources speak to the tensions that the introduction of these new populations introduced to the community during a period when it was already experiencing high levels of crime, stress, and social fragmentation due to de-industrialisation and the other factors outlined in this thesis. However, a lack of source material with testimonies from asylum seekers who did live in Byker during this period means it is difficult to assess the extent to which the outside perception of racism matched reality. The focus of my thesis and the means by which I sourced participants means I did not speak to any Byker residents who had been asylum seekers but would mark this as a point for future oral history research. The testimonies I did collect did not mention race specifically, but some identified the arrival of new people to the estate as a factor in the decline of its street sociability. Certainly many residents felt that a whole host of factors were driving strangerisation, accelerating neoliberal processes of social atomisation.

People from outside coming in. And then it’s not just outsiders coming in from different areas, people from inside doing it [crime] as well. But they all kind of were in a bit of a perfect storm in the middle of it all. (Lynn, F, 1990s)

This ‘perfect storm’ was created by the combination of economic, environmental, and social issues that increasingly plagued Byker during this period. Some new residents, some of whom were former prisoners, did exacerbate these problems. Many participants described to me new people who would move in and have no pride in their home or the community, demonstrated by the poor state they would keep their house and garden in. At the same time, it is clear new residents were generally not made to feel part of the existing community.

However, despite reduction in the strength of community relationships, Byker did not undergo as complete a transformation as many participants articulated. Even though the youngest participants interviewed acknowledged a diminished sense of community in Byker, they still believed that many people in the community were familiar to them:

I think a lot of people work outside Byker, so I see my neighbours like once a month if that, like you don’t see a lot of people when you’re working full time, so I think that’s kind of, like me grandma didn’t work full time, it’s different times. (‘Jamie’, F, 2000s)

‘There’s a good community here, on this balcony, everyone’s looking out for each other. I can’t say about the rest of the estate though, I don’t really know about that, I don’t go there.’ (Dan, M, 2000s)

These testimonies suggest that a sense of community persisted in Byker, albeit in a different form than that experienced by older generations. Clearly, the community was fractured by multiple interlocking forces of strangerisation, the key factors discussed in this section being: De-industrialisation and unemployment, loss of shops and pubs, crime, drink and drugs, neoliberal atomisation, and cars. The nostalgia shown by some participants therefore is a valid expression of loss for a positive aspect of the Byker community which declined, and a call for it to change again. As Stack said:

No one, however nostalgic, is really seeking to turn back the clock… What people are seeking is not so much the home they left behind as a place they feel they can change.^⁷⁵

3.3 Construction: Finding Space for Play on the Fringes

3.3.1 Climbing: Play That Requires Attentiveness to Environment

One persistent example of the competing values placed on different environments between children and adults in Byker was the practice of climbing, particularly onto roofs. Compared to Old Byker, New Byker provided opportunity in abundance for climbing on roofs due to the many single-story low slanting roofs within the estate, and most participants I talked to across the decades described doing so.^⁷⁶ In addition, New Byker featured an assortment of street furniture that invited climbing:

They would build these like shelter things… Them to us, it was like an adventure playground, so we would climb on them all. So you could [go] up into Byker and you could just climb on walls, structures, things. Yeah, roofs, all kinds of stuff! Anything that you can climb on. We were climbers in that era, they don’t climb as much these days people are scared about it. So that’s what we would do, we’d go in there and it was just the best place. (Alan, M, 1980s)

Figure XIII. Alley leading to roof with bicycle (middle), and raised fence (left), Spires Lane.⁷⁷

Figure XIV. Two ‘Shelter Things’ on Laverock Court.⁷⁸

A letter written to Erskine from 1972 noted that:

The rainwater pipes especially in public areas are subject to vandalism… concrete plinths to which the foot of the pipes are attached only encourage children to climb onto them, these children then pull on the pipe and in consequence the top of the pipe is pulled away from the nozzle outlet on the eaves gutter.⁷⁹

In conducting the walking interviews, one of the most common memories the environment would induce in participants would be ‘we used to climb on this’. Despite the estate’s loss of trees and structures over time, Byker today still invites the prospect, with its bright colours and unique street furniture, and so invites the memories too. Climbing memories are special, as Alan identifies, because climbing is an activity that necessitates engaging intimately with an environment. Climbing rewards the attentive climber with access to a space from which you can feel safe and secluded – even hidden – whilst simultaneously being central and overlooking others, which are environmental characteristics that children often value.^⁸⁰ In this way an environment creates a set of challenges for young people, which is magnified when together in groups: ‘Do you think you could hang on that upside down?’, ‘I bet you couldn’t climb up there’, ‘watch this jump’. By this mechanism, the Byker environment shaped its young people into a generation of ‘climbers’, as Alan defined it. At the same time Alan’s description of ‘going in’ to Byker is telling of its insular design that would ultimately leave its children disconnected from the wider city. He lived in Byker in a Victorian terrace that had not been demolished on St Peter’s Road, yet he clearly conceived of New Byker as a place apart – somewhere that had to be entered.

We all used to climb round here and play round here and play ‘Tuggy on High’ and that round here… You had to climb up high [mimes the climb] so nobody could tug you and if you got down and they tugged you then you were out [laughs]. The mad games we used to play… (Lisa, F, 1990s)

The act of the walking interview was an excellent tool for eliciting climbing memories, where the space itself provided the prompt for recollection and even recreation. Adults rarely wander around a place like children do, but the interview provided a facsimile of that experience where there is no clear destination or purpose of direction. The possibility of playing with or exploring the place in more unusual ways becomes more inviting in this context and climbing up walls and onto roofs less unthinkable.

Roof spaces, like abandoned buildings, can be attractive to children because they also qualify as liminal spaces. In contrast to a rubble heap, however, they are vacant but still owned, and this is another example of where the contrasting environmental values of adults and children came into conflict. All the participants who described roof-climbing knew that it was ‘wrong’ and that they risked getting told off for it, but the rewards – to them – were worth it. Parents were concerned that children would damage the roof, injure themselves, or make annoying noise, but these were not considered ‘problems’ in the same way by the children. Indeed, the ‘improper’ use of Byker’s environment was a fundamental pillar of its appeal, and a core memory for many of those interviewed. As such it is little surprise that the slow removal of climbing structures like shelters and trees – and the increased policing of the space with fences, anti-climb paint, and CCTV cameras – reduced the desirability of the outdoors to children over time. This can be attributed as part of the reason why those interviewed who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s described climbing in terms of individual events rather than as a general culture:

One time we climbed up there, yeah, cos’ it’s like big steps all the way up. So yeah we just climbed on the roof, just to see, you know? Just to look around. I remember we all thought we’d got seen so we ran down and [John], me friend [John], he cut himself on the fence. Cos’ there was this big fence because it was abandoned. (Andy, M, 2000s)

Figure XV. Bolam Coyne in 2008, the building Andy described climbing.^⁸¹

This demonstrates the shift in understanding that took place amongst Byker’s kids whereby the act of climbing moved from something that the environment invited to something it discouraged. The nostalgia of older participants for the more climbable era of their youth is therefore a manifestation of personal and community memory acting to shape the present and future of the estate. This may be understood as a practical example of the ‘nostalgic progressivism’ concept I outlined in Chapter One..

This said, it must also be acknowledged that the challenges of nostalgic memory as a source still remain, namely in that there is a strong tendency for individuals and a community to ‘universalise’ childhood experience in recollections. For example, many participants talked about how they no longer saw contemporary children climbing as they did:

It wouldn’t cross their minds to try I don’t think, to try and climb up a roof or go sledging down something in a black box somewhere or you know… everything’s a bit more organised for them and a bit more thought about a bit more. I do not think they think to ask permission more than I would have done. Which is quite different. (Shelley, F, 1980s)

This framing of change in children’s behaviour is founded in the truth of decline in outdoor free play but does not encapsulate the full story. Evidently, climbing has not (and really cannot) be totally wiped out as a practice, as evidenced by the presence of anti-climb measures across the estate today. Fences, spikes, signs, CCTV, and anti-climb paint are the environmental manifestation of the barriers put in place over time that have contributed to less climbing, alongside cultural barriers. These preventative measures also show us that whether they climb or not, it certainly does ‘cross the minds’ of certain children to try.

Figure XII. ‘Warning. Anti-Climb Paint’.⁸²

Whilst it is the case that everyone I spoke to described climbing memories, it was noticeable that boys recollected a greater sense of ownership over the ‘best’ climbing spots than girls. For example, whereas Alan described how he and his friends ‘had’ certain spots where they could sit ‘for hours’, Shelley described climbing as a briefer and more contingent activity because boys had an assumed right to the space that girls didn’t.

Now just on the back of [St. Peter’s Church]… there was this big tree, and there was no phones and we just used to sit and talk and make stories up and tell each other, and we would be there for hours. (Alan, M , 1980s)

Me and Tina would climb up this big tree, like shimmy along the branch. Yeah, I think and then go down. You would like sneak down ‘cos them [parents] sitting in the garden would shout if they saw you. So, yeah. I think there was just complete freedom to do whatever you wanted to do. (Shelley, F, 1980s)

The contradiction in Shelley’s assertion of ‘complete freedom’ alongside getting shouted at for climbing a tree reveals that general structures of feeling about a childhood can be complicated by looking at specific stories from it. Freedom, although greater in many aspects than in later decades, was not total – especially for girls. Indeed, Thomson’s work on post-war generations tells us that British children’s independence had already been in decline for decades prior.^⁸³ Memories of being shouted at and chased did not necessarily clash with the concept of freedom in the minds of participants because they were viewed as unserious. By this I mean that getting told off (or the danger of it) was often ‘part of the fun’. However, it is also true that rule-breaking in earlier decades contributed in part to more policing and restrictions over climbing in later ones. Another activity whose popularity prompted adults to alter Byker’s environment to discourage it was den-building.

3.3.2 Dens and Weather

From the inception of New Byker there was a tension between the desires of its adult and child residents. In their consultations with Erskine’s team, residents wrote that they wanted to extend fencing to include shrubbed areas flanking the footpaths. The architects wrote in response: ‘we feel visually this would be a pity, but if it means that beds get well maintained, it is probably worthwhile’. The opportunity for more privacy was quite readily taken by residents. However, sometimes the architects elected not to change things, and to carry on as planned. Justifying the level of enclosure of private gardens or yards, they continued to find ‘the general standard of privacy and enclosure reasonable. It was discussed with the tenants at the time.’ The front garden fences were not in all instances re-designed, and play spaces were still constructed in other parts of the estate. The result was an environment of compromise between planners and adult residents. Children – considered but not consulted – found ways to occupy this environment in ways unexpected to both adult parties. Often the liminal in-between spaces that many young people found interest in were those that had been comparatively overlooked in the design process.

When they built this they put a lot of greenery in and bushes everywhere. But there’s not as many these days they seem to be a lot lower than what it was, but when they first put them in, we just hid stuff in them constantly. (Susan, F, 1980s)

There used to be a little industrial area just outside of the estate… and every now and then out the back there’d be these big bins, and there’d be stuff that they just would put out and me and Carl would, like, nick all of it… and if we didn’t know what to do with the contraband that we’d nicked out of the bins we’d put them in our den that we’d built. And it was just something in the bushes that you’d, like, find a hollow and you’d hollow it out even more and then you’d just sit in there and just play. (Shelley, F, 1980s)

Old Byker’s de-industrial half-life, in the form of industrial units on New Byker’s periphery, provided Shelley with the materials for den-building. As the years went on and this latent industry declined so did the available material. At the same time the cutting back of bushes observed by Susan limited their usefulness as sites for den construction by curtailing their ability to provide privacy. These two factors that conspired to give Byker fewer enticing places for den building came from very different sources. The closure of peripheral industrial sites was part of a long-running trend on Tyneside accelerated in the national context by Thatcherism and a broad neoliberal shift away from a manufacturing to services economy. Conversely the uprooting and cutting back of bushes was a local issue largely brought about by the cost of their maintenance to the council and complaints from residents about young people using them to hide scrap for dens and fires. As dens do not necessitate the use of scrap, I would argue the local environmental factor was the more crucial in this case.

Eventually when the estate was all built. The wall completed and then landscaped it was absolutely beautiful. Honestly, it was lots of green shrubs around, you know? Yeah. Lovely scenario. If you look, you know, we’ve still got trees and that but, I mean, it’s not the same. (Bill, M, 1990s)

Bill’s memory for Byker’s greener past is interesting as he was a child of the 1990s, growing up at a time when cutbacks had already begun. In part, his feeling draws upon a collective memory of New Byker’s inception and, in part, it reflects a time of slow transition from abundance in den-building sites to scarcity. Bill’s note that Byker has ‘still got trees’ demonstrates the importance of a qualitative analysis of human-environment interaction. The quantity of trees and shrubs around was not as significant as the management of them in their qualitative value to young people.

Thickets of leafy shrubs provided interest to some of Byker’s children largely because they opportunity for creative independent play and, crucially, privacy. When those same shrubs were thinned or cut back, they longer did so. ‘Sarah’ gave me a similar example:

There was this big playing field where everybody played, right here before they built the motorway, and this is where we’d stand. And it’s a little bit, like, secluded, so it was a good place to hide away down here. (‘Sarah’, F, 1980s)

The field in question had been slated to become a motorway from New Byker’s inception. Indeed, it was the reason for the Byker Wall’s existence as a shield against it. When the large road was built (whilst not an officially designated motorway) it divided the neighbourhood and produced noise and air pollution. In the in-between period after The Wall was constructed but before the road was built, children occupied that unclaimed land. Because the temporary green space was never intended to be a public space it was not well integrated into New Byker’s plan and therefore became the ‘secluded’ place that younger and older children could use to ‘hide away’ for a brief time before construction began.

Sarah’s assertion that ‘everybody’ played on the field, and that of ‘complete freedom’ that many participants recalled, is however in conflict with other stories they told of breaking rules and being told off. This was especially true for girls who had more parental and social expectations around their behaviour. With football for example it was very clear that, by-and-large, the boys played whilst the girls watched. Whilst it could be said with a cursory assessment that both girls and boys took part in football, a more granular analysis shows they did not have equal experience.

When I look back it was idyllic because we had our freedom, whereas I wouldn’t let my grandchildren do half the things I did. I mean climbing on roofs or climbing trees and things like that: ‘boys should do that’ or ‘girls should do that’. They should be put into certain dangers so that they can learn. But you know the way the law is now you cannot do that (Val, F, 1980s)

It was very, very rare. You saw a lass at a match… The girls got dolls and prams to play with. We got things that you would call boy stuff: footballs, bats, tennis rackets (Michael, M, 1980s)

In 1984 the National Playing Fields Association described the adventure playground movement – a posterchild for post-war British childhood playscapes – as having been ‘dominated by boys’.^⁸⁴ The nostalgia shown by many of the women interviewed for a more egalitarian time is complicated by such details. The concept of ‘everyone knowing everyone’ and playing out together irrespective of gender (or indeed race, class, etc.), was not the case. However, that does not mean there was no truth to these testimonies. Indeed, this research also finds that there was an increased segregation of boys’ and girls’ play from 1980 through to 2010. Toy culture provides an example in the national context. In the decades leading up to the 1980s, influenced by second-wave feminist movements across the country, Britain saw a push toward gender-neutral clothing, toys, and activities for children. However, with the explosion of children’s TV advertising and the birth of the ‘pink princess’ and ‘blue action man’ tropes of the 1990s much of toy culture again adopted more segregated gender stereotypes. As Sweet discovered, in America the 1975 Sears catalogue used gendered marketing for less than 2% of its toys, whereas that figure had risen to 50% in 1995.^⁸⁵ In Byker specifically, the testimony I heard suggested that the younger a participant, the more likely it was that they had spent a period of their childhood playing only or largely with others of their gender.

I had more [friends who were boys] when I was little, but then you just kind of separate out don’t you? And then you become interested again. (‘Rebecca’, F, 2000s)

Rebecca’s more atomised childhood experience is one narrativised by older participants as a prime example of degradation from an earlier more social form. However, this change in the commonality of intermingling was brought about by environmental changes that, particularly from the perspective of adult residents, were desirable for the purposes of ‘refining’ the neighbourhood. As the ‘secret’ spaces where undesirable forms of play took place were curtailed, the estate could be seen to be being brought closer to its original concept; a more settled environment where spaces for children’s play were better designated and controlled. However, environmental and testimonial clues tell us that perfect separation of space by function (play, work, transport) was not achieved. Indeed, nature was constantly at work to frustrate or enhance human designs. In particular, the factor of weather stood out as especially significant for this thesis as a natural force with a unique quality to radically alter the environment:

You got up in the morning and if you weren’t at school it was just like ‘get out the house’ go out and play… If it was raining, you put your wellies on… and you went out and you got wet. If it was snowing you went out and you got cold, you come in, got warm, went out again. (Val, F, 1980s)

Many participants of earlier decades described a culture of playing out whatever the weather, including some children of the 1990s. This did not mean that weather was irrelevant to the children, rather that it was not perceived as an obstacle. Instead, rain, wind, and snow could provide opportunities for new forms of exploration and play. Snow most obviously alters a landscape, but rain and wind also do so in the form of puddles, slides, kites, fallen branches, floods etc. Importantly weather also facilitated new sensory experiences that do not strictly fall into the category of ‘play’: leaning into the wind, the sounds and smells of a thunderstorm, or the cold and quiet wonder of snowfall. Such strong sensational memories were often sparked in the walking interviews by a turn in the weather.

When it was raining and windy like this you’d still just go out. We would go out in every single weather type. (Dan, M, 1990s)

Again, the tendency to universalise childhood experiences of the community is present in these testimonials, but that it was at least not uncommon to go out unsupervised in ‘bad’ weather is the key point of interest here. By 2000 new parents were hesitant to allow it – bad weather increasingly seen as another reason (on top of the more significant factors discussed at length in this thesis) to restrict their children’s independent mobility on grounds of health and safety. Most of all this could be seen in the remarks of participants who grew up in earlier decades and had since become parents:

Doesn’t really happen these days… the school closed due to snow and we’d just be out playing for as long we could, and you might not even have a pair of gloves. (Michael, M, 1980s)

We used to like going down to the river, er, swimming, even though it was probably stinking. Remember coming home from the river once just soaking wet, ‘cos you would just go in with your clothes on… You would be out all day, I wouldn’t dream of letting my kids do that! (Amanda, F, 1980s)

Participants of later decades did not describe playing out in rain, wind, or snow with as much persistence as their parents’ generations. In part, this is because they were not allowed to. In many cases parents of the 2000s successfully protected their children from dangers they risked themselves when they were younger. After all, the river Ouseburn that Amanda described playing in was (and continues to be) quite polluted and by playing out in the snow without gloves Michael was tempting frostbite. The trade-offs were that by imposing restrictions parents limited opportunities for Byker’s young people to exert the independence and creativity often necessitated to endure or overcome obstacles and hardships. To replace those opportunities, Byker residents turned towards new toys, games, and technologies alongside reliance on private garden space and timetabled sports and activities. For example Bill told me about a summer activities club that parents set up during the 1990s:

Trips in the minibus, we hired it and we’d all get a lovely day off to Whitley Bay… we had a big trampoline brought in just out there. (Bill, M, 1990s)

Such trips and activities were remembered fondly by participants, but cost parents time and money to orchestrate in replacement for forms of play that had previously been ‘free’ in both senses of the word. Adults were driven by the environmental changes around cars and landscaping discussed in this chapter to replace their children’s unsupervised outdoor play with supervised play. Also, in part, cultural attitudes had changed following stranger-danger and anti-social youth fears. The Ouseburn did not get more dangerous over this period (rather less) but still it became seen to be more dangerous. The weather (though of course fundamentally variable by its nature) did not significantly worsen, yet it came to be perceived as a greater obstacle. In the context of growing suspicion and wariness of ‘the outdoors’, once minor obstacles compounded existing fears. Over the studied 30 years the cultures of parenting and community had changed in Byker, and a new identity of what it meant to be a ‘child of Byker’ was forming.

3.4 Conclusion: Children as Sociological Explorers

In Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination, Strangleman utilises Thompson’s analysis of industrialising societies to better comprehend de-industrialising ones.^⁸⁶ By emphasising Thompson’s attention to the real-life experiences of industrialisation and his understanding that individuals could only utilise their own past knowledge to comprehend and navigate these changes, Strangleman highlights the limitations of the tendency to view the past as discrete time periods, which can obscure the processes of transition.^⁸⁷ With Byker the destruction of the Old and construction of the New could make this trap all too easy to fall in to. However, as this chapter has shown through its analysis of children’s intimate negotiations with changing space, from the very beginning New Byker was an environment of transition and change. Old Byker’s half-life, new national developments, local economic, social, and infrastructural change, and the opinions and actions of its citizens all shaped New Byker. Byker’s children – those residents least expected to be bound to the past – found their daily lives entangled with industrial legacy through environment and culture. Furthermore, some children acted as key sociological explorers during this period, forming and binding new communities and finding environments of play in a world of ever-tightening restrictions on their mobility.

The testimonies in this chapter have elucidated key forms of interaction between environment and child in a de-industrial, North East, 1980-2010 context. The use of demolition and construction as sites for exploration, sliding down rubble heaps, and setting fires. Building dens and gathering materials from legacy light-industrial sites on the fringes of the estate. Hiding away and making use of land scheduled to be developed or otherwise left untended by the adults. Fighting, playing pranks, and other forms of behaviour that often turned dangerous or anti-social. Utilising the geography of the old street-pattern for wheeling downhill. Climbing on rooves and trees and taking advantage of the opportunities for environmental transformation brought on by weather. These are instances where Byker’s environment invited children to explore new forms of play, but at the same time these alternative utilisations of space often came into conflict with the adult world, and this is when measures like taller fences, spikes, and CCTV cameras were taken to curtail activities like den-making, climbing, and setting fires. As fears for and of children grew across the period, the scope of outdoor play testimonials reduced. Beyond these localised changes, national trends were also making themselves felt in Byker, as rising car numbers, stranger-danger fear, street drink and drug culture, local shop closures, and a growing safety-conscious culture of individualism made it no longer conscionable for parents to let their children play as freely as prior generations. All these factors eroded community cohesion, reducing child mobility, which in turn reduced social connectivity in a vicious cycle of restriction and isolation.^⁸⁸

Whilst the reasons for decline in outdoor play in this context are therefore clear, the testimonies herein have also demonstrated that all the forms of outdoor play discussed in this chapter persisted throughout the period – though evolved. Participants across the decades expressed similar childhood values and desires towards things like secrecy, novelty, danger, and ownership. In a changing environmental, economic, and social landscape, these desires were met in different ways, increasingly through technology and timetabled activities as part of a national ‘inward turn’ in child-rearing approaches away from public space and toward private ones. In an urban context of little garden and yard space this left many with few places to turn. Erskine’s green, low-rise, and car-lite modernist design for New Byker might have been expected to become a posterchild neighbourhood that resisted the national and regional trend of decline in outdoor interaction and social atomisation. A key reason it didn’t was its failure to comprehend and integrate children as equal users of the entire space, imagining they would stay confined to designated playground areas, upsetting residents when they didn’t, and then not maintaining those areas over time or converting them into car parks. It is somewhat ironic therefore that New Byker so resembled a giant playground. An environment that beckoned to be explored but increasingly told children that they should not.

<- Chapter 2 – Chapter 4 ->

References

1 Michael Dradge, ‘Byker: Surprising the Colleagues for 35 Years. A Social History of Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB in Newcastle,’ Twentieth Century Architecture 9 (2008): 150.

2 Mats Egelius, ‘Ralph Erskine : Byker Redevelopment, Byker Area of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, 1969-82,’ Global Architecture 55 (1980): 40.

3 Robin Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ Built Environment 29 (2003): 117.

4 Dradge, ‘Byker: Surprising the Colleagues for 35 Years,’ 156.

5 Peter Malpass, ‘The other side of the wall,’ Architect’s Journal (May 1979): 964.

6 Ibid, 966.

7 Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, ‘Carville Road at Night (Byker),’ photograph, 1971. Tate Gallery Archive.

8 Louis Holland Bonnett, ‘Byker 1970,’ JPG map, February 2024, Digimap Ordinance Survey Collection.

9 ‘Where to Live in Byker?,’ Byker Community Trust , accessed 25 March 2024, https://bykercommunitytrust.org/properties/.

10 Louis Holland Bonnett, ‘Byker 1980,’ JPG map, February 2024, Digimap Ordinance Survey Collection.

11 Alison Ravetz, ‘Housing at Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne,’ Architects’ Journal 15 (April 1976): 7; Portmeiron is a village in Wales built in the 20^th century to resemble a Mediterranean village.

12 Mary Comeiro, ‘Design and Empowerment: 20 Years of Community Architecture,’ Built Environment 13 (1987): 61.

13 Elain Harwood, ‘Post-War Landscape and Public Housing,’ Garden History 28 (2000): 114; See also Dan Kerr, ‘We can still learn from Byker’s inclusive design ethos,’ RIBA Journal (October 2019).

14 See the child’s absence from such assorted works as: Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, ‘Urgent Minor Matters: Re-Activating Archival Documents for Social Housing Futures,’ Architecture and Culture (2022): 483; Malpass, ‘The other side of the wall,’ 964; Rosalind Kain, ‘Is Byker Heritage? : a Study of the Residents’ Value of Byker’s Post-War Architecture and Their Support for Its Conservation,’ (PhD diss., University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2003); Peter Blundell Jones and Eamonn Canniffe, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies 1945 to 1990 (Elsevier, 2007); Mats Egelius, ‘Ralph Erskine : Byker Redevelopment, Byker Area of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, 1969-82,’ Global Architecture 55 (1980); Robin Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ Built Environment 29 (2003).

15 Dradge, ‘Byker: Surprising the Colleagues for 35 Years,’ 152.

16 Ibid, 154.

17 Ibid, 154; Nageen Mustafa et al., ‘An Exploration of the Historical Background of Criminal Record Checking in the United Kingdom: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century,’ European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 19 (2013): 23.

18 Louis Holland Bonnett, ‘Byker 1980,’ JPG map, February 2024, Digimap Ordinance Survey Collection.

19 ‘Where to Live in Byker?.’

20 Ralph Erskine and Lars Harald Westman, An Ecological Arctic Town, 1958, Gouache and Pencil on Print, ArkDes Collections ARKM.

21 ‘Where to Live in Byker?.’

22 Dradge, ‘Byker: Surprising the Colleagues for 35 Years,’ 161.

23 Robin Abrams, ‘Byker: An assessment,’ Landscape Design 142 (1983): 10.

24 Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ 126.

25 William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,’ Environmental History 1 (1996): 76.

26 MacPherson, ‘Regenerating industrial riversides in the north east of England,’ in Urban Waterside Regeneration: Problems and Prospects, ed. K.N. White (Harwood, London: 1993), 32.

27 Hattersley, ‘Byker threatened,’ Building Design 141 (1999): 4.

28 Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ 128.

29 Ibid, 129.

30 Tony Henderson, ‘Awards for iconic flats; New life for 1960s and ’70s landmarks,’ The Free Library, accessed 27 March 2024, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Awards+for+iconic+flats%3b+New+life+for+1960s+and+%2770s+landmarks.-a0288222027.

31 Louis Holland Bonnett, ‘Society Digimap: Byker,’ Digital map, March 2024, Digimap Ordinance Survey Collection.

32 Peter Blundell Jones and Eamonn Canniffe, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies 1945 to 1990 (Elsevier, 2007), 172.

33 Stephanie Schoeppe et al., ‘Socio-Demographic Factors and Neighbourhood Social Cohesion Influence Adults’ Willingness to Grant Children Greater Independent Mobility: A Cross-Sectional Study,’ BMC Public Health 15 (2015), 2.

34 Sarah Moser, ‘Personality: a new positionality?,’ Area 40(2008): 383.

35 Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Practices in Principle (Routledge: London, 2007), 64.

36 Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, 51.

37 Ibid, 53.

38 Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, ‘Urgent Minor Matters: Re-Activating Archival Documents for Social Housing Futures,’ Architecture and Culture (2022): 491.

39 Katie Schmuecker, ‘Social Capital in the North East,’ Institute for Public Policy

Research North (2008): 6.

40 Gary Pattison, ‘Planning for decline: the “D” ‐ village policy of County Durham, UK,’ Planning Perspectives 19 (2004): 312.

41 Ibid, 329.

42 BFI Player, Byker Song, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-byker-song-1974-online.

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

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

45 T. Strangleman, ‘Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination: Making Sense of Work and Industrial Change,’ Sociology 51 (2018): 476.

46 Sarah Glynn, ‘Good Homes: lessons in public housing from Byker,’ in Byker: Newcastle upon Tyne (2011), 6.

47 Rosalind Kain, Is Byker Heritage? A Study of the Residents’ Value of Byker’s Post-War Architecure and Their Support for Its Conservation (Thesis: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2003).

48 Richard Collier, ‘“Rat Boys” and “Little Angels”: Corporeality, Male Youth and The Bodies Of (Dis) Order,’ in Contested bodies (Routledge, 2003), 31.

49 Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited’ Built Environment 29, no. 2(2003): 126.

50 Nicola Crosby, ‘Crime Report 1998 to 2002,’ Tyne & Wear Research and Information (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: 2004), 10.

51 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 30; Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization.

52 Louis Holland Bonnett, photograph, Byker, December 2023.

53 RAC Foundation, ‘Car ownership rates per local authority in England and Wales,’ RAC Foundation, 26 December 2012, https://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/downloadables/car%20ownership%20rates%20by%20local%20authority%20-%20december%202012.pdf.

54 Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ Built Environment 29 (2003): 128.

55 SiteLines, ‘Byker Redevelopment,’ Newcastle City Council, https://sitelines.newcastle.gov.uk/SMR/16463.

56 Louis Holland Bonnett, photograph, Byker, December 2023.

57 Sayette et al., ‘Alcohol and Group Formation: A Multimodal Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol on Emotion and Social Bonding,’ Psychological Science 23 (2012), 869.

58 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 194.

59 A. O’Gorman, Drug problems and social exclusion: The development of heroin careers in risk environments (Middlesex University: PhD thesis, 2011), 1-3.

60 Peder Clark, ‘Ecstasy’s Risks and Pleasures in Britain, 1985–2000,’ (Edinburgh: Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, 2024), II.

61 Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ 126.

62 Glynn, ‘Good Homes,’ 6.evidence

63 Abrams, ‘Byker Revisited,’ 117.

64 Newcastle City Council and Northumbria Police, Newcastle Drug Market Profile: Project ADDER Analytical Hub Report, February 2023, 107.

65 Kenneth Silverman, Drug Abuse Treatment Intervention: A Behavioral Economic Analysis, (Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1998), 3.

66 Office for National Statistics, The nature of violent crime in England and Wales: Trends in Violent Crime

How Safe are Our Children, Kidscape (1993), 1.

67 Nicola Crosby, Crime Report 1998 to 2002, Tyne and Wear Archives, 1, 10.

68 Nick Morgan, ‘The heroin epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and its effect on crime trends – then and now: Technical Report,’ Home Office, 2014.

69 Nick Morgan, ‘The heroin epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and its effect on crime trends – then and now: Technical Report,’ Home Office, 2014.

70 Franziska Till et al., ‘Social Identification in Times of Crisis: How Need to Belong, Perspective Taking, and Cognitive Closure Relate to Changes in Social Identification,’ Journal of Applied Social Psychology 55 (2024): 40.

71 Mary Cooper, ‘Motorways and Transport Planning in Newcastle,’ SOC’EM Report (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: 1975), 18.

72 Saran Michelle Mallinson, Dispersal: a barrier to integration? The UK dispersal policy for asylum seekers and refugees since 1999: the case of Iraqi Kurds (Thesis: University of Warwick, 2006), 266; Matthias Flug and Jason Hussein, ‘Integration in the Shadow of Austerity – Refugees in Newcastle upon Tyne,’ Social Sciences 8, no. 7 (2019): 212.

73 Ibid, 195.

74 Ibid, 195.

75 Carol Stack, Call to home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South (Basic Books: New York, 1996), 198.

76 Although it must also be noted that the children of Old Byker were certainly no strangers to rooftops.

77 Louis Holland Bonnett, photograph, Byker, March 2024.

78 Louis Holland Bonnett, photograph, Byker, March 2024.

79 Dradge, ‘Byker: Surprising the Colleagues for 35 Years,’ 156.

80 Teresa Aslanian and Anne Turid, ‘Climbing, Hiding and Having Fun: Schoolchildren’s Memories of Holistic Learning in a Norwegian Kindergarten,’ Nordic Studies in Education 40 (2020): 268-285.

81 Patricia Payne, ‘Bolam Coyne Northeast Aspect in 2008,’ photograph, Historic England Archive, Reference DP152710.

82 Louis Holland Bonnett, photograph, Byker, December 2023.

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

84 Krista Cowman, ‘The Gendering of Activism in the British Adventure Playgrounds Movement,’ Journal of Social History 53 (2019): 236.

85 Sweet, Boy builders and Pink Princesses, 36.

86 Strangleman, T. (2016). ‘Deindustrialisation and the Historical Sociological Imagination: Making Sense of Work and Industrial Change’, Sociology, 51(2), 469.

87 Ibid.

88 Stephanie Schoeppe et al., ‘Socio-Demographic Factors and Neighbourhood Social Cohesion Influence Adults’ Willingness to Grant Children Greater Independent Mobility: A Cross-Sectional Study,’ BMC Public Health 15, no. 1 (2015), 2.

2026.02.04

Chapter 2: The Fearful Outdoors: Moral Panics, Media Discourse and Normative Childhood Geographies – The Natural Habitat of Youth?
<- Chapter 1 – Chapter 3 ->
2.1 Introduction

The relaunch of the previously ailing Sun newspaper in 1969 as Britain’s first modern-style tabloid marked the beginning of a fundamental shift in the country’s media landscape.^¹ The format proved popular and by 1978 The Sun had turned around its fortunes to become the country’s best-selling paper, inspiring many others to (re)launch in the same fashion such as The Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and News of the World. These ‘new’ papers differentiated themselves from traditional strait-laced broadsheets with exciting, polemical, and often inflammatory commentaries alongside a focus on deeper engagement with their readership and public feeling. They were also the product of a consolidating industry with a small number of media moguls – Rupert Murdoch in particular – amalgamating their ownership. By 1987 Murdoch papers like The Sun constituted 1/3^rd of all newspaper sales in Britain, and his symbiotic relationship with the Thatcher governments was a defining factor in both the deregulation of the industry and the explosion in readership of tabloids during the 1980s.^² Conversely, local newspapers had for some years been experiencing a ‘provincial meltdown’ as readership plummeted, sending many out of business and stripping those that remained of the income necessary to engage in consistent high-quality reporting, further centralising and concentrating news media production.^³

Despite the growing popularity of the TV, and later the internet, historians have argued that the tabloids defined the media landscape during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and indeed forced new digital media to adapt to their ‘populist priorities’ of ‘speed, brevity, accessibility, drama and controversy’.^⁴ The drama-led skew of the tabloid reporting style often led papers like The Sun to spotlight and repeatedly return to specific individual human stories – or ‘scandals’ – with which the public could emotionally connect, and such coverage would frequently turn to campaigning as the newspaper took up the cause of a certain afflicted individual or community. This approach was both one of the keys to the success of tabloid journalism and a key driver behind wider discourse also being defined by various ‘scandals’ during this period.

Of special relevance to this thesis was the openness of the tabloid press toward collaboration with members of the public – either as individuals or assembled as campaign groups – to bring their issues into national discourse. Parents concerned for the safety of their children around strangers featured in the press often, and conversely so too did people fearing the dangers of a ‘new youth’ that was said to be more uncaring, disrespectful, and violent than ever before. Both narratives problematised the relationship between children and outdoor environments, as either the outdoors was characterised as unsafe for children, or children as unsafe for the outdoors. New technologies were also common subjects of concern, with the discourse around them blending fears about the corruptible nature of children with the dangers of what were seen as unknown, unpredictable digital environments in which – much like the outdoors – adults had less control over children than they would like. Indeed, technologies like the TV and internet played a complex role as both informers of – and subjects of – public discourse about their safety, as symbolised by the 22-year-long TV run of Why Don’t You?.^⁵

This chapter will mirror the tabloid format by focussing on three defining ‘scandal’ stories of the period relating to the dangers children faced by strangers and technology, and how the reporting of those events chose to represent different environments of childhood. The first scandal I discuss is the 1991 Orkney satanic child abuse case, in which city social workers removed nine children from a rural island on suspicion of child abuse, only to return them a month later amidst a massive media storm. In Orkney, I find that the reporting of the event infused the pastoral island landscape with a notion of a middle-class, rural purity in which children necessarily flourish set against an urban environment of cosmopolitan corruption – as embodied by the social workers. This narrative was indicative and promotional of a social belief that not only cast urban environments as improper for childhood but also rural environments as something urban people were not necessarily worthy of.

The second scandal I examine is that of a longer panic the press played a key role in stoking during the 1990s and 2000s: ‘stranger-danger’. Coverage of stranger-danger problematised all public outdoor space on grounds of safety, as dramatic reports of (in actuality very rare) attacks on children by strangers scared families into restricting childhood freedom and mobility for fear of a danger that was ever-present because it was unknowable. This promoted the use of private enclosed spaces like gardens and sports centres over public streets and parks, disadvantaging households with worse access to such private environments. Very importantly, this also ignored and distracted from the far more pervasive and unseen danger of at-home abuse.

The final scandal I examine is the ‘video nasty’ panic of the mid-1980s which is an early example of how technological environments accessed at home were also being positioned in the media as spaces that corrupted children. This meant that children who had the least access to ‘acceptable’ outdoor space (and thus spent more time indoors) were left with no physical place where they were not seen to be in danger either from others or themselves. Within this framework, it became increasingly common to think of children themselves, corrupted by modern technology and permissiveness, as the cause of their own decline in outdoor play and the decline of childhood itself, as an idea and experience.

Overall, this chapter demonstrates the media’s significant role in contributing to the milieux of social anxiety amongst parents and policymakers during this period that led to both an increase in restriction of children’s mobility and an outcry over the laziness of the modern ‘couch potato generation’. Drawing on and adding to the well-established historical literature on media moral panics, particularly the work of Adrian Bingham, Jenny Kitzenger, David Jenkins, and Jennifer Crane, this chapter advances an environmental argument that connects media representations of certain ‘scandalised’ environments with their real-world consequences for children’s relationships with those places – as interpreted and mediated by adults. As with the first chapter, this style of study is justified on the basis Mora et al.’s analytical framework of the ‘circuit of culture’ – connecting public and media representations of childhood environments to how those spaces were produced, identified, and consumed.^⁶

This chapter is also concerned with how parents, carers, and institutions changed their approaches to managing children based on how their perceptions of different environments were shaped by public discourse. This extends not only to parents disallowing younger children from doing things like walking to school or playing outside unsupervised, but also to how adult society at large came to frown on older children for ‘hanging around’ in parks or shopping centres, or indeed for spending too much time indoors. This approach grounds my analysis of public discourse in the physical environments being discussed and, more specifically, how during this period they came to change children and be changed by them. When discussing the two North East case study areas in subsequent chapters, this national context is essential to understand when considering how it impacted upon, and was intermediated by, local communities.

Importantly, this chapter will also address why there was no moral panic surrounding cars and urbanism as there was for strangers and technology despite (as outlined in Chapter One) the topic’s popularity in expert discourse. I do so by utilising Martin Innes’ concept of ‘signal crimes’, Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’, and Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘signification spiral’ to explain why Orkney, stranger-danger, and video nasties became such significant and influential media events whereas the destruction of childhood play environments and danger to children’s lives posed by cars was comparatively ignored. Stories such as the dangers of leaded petrol and the construction of new motorways through protected landscapes were reported on and did enter public discourse, but never with the intensity and purpose typical of a ‘moral panic’. Primarily this was because the danger was characterised by ‘slow violence’ – a steady, encroaching change – and not the kinds of explosive scandals or ‘signal crimes’ that fuelled tabloid campaigns, and thus there was no clear single idea that could be latched onto and used as part of a ‘signification spiral’ to draw people to conclude that one event was emblematic of a much larger issue that needed to be addressed. This analysis is key because by revealing how cars’ real threat to children failed to result in a significant panic or response, it demonstrates that what was regarded as dangerous to children was contingent on socially constructed discourse. Therefore, restrictions placed on childhood freedoms were not based simply on pragmatic response to danger, but on perceived danger that was neither inevitable or immutable and was the product of historically specific factors. I also utilise these analytical concepts to bolster the argument that media coverage explicitly and/or implicitly causally linked scandal events not only to the specific environment they took place in, but to a wider category of environment that was then viewed with public suspicion.

2.2 Cars: The Missing Moral Panic

The British media’s approach to the reporting of threats to childhood during this period was to focus on specific key events. Certain emotive stories that fit well with tabloid-style journalism were presented as symbolically representative of a wider problem that the British people should demand something be done about, typically by giving their support for new regulations and enforcement measures. Martin Innes calls these events ‘signal crimes’ – media-events which highlight the symbiotic relationships journalists have with the police and criminal justice system. For example, the police commonly used media publicity to appeal for witnesses in cases like the decade-long hunt for serial killer Robert Black during the 1980s; this was in the interests of both detectives and journalists who worked together to both solve a case and get a story.^⁷ However, such collaboration worked to amplify the ‘signal value’ of a particular event and ‘either intentionally or unintentionally transform it into a focal point for public concerns about crime and crime control’, as well as lending the authority of the police to whichever moral panic the papers were presenting a particular event as symptomatic of.^⁸ The problem with the threats posed to childhood from the new urban environment of the car was that there was no associated explosive ‘signal crime’ to attach the issue to; just a steady, encroaching change. This is very often the case with environmental threats that move predictably but slowly, compared to human threats that can be both fast and unpredictable, as with the sudden introduction of a new technology or appearance of a strange figure. The spread of the motor car was a form of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’; the sort of ‘catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects’.^⁹ Partly because of this spectacle-deficiency, I argue, whilst the car was the primary force exacerbating the decline in environmental quality and choice available to children, it was ignored in favour of the more minor but more ‘newsworthy’ dangers of strangers and technology.

A defining feature of the signal crime phenomenon is that it is intended to ‘bring something to light’ and therefore reconfigure people’s behaviours or beliefs in some way. Most importantly, the response to the signal may involve either an individual or collective decision to make changes to the environments perceived to be under threat – the environments of childhood in this case. During the studied period, these changes were sometimes physical crime-prevention measures like the installation of CCTV cameras, but more crucially they were also changes in communities’ social fabric that leant toward risk-avoidance and political demands for more policing, laws, and social control. Less explicit, but equally important, these changes involved a reframing of the mental maps that people used to locate potential dangers and threats in everyday life. Thus, the media’s role in amplifying signal crimes not only spread fear about the risks posed by the specific danger in a case (like an individual), but of a more general threat that they came to represent (like a type of individual). To put it simply, parents were being told that if one child wasn’t safe, no child was. As Cutter has shown through studying health risks, people tend to worry more about high-profile, dramatic, and visible risks than they do about the comparatively invisible hazards that they are routinely exposed to, such as that posed by air pollution.^¹⁰ Furthermore as Slovic identifies, these worries find particularly fertile soil when centred around a topic that is poorly understood.^¹¹ Parents felt they understood the car and its risks – statistically they owned one – but they didn’t necessarily feel they understood the unknowns of new technologies and strangers. This is how car-oriented urban environments could be seen as dangerous, but cars themselves as safe. The car itself was a bubble, a moveable extension of private home space over which a parent had, in theory, total control.^¹²

The ubiquity and symbolism of the car were two further factors making it an unlikely target for the press. Rising rates of car ownership and expansion of facilitating infrastructure during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s did threaten children – but it was the population at large that drove cars, not a specific minority. In the early 20^th century, the ‘extreme danger of motor cars’ came under constant criticism in newspapers due to their high death toll for children in particular, but by 1980 the climate had changed.^¹³ If the papers had attempted to create moral panic around the issue of cars, they would have needed to pick out the motorist as a target, which would have meant picking out their own readers as targets. Aside from being unpopular with readership, this would not have aligned with the politics of most of the tabloid press which during this period was supportive of the individualist freedoms that the car had come to represent. This was why even during the height of public protests against the construction of hundreds of new road schemes following Thatcher’s Roads for Prosperity programme during the 1980s and 1990s (most famously Twyford Down in 1992) – widely supported around the country and described by the Economist as a ‘a truly populist movement drawing from all walks of life’ – tabloid press did not get involved or call for legal change to the extent that they did after the Orkney scandal, for example.^¹⁴

2.3 Out of the Shadows: The Press ‘Discovers’ Child Abuse

The British media and the tabloid press often perpetuated inaccurate and harmful representations of who and what did (and did not) pose a threat to children during this period. However, it must also be acknowledged that during the 1980s the media played a key role in publicising endemic problems of child abuse, and child sexual abuse in particular, that had been ignored in prior decades. In America in 1983 Time declared that ‘private violence’ was finally being ‘yanked out of the shadows’.^¹⁵ In the UK, public recognition was emblematised by the launch of the TV show Childwatch in 1986. Childwatch included statistics and in-depth discussion about abuse and how to support victims, and its popularity with viewers led to the setup of the charity Childline. Childline itself received 50,000 calls on its opening day and calls continued at a rate of 8-10,000 per day after that, a fact which generated further media attention.^¹⁶ The Childwatch programme was accompanied by a remarkable expansion in attention to child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, from other TV formats as well as the print media. Reporting of sexual abuse in The Times, for example, increased by 300% between 1985 and 1987.^¹⁷

Sexual abuse within families also became an issue for flagship UK documentary series such as Brass Tacks (BBC2, 1987), Everyman (BBC1, 1988), Antenna (BBC2, 1989) and Horizon (BBC2, 1989).^¹⁸ TV films also increasingly played an important role. The American made-for-TV drama Something about Amelia broadcast in the UK in 1989 and was ‘often credited with doing for child sexual abuse what Cathy Come Home did for homelessness’ – getting the public emotionally invested in the subject matter.^¹⁹ By the early 1990s child sexual abuse also began to appear in drama series. It featured in The Bill and Casualty as well as in a two-year running storyline in Channel 4’s soap-opera Brookside from 1993-1995. The storyline of the victim, Beth, was so important to some viewers that when the news leaked that the producers planned for her to commit suicide, various incest survivors’ groups demonstrated outside the TV studios under banners reading ‘Save Our Survivor’. Under this pressure the producers agreed to rewrite the plot so that Beth would die of natural causes.^²⁰

The decade between 1985 and 1995 was thus a time of dramatic shifts in the public profile of child abuse. Indeed, this was so much the case that journalists who said they had been discouraged from following up stories of child abuse in the 1970s and early 1980s reported to the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) that they now were suffering from ‘abuse fatigue’ from an over-reporting of these stories.^²¹ It must be acknowledged, however, that the groundwork for recognising this abuse came initially from the grassroots work of early feminist activists and organisations, such as Florence Rush at the 1971 New York Radical Feminist Conference, who had called child sexual abuse ‘The Last Frontier’, challenging the pervasive Freudian view which held children responsible for their own abuse as ‘seducers’ of adults.^²² In the UK the topic was a focus of the 1982 National Women’s Liberation Conference and the London Rape Crisis Centre made headlines when it reported in 1986 that a quarter of its clients were under 16.^²³ Furthermore, media interest in cases of child-abuse during this period focussed on particular forms of abuse at the expense on others, leading to a situation where many cases of at-home abuse from known persons were still being ignored.²⁴

The issue had broken into the mainstream towards the end of the 1980s, but how did the media portray the perpetrators of these crimes? At the crudest level sex offenders were often personified as sub-human animals. Many headlines dropped the straightforward term ‘man’ in favour of ‘fiend’, ‘pervert’, ‘monster’ or ‘animal’.^²⁵ Such reporting was often accompanied by disturbing mug shots of these ‘beasts’ with captions or headlines drawing attention to their distinctive appearance, such as The Sun’s ‘Evil Mr Staring Eyes’.^²⁶ On the other hand, if a photograph made an abuser look normal then a Jekyll and Hyde type-metaphor might be used such as The Star’s ‘Smile that hid the violent depravity of sex fiend headmaster’.^²⁷ This approach dehumanised the men who committed these crimes as individualised embodiments of evil, and thus avoided some of the trickier questions these incidents brought up around wider societal issues over the relationship between sexuality, masculinity, and power.^²⁸ Another related tactic was to associate attacks on children with homosexuality. One study that analysed all national British press reporting during 1991 found that abusers were explicitly identified as ‘homosexual’ in 50 newspaper articles such as The Independent’s ‘Man tells of homosexual abuse by care staff’, yet no article in any newspaper identified an abuser as heterosexual.^²⁹ Unlike the use of terms such as ‘monster’ and ‘beast’ which were mostly confined to the tabloids, identifying abuse as gay was common across all the press. A case in point was the coverage of the Frank Beck case, a man who assaulted boys over many years in the care home in which he worked. On that case The Guardian reported dismay at the fact that a care worker was allowed to foster two boys ‘even though there were complaints that he was homosexual’.^³⁰ In a clear demonstration of the interchangeability of the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘paedophile’ in the British press, a Sunday Times report on a ‘murderous sex ring’ stated that the police had interviewed 92 men and ‘Not all of them were paedophiles; sometimes they were straight men’.^³¹ Children were being ‘swallowed up in large cities’, the article went on to say, linking the urban environment to concepts of danger and depravity.^³² This type of disparagement of the cityscape was common in the media during this period, despite the fact that most academic reports found that rural areas had equal to or higher rates of child maltreatment than urban areas, and indeed urban areas were at the ‘forefront’ of activities to prevent child abuse.^³³

The environments of the school and the care home are interesting to examine, as they straddled the line between public and private space. By strict definition they were private premises, but they were not the nuclear family home, and their boundaries were more permissive. Stories about abuse in those environments carried with them the horror factor of the perpetrator being a trusted, known adult, but as they were also public institutions they could be simultaneously thought of as public environments wherein abuse was more ‘expected’ than at home. Furthermore, dangers or even just suggestions of dangers around these institutions were necessarily widely publicised though school letters, local papers, and school-gate gossip because of their public profile, and thus more likely to make it into a national paper. In reporting of child abuse in these settings, press coverage again individualised the problem down to the specific perpetrators, with little to no focus on the patterns of abuse in these settings, such as the preponderance of abuse cases coming out of private schools during the 1990s. Private schools had such an acute problem that Childline set up a specific helpline for them in 1991, yet reporting of abuse always framed the problem as certain men taking advantage of the institution in which they worked rather than also interrogating how the structures of that institution allowed abuse to occur for so long.^³⁴ In the prosecution of the headmaster with the ‘smile that hid violent depravity’, for example, the judge in the case made a point of saying that the man was a good teacher and the school ‘had admirable facilities and was well run’, despite what had been taking place there.^³⁵

The media thus helped to bring to light issues of child abuse both at home as well as from strangers, but the question of who was to blame for these issues was more complex than that. Individualising the problem to ‘a few bad apples’ allowed abuse at large to continue. Contrarily, the press did often identify experts – those who had ‘allowed’ these things to occur – as needing institutional reform. Social workers attracted the most concentrated ire despite other professionals like police, doctors, and nurses usually being involved in the same cases. Indeed, these more respected professionals were likely to be portrayed as heroes rather than villains. The Department for Education’s (DfE) Munro Review of Child Protection, carried out in the wake the murder of the 1-year-old Peter Connelly (‘Baby P’) by his parents in 2007, found that 70% of news articles about the event were negative about social services.^³⁶ The report analysed all the coverage in The Sun, Mail, Mirror, Telegraph, Times and Guardian, and found that the equivalent figures for medical staff were just 54% negative, and for the police only 30%, when all had had involvement with the family before the death.^³⁷ Even more telling was the fact that the proportion of negative coverage given to social services (70%) was equivalent to that given to the parents themselves – the perpetrators of the crime.^³⁸ The message – intentional or otherwise – was that social workers were just as much to blame for the infant’s death as the parents.

Why then was it that social workers attracted such exceptionally negative attention from the press? First, the nature of social work inevitably tended to attract media attention only when something had gone badly wrong; their day-to-day work understandably attracted little media interest, but whenever catastrophe struck it could not help but be dramatic and newsworthy, especially if children were involved. Second, as Leedham and Georgeson have studied, female-dominated professions like social workers were held to higher moral standards than others (and therefore more scathing critique), rooted in a misogynistic expectance for women to be morally pure.³⁹ Third, the stereotype of ‘The Social Worker’ had earned a reputation in the tabloid press as being synonymous with ‘politically correct’ professionals employed by what came to be known as ‘loony left’ Labour councils – especially during the 1987 general election.^⁴⁰ In 1984, shortly after the media had generated this concept, the murders of two girls, Tyra Henry and Jasmine Beckford, occurred in London boroughs that were already in the media’s cross-hairs as ‘loony left’, and journalists weren’t slow to draw connections between the left-wing policies of these urban boroughs and the perceived failings of their social services departments. These inner-city places like Islington, Ealing, and Liverpool with a leadership focus on issues of gender, race, and sexuality that the press regarded as fringe issues. The Daily Mail’s ‘Poison at Red Ted’s Town Hall’ (18 July, 1985) focussed on Tyra and divisions in Lambeth council caused by ‘criticism and interference by black councillors especially’.^⁴¹ Ted Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, was made (not entirely unwillingly) into a figurehead for the ‘loony left’ due to Lambeth’s famous use of lesbian and gay committees, nuclear-free zones, and flying of red flags.^⁴² Another article from The Daily Mail on Brent council and Jasmine’s case read:

But what of those who could have saved her; who had the legal power, the professional responsibility and, in theory, the trained expertise to save her? What of the social workers of the London Borough of Brent?^⁴³

Because ‘loony left’ councils and associated social service departments were always city-based, urbanity came to be the associated environment of moral suspicion in most of the tabloid press. As a counterpoint the rural environment was commonly represented as a place of safety and common sense, where the more conservative populations knew better than to fall prey to ‘loony left’ ideology. This can be seen most evidently and most explosively in one of the defining child abuse ‘signal’ cases of the 1990s: the February 1991 Orkney satanic abuse scandal.

2.4 The Orkney Satanic Abuse Scandal

Early in the morning of the 27 February 1991, and without warning, social workers came to the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay and forcibly removed nine children from their homes and parents on suspicion of widespread ritual child abuse. The allegations, however, would turn out to be false and the children were returned home two months later. The story became a huge media eventduring this period withover quarter of all UK press stories about child abuse during 1991 given over to it – more than 400 features.^⁴⁴ This is a prime case study of a moral panic linked to media representations of childhood environments. As will be shown, the way the remote rural island of South Ronaldsay was represented in the press against the city environments the children were taken to, such as Inverness and Glasgow, is telling of how urban places and children were increasingly portrayed as incompatible during this time.

From an early stage after the ‘dawn raids’ – as they came to be known – coverage by the press and TV was sympathetic to the islanders, particularly after the formation of the South Ronaldsay Parents Action Committee (SRPAC). SRPAC decided to work closely with the media to put their case forward, sharing the highly emotive stories of the moments their children were taken away, such as one mother describing how ‘I actually came running into the house screaming for my own mother who’s been dead for 20 years’.^⁴⁵ This parent-paper partnership was recognised by another mother interviewed on the return of her child, saying ‘just thanks, everybody. Thanks press, thank you community, wonderful to have the children home’.^⁴⁶ This contrasted starkly with the social workers who communicated very little with the media, partly due to reticence, but also to legal restrictions surrounding client confidentiality.^⁴⁷ Indeed, during the two months before the official dismissal of the social workers’ case in April, most reporting was at the very least sceptical of the charges of satanic abuse, and it is my contention that the evidence suggests that South Ronaldsay’s landscape acted as both proof of, and a metaphor for, its inhabitants’ innocence in press coverage. Such stories had always been popular in the printed press, but the unusual popularity of this story with TV news media is evidence of the essentiality of South Ronaldsay’s image to the story. For months, news reports would open with evocative shots of the isolated harbour or scenic countryside, to the extent that in a study asking people their memories of the event, one participant described how she ‘got into the habit of going off to make herself a cup of tea whenever she saw the typical “establishing shot” on TV’.^⁴⁸

Figure I. South Ronaldsay’s Harbour, as shown on BBC news.^⁴⁹

In almost all reporting the island was depicted in utopian terms, the perfect place to raise a child. The language used upheld the romanticist association between childhood innocence and natural virtue. Newsnight describedSouth Ronaldsay as a ‘haven of peace’ and the locals as ‘good working people’.^⁵⁰ Most had not grown up in Orkney but had moved there in pursuit of ‘the simple life’, according to Channel 4 News, or to ‘escape the rat race of contemporary urban society’ as Scotland on Sunday put it.^⁵¹ Indeed the island’s very remoteness and physical distance from the metropolitan sphere, which in prior decades would likely have been used to cast it as uncivilised, was instead a mark of its purity from urban corruption, allowing its inhabitants ‘a quieter, more fulfilling existence’.^⁵² Amongst many others, the Sunday Tribune made the point the people were ‘uniformly English, articulate, and middle class’ and had chosen Orkney specifically because ‘It was regarded as a “place of safety” to bring up their children’ – this phrase used with deliberate irony as a ‘place of safety’ order was the name of the ruling used to take the children off the island.^⁵³ Making pains to connect South Ronaldsay’s ruralness and its middle-classness pre-empted any reader preconceptions surrounding rural backwardness, but it was also revealing of a prevailing presumption which connected middle and upper-class children to nature and purity in a way that working-class children were not.

As well as conducting many interviews with individual islanders, the media also worked to broadcast group SRPAC petitions and demonstrations, in which ‘the island’ and its people became synonymous. Very little reporting acknowledged any differences in opinion on South Ronaldsay, creating the impression of a homogenous group of people. The Mail on Sunday wrote of ‘Fears of an outraged island’, The Daily Mail of ‘Village fury’, and Scotland on Sunday went for ‘Orkney Reels’ as a headline.^⁵⁴ In these articles, terms like ‘parents’, ‘islanders’, ‘village’, and ‘the island’ were used with little distinction between them to refer to the people of South Ronaldsay, evidencing and propagating the idea that people and place were one and the same. This is a common way to talk about communities generally, but within this construction, no islander could not fit the vaguely held perception that South Ronaldsay’s landscape had the ability to purify its inhabitants. The 1983 film ‘Local Hero’, which follows an uncaring American oil executive redeemed by a ‘dreamlike’ Scottish coastal village, is an example of this idea expressed in the popular culture of the period.^⁵⁵ Unlike South Ronaldsay’s residents however, the social workers were incomers who had not stayed long enough to breathe the cleansing air. Some descriptions of the ‘dawn raids’ implied the social workers had introduced a kind of evil to this contemporary Eden. The Daily Record showed a picture of parents looking over the Orkney landscape with the caption ‘Paradise Lost’.^⁵⁶ The Daily Telegraph also used the term ‘paradise lost’, and described the morning of the raid in gothic fashion:

It is a story that can only be thought of in monochrome. There are houses of grey granite and a swirling Orcadian mist.^⁵⁷

Weather was a key component of how the island’s environment came to be integral to the story, partly due to its metaphorical value. Shortly after the event The Times described ‘islands under a cloud’, again demonstrating the monolithic depiction of the Orcadians, but also the pseudo-biblical manner in which weather was often used to synthesise this satanic story.

Figure II. Captioned Photo of St. Margaret’s Hope in The Times, 4 March 1991.^⁵⁸

On the children’s April return to the island The Daily Mirror picked up a similar theme with ‘Storm as sex abuse kids fly home’.^⁵⁹ ITV news, on the other hand, reported that ‘After days of rain, the island was bathed in sunshine today, a fitting welcome back for the children’.^⁶⁰ Despite two opposing weather-metaphors being used, in both cases South Ronaldsay’s environment was utilised to vindicate the inhabitants – as if the landscape itself knew of how it had been wronged by the social workers. The Express described the ‘brilliant sunshine etching the hills and fields in spring gold’ and explicitly linked this to the island’s status as a secure playground for youngsters: ‘It looked like the perfect safe haven for children to play…’.^⁶¹ The Scotsman used ‘Sunshine after the storm’ , and Scotland on Sunday went with ‘From magic summer to winter nightmare’.^⁶² In the same article a photo of the quarry where the abuse was alleged to have taken place was captioned poetically as ‘In that long, now lost summer, the place where the water warmed up and brought youngsters from miles around’.^⁶³ The island environment did not have to be employed this way, as one anomalous Evening News article from before the children’s return proved. In it, the paper represented the island as a cold, shadowy, and divided place. South Ronaldsay was ‘a place so wild it appears to have been abandoned totally by both God and man’ and described the same quarry from the Scotland on Sunday article as ‘remote… shrouded in mist [and] partially filled with muddy water’.^⁶⁴

Figure III. The quarry, as shown on BBC news.^⁶⁵

Similarly, The Evening News’ negative portrayal of the rural focussed on the concept of ‘wilderness’, a dangerous environment in which children hurt themselves and are roughened by. Conversely, the numerous positive portrayals depicted a tamer, more genteel landscape that better fit the image of a middle-class idyll. For much of the press, it was the cities the children were taken away to that took on the role of ‘wilderness’. The corrupting ‘urban jungle’.An interview with one of the returned children was highlighted in the Daily Record and many other newspapers wherein a boy ‘spoke of learning to steal cars, roll a cannabis joint and glue sniffing’ after being taken off the island – a clear demonstration of a loss of childhood innocence and corruption by the urban sphere.^⁶⁶

Figure IV. Front page of the Daily Record, 6 April 1991.^⁶⁷

The Daily Mirror ran the headline ‘They left here unharmed, they’re coming home abused’.^⁶⁸ One mother described how her daughter had been bullied and withdrawn when they lived on the mainland but had ‘made very good progress’ since moving to Orkney – which she feared would now be ‘set back badly’ after the ordeal.^⁶⁹ The whole saga was understandably traumatic for the families, and it was used by tabloid and TV news to promote a general narrative about the benefits of country over city life for children. In reading the Daily Record article more closely, it is made clear that the car-stealing, cannabis-smoking, glue-sniffing boy only ever talked about these things with other kids, though the headlines implied he witnessed and took part in them.^⁷⁰ However, while the prevailing impression given was that something so abhorrent as child abuse simply could not happen in idyllic Orkney, almost no papers mentioned that five years earlier a father on South Ronaldsay had been imprisoned for abusing eight children, and that none of the locals had suspected anything at the time.^⁷¹ Furthermore, it was accusations made by the abused children during that legitimate case that led to the 1991 dawn raid.

The Independent did mention this in one article and quoted a local as saying ‘We’d never have thought. He must have been a Jekyll and Hyde character. Nobody could believe it when he was taken away’.^⁷² This, The Independent noted, brought under suspicion the claims from locals and the press that they would somehow instinctively know if something like that was going on. It was symptomatic of the common assumption that an abuser had a particular ‘look’ or ‘manner’, and furthermore – I argue – lived in a particular environment. Additionally, what was not reported on was the fact the dismissal of the social workers’ case was overturned not because it had no substance but because it was deemed ‘impossible’ for the sheriff ‘to bring a fair and balanced judgement to the issues’.^⁷³ Because the case was then dropped due to being deemed ‘compromised’, the social workers’ evidence was never heard in a court of law or officially dismissed. There was no ritual abuse on South Ronaldsay, but the conviction that there never could be, and the general assumption that the social workers had no evidence because the case was dismissed, was false and partially based on a form of environmental prejudice that favoured an image of South Ronaldsay’s middle-class rustic charm.

The importance of media representations of the environment during a key a signal-crime ‘scandal’ such as Orkney was made apparent during a study over a decade later into the public’s memories of the event. The powerful image of the rural idyll against the urban mire constructed in the media made a lasting impression on the public, more so than any specific details of the scandal, as most people could (unsurprisingly) only remember headlines, broad strokes, and impressions. What they remembered most were particularly powerful or oft-repeated talking points and imagery: the close-knit united community nestled into a beautiful rural landscape suddenly sundered by the ‘dawn raids’, evocatively described by both reporters and in the emotive pleas of parents.^⁷⁴ One of the consequences of newspapers and parents working so closely together on this story was the lasting impact that personal accounts had on the public compared to third-party reporting. For example, very few of the research participants remembered that social services won an appeal against the decision to return the children home, and could have taken them away again if they wanted, but decided not to partly because of the media backlash such a move would have generated. Very few ascribed any blame to the police for the incident, who helped orchestrate and were present at the dawn raids but came under far less media scrutiny. Furthermore, because the parents were absolved in such a high-profile story, the Orkney scandal helped to reinforce the idea of the ‘stranger’ – especially the urban stranger – as the real danger to children. After all, had not the big-city social-workers been the real menace? The pervasive idea that the Orkney islands were ‘not that kind of place’, both at the time and decades after, was propagated by press representation, despite the fact that urban areas were at the ‘forefront’ of child abuse prevention during the period.^⁷⁵ Ultimately, the message scandals such as Orkney sent to families was that the best environments to raise a child were rural, remote, and ‘respectable’.

2.5 Stranger Danger and Boundary Making

Despite public opinion being led to believe otherwise, there were no significant changes in the prevalence of attacks on children from strangers during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.⁷⁶ As before, during this period less than 1% of all missing children per year were the victims of the ‘stereotypical kidnapping’, as in abduction by a stranger.^⁷⁷ As David Pimentel illustratively put it, ‘It would take your child, left outside, 500,000 years to be abducted by a stranger, and 1.4 million years for a stranger to murder them’.^⁷⁸ By contrast, in 1995 the ESRC found that 96% of newspaper articles about how to protect children focussed on threats from strangers.^⁷⁹ Following a spate of attacks by strangers, The Sun’s ‘WEEP, 3 children murdered in 100 hrs as Britain sinks to a new low’ (14 August 1991) ignored the fact that a child was being killed by their parents every two or three days in Britain, and this statistic had been unchanged for many years.^⁸⁰ Similarly, a 2002 study for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that TV news reports covering child sexual abuse perpetrated by persons known to the child led only 31% of viewers to assign ‘moral responsibility’ to the abuser because they perpetuated stereotypes about the victim ‘leading them on’.^⁸¹ Home abuse, despite being significantly more prevalent than abuse from strangers, was disregarded because it was not proportionally represented in the news and victims were more likely to be considered morally suspect. Indeed, the message of ‘stranger danger’ relied on the idea of the safe home environment to act as its foil. If stranger meant danger, then familiar meant safety. In this fashion, all public space (particularly urban space) was characterised as dangerous and as such the importance of having boundaries between public (outdoor) and private (indoor) space became a critical issue.

A representative for the Kidscape charity said in an interview in 1995 that stories of home abuse were rarely printed because ‘it’s not a fun subject, it’s likely to put readers off… and it’s easier and safer to concentrate on strangers and bullying’.^⁸² The message that an abuser ‘could be anyone’ had reached people to some extent but, as interviews undertaken on this subject in the mid-1990s highlighted, most people – while salient of this fact – were not prepared to believe allegations made against anyone they knew. This assumption was ‘often accompanied by a sense that, if they did meet an abuser, they would instinctively know’, showing how the idea that an abuser would be identifiably different from a ‘normal person’ was pervasive.^⁸³ As an extension of this, people also found it hard to believe that an abuser would be living in their community, even if that community was the sort of working-class urban estate usually characterised as the places most at risk of such attacks.^⁸⁴ This exemplifies the fact that ‘the stranger’ existed predominantly as a conceptual category. The danger was real enough for people to limit their children’s mobility and freedoms in response to it, but the threat was always thought about as something unknowable and outside the bounds of familial control. The vagueness of the concept affected children too. A survey carried out by Kidscape in 1984 found that 90% of children could not identify or define who might be a ‘stranger’, despite knowing that they were dangerous.^⁸⁵

Media representations of stranger-danger were reinforced and reiterated through everyday conversation, particularly because events involving strangers, such as a strange man hanging around outside a school, were collective experiences in public spaces, whereas events involving known persons were hidden from view inside. It was also common for police officers to go into schools to show videos about stranger danger and give out warning slogans such as ‘keep away from people you don’t know’ and ‘you don’t want to end up dead or in hospital, say ‘No’ to strangers!’, encouraging children and parents to talk over the idea.^⁸⁶ When particularly shocking cases of abuse from friends or relatives did make headlines, the perpetrators, dehumanised into ‘monsters’, were represented as if they had been Jekyll and Hyde split-personality types, as if to some extent they had secretly been an ‘outsider’ all along. In this fashion, high-profile cases of abuse perpetrated by known persons were wrapped up into the media’s broader obsession with ‘the stranger’. More to the point, at-home abuse was simply less likely to be reported in the media – or at all – because the issue was not discussed with children or adults, making an already very difficult topic to discuss ever harder for kids who may be manipulated, confused, or ashamed by what was happening at home.

Depending on the size and strength of a community’s social cohesion, the inside/outside dynamic could also play out at a neighbourhood level as opposed to just a household level. As seen with Orkney, close-knit communities found it hard to believe that one of their own (an insider) could be an abuser.⁸⁷ Accepting such a fact meant admitting that an environment they previously conceived of as safe could, in fact, be corrupted from the inside as well as outside forces. However, the key difference between (most) neighbourhoods and homes is that a neighbourhood’s boundaries are social whereas the walls of the home are physical, meaning outside dangers can more easily cross the community threshold. It is unsurprising then that the visual language used to describe strangers very often positioned them as being on the other side of a boundary like a fence or window, just outside, and therefore placed extreme importance on such boundaries. As Markus noted, the very purpose of a building or built environment is to serve certain people and exclude others. In this way, ‘social structures are made tangible in the spaces and buildings that groups use’.^⁸⁸

For example, the establishing shot of the PIF Say no to Strangers (1985), shown in schools and on TV, framed its stranger through the links of a school fence.^⁸⁹ The effect of this representation was to promote an insider/outsider mentality and by extension place a great deal of importance on the fence itself as a barrier to threats beyond it, as well as encouraging parents to ‘always know where they are any time of the day’ as a contemporary PIF put it.^⁹⁰ Higher walls, fences, and hedges around private gardens was indeed an increasing trend during this period and new housing developments were also built to more insular design standards, with smaller windows in the front, windowless garages, and smaller front porch areas – in contrast to the growing popularity of fully windowed architecture in commercial and professional environments.^⁹¹ This was also evidence of the increasing premium being placed on private spaces as the ‘proper’ place for children to be raised, which meant that those families with the least private space were seen as negligent for letting their kids roam the public realm.^⁹² Ironically, the increase in the quantity, height, and opacity of barriers ultimately reduced the amount of ‘eyes on the street’ able to keep a passive watch on kids at play, as had been common on working-class streets in the first half of the 20^th century, reducing child safety.^⁹³

Say no to Strangers also depicted its stranger in a car, a trope in media representation that was fairly accurate as cars were a common tool for kidnappers who wanted to get in and out of an area quickly. To a certain extent this was another symptom of the dangers cars and car infrastructure posed to children who increasingly needed to wait for a lift to get anywhere. Furthermore, it demonstrated how the completely enclosed environment of the car represented a unique danger as it allowed anybody to bring a small piece of dangerous ‘outside’ space into the inside of a community and tempt a child across that threshold. As was shown in many theatrical films and PIFs of the period, once inside a moving car with the doors locked, it was not feasible for the child to leave. In this way, the car’s boundaries could be made permeable or solid at the will of the stranger, and that is why it was promoted in the Never go with Strangers PIF that ‘it is best to think about a strange car as danger’.^⁹⁴

Figure V. A stranger beyond the school fence, as shown on the ‘Say no to Strangers’ PIF.^⁹⁵

In the second half of the 1990s a slightly modified version of the traditional threat rose to media prominence and created a more specific and intense moral panic: the paedophile. In essence the threat of the paedophile was no different from the more general ‘stranger’ threat before it, but it chimed with the particular focus placed on child sexual abuse during this period in both expert and public discourse. A number of serial child sex murderers made famous in the 1960s and 1970s were due to be released from prison in the 1990s. Myra Hindley, in particular, who the press had made into ‘the face’ of these crimes, was in and out of the papers during the 1990s and 2000s due to a long twisting string of events including parole hearings and appeals. This reached one moment of culmination in 1990 when, close to her release date, the home secretary David Waddington increased Hindley’s sentence amidst a flurry of fearful tabloid reporting.^⁹⁶ Also in 1990, Robert Black, the serial rapist and murderer and Britain’s most wanted man, was finally caught and put on trial after a decade on the run; the extensive reporting further raising the profile of this type of threat.^⁹⁷ The murder of James Bulger in 1993 also shook the nation, particularly because his abduction was caught on security camera, allowing parents to visualise the threat. The Newcastle Journal reported that it was this event which had prompted one man from Whitley Bay ‘to invent the revolutionary new child safety strap’ (a lead for your child).^⁹⁸

With danger repeatedly in the news, parents were understandably increasingly fearful of public outdoor spaces because they were portrayed as fundamentally unsafe, especially for their daughters. Indeed, a 1993 survey found that ‘British parents fear the abduction of their children over any other danger’.^⁹⁹ Of course, this understanding failed to recognise the higher likelihood of attack from known persons, which also most threatened girls. From the 1970s onwards UK street crime had in fact been falling as a proportion of the population whilst a 1985 NSPCC report found that abuse of children at home had increased by 70% between 1979 and 1984.^¹⁰⁰

Figure VI. The Evening Chronicle reporting day-by-day kidnap attempts, not clarifying if these were from strangers or from estranged parents, as was most common.^¹⁰¹

Nevertheless in 1996, in an attempt to assuage public fear over paedophiles, the home secretary Michael Howard introduced legislation to create a register of sex offenders and monitor them after release, generating headlines like The Times’ ‘Paedophile lists for police’, highlighting how child sex offenders were seen to be the primary target of the law, even though the list was for all sex offenders.^¹⁰² However, the creation of the register prompted many questions about how the list would be managed and who would have access to it. Community organisations usually based on council estates such as ‘Freedom for Children’, ‘People’s Power’, ‘Parents Opposed to Paedophiles’, and ‘The Unofficial Child Protection Unit’ began to demand public access to the register and that they be notified when dangerous individuals moved into their neighbourhood.^¹⁰³ In the US, legislation known as Megan’s Law introduced in 1996 did just that.^¹⁰⁴ In this way the creation of the register increased awareness and fears over the paedophile threat, as parents knew that there was a list which could confirm or deny if a former sex-offender lived in their area but that they could not access it.

The strong correlation between anti-paedophile campaigns and council estates is evidence of the fact that the paedophile threat was understood to be an issue particular to a certain type of community. For practical reasons councils tended to place released prisoners in hostels and housing in working-class areas, often on council estates, where it was cheapest. Furthermore, the growing body of negative press about social workers – a more common sight in working-class neighbourhoods – fuelled distrust in authorities to monitor or investigate properly should a crime occur. Especially within these communities therefore, agitation grew into letter-writing campaigns and petitions set up by newspapers, and then further into demonstrations, civil disobedience, and even attacks on suspected paedophiles. In several instances the police even had to be brought in to protect released sex offenders from the public, and in some cases as with Francis Duffy in 1997, a person was wrongfully attacked after being mistaken for a paedophile identified in the paper.^¹⁰⁵ Already more likely to lack access to safe outdoor spaces for play and natural environments, working-class families were now also especially exposed to the perceived dangers of paedophiles in their communities. The very name of a group like ‘Freedom for Children’ alluded to the much broader mission the group saw itself as undertaking to restore lost childhood environments in which their children could safely play. Similarly, ‘The Unofficial Child Protection Unit’ name underlined the lack of faith in ‘official’ child protection organisations.

The phenomenon of parent-activism had already been seeing a noticeable uptick since the 1960s – following in the post-war tradition of the self-help group – but in the 1970s the nature of these groups began to change into something more political and campaign-oriented. Crane argues that groups post-1945 were often focussed on mutual support and aid of their members, whilst also making ‘representations to Parliament looking to add complexity to visions of “normal family life”’. In the following decades under Conservative governments however, these groups challenged ‘individualist models of responsibility for child protection’ and campaigned directly for more state resources for childcare. As outlined in the previous chapter, Thatcher’s distrust of the public sector resulted in an explosion of new smaller organisations that operated with great freedom in between the bureaucratic cracks, such as Kidscape, Childline, and Children in Need. These new groups were assisted by the media which offered a public forum to discuss children’s experiences and emotions, albeit around a news-cycle built on cases of terrible child abuse. By the time of the paedophile moral panic in the 1990s and 2000s, a number of groups had embraced an ethos of vigilantism, bolstered by media praise and enabled by reporting of suspected paedophiles’ descriptions and addresses. On the other side of things, Parents Against Injustice (PAIN) was a group set up to make it harder for accusations of child abuse directed at parents and other known-persons to result in legal action. This was because, they said, an ‘anxious climate’ had emerged where false accusations were common.^¹⁰⁶

Co-operation between the press and community organisations was thus key to the rise of the paedophile threat in the late 1990s and 2000s. Newspapers almost always sided with parents when protests or even violent attacks occurred; headlines in the national press included: ‘Parents in dark as paedophiles stalk schools’, ‘Paedophile out of prison “fearful for life and limb”’, ‘Mothers drive sex criminal off estate’, ‘Stop hiding perverts say protest mums’, and ‘Town not told of paedophile’s stay’.^¹⁰⁷ Such reports were also often accompanied by photographs of local people marching with banners declaring ‘Perverts out’ or children carrying placards reading ‘Make Me Safe’.^¹⁰⁸ In this way both the imagery of the child and children themselves were being used to advocate for the cultural and legal changes during this period that resulted in their lives becoming increasingly restricted. A self-perpetuating cycle was created between public protests against paedophiles living in their area and tabloid press fuelling and being fuelled by them, which together gave the impression that working-class estates were the only places at risk.

In 1997 the Manchester Evening News published a front-page spread about a local sex offender alongside a photograph of him in his car behind a smashed windscreen after ‘a vigilante mob had vented their anger’.^¹⁰⁹ Many newspapers took this more proactive role as guardians of public safety over merely reporting local unrest. When Robert Oliver, who had murdered a boy in 1985, was released from prison in 1997 he was pursued by journalists. The Sun asked its readers to phone an emergency number if they spotted him and, when he moved to Brighton the local paper, the Evening Argus, published his picture on their front page with the headline ‘Beware this evil Pervert’.^¹¹⁰ In other cases, journalists alerted people to the presence of paedophiles, either through knocking on the doors of neighbours and asking how they felt about living near a sex offender or through outing them on the front page. The Sunday Express printed photographs and details of offenders with their last known address under the headline ‘Could these evil men be living next door to you?’ and the Daily Record produced a similar campaign, devoting the bulk of one issue to asserting a ‘Charter for our Children’ and demanding the ‘legal right for communities to be told when a pervert moves into the area’.^¹¹¹ By promoting suspicion, these reports sundered the social boundaries of community, leaving only physical boundaries as the ‘last line of defence’ against sexual predators. This of course ignored the more prevalent danger of abuse from known persons. Particularly revealing is the 1985 Guardian article ‘The Video Nasty that Children Ought to See’ which reviews an education film titled Kids Can Say No!.^¹¹² The film was presented by Rolf Harris, who, it was later uncovered, was actively sexually abusing children at the time of the recording of this film. In the film Harris advises that ‘some people don’t act right with kids and they need help… It’s better to say something so that you and the family can get the help you need’. This statement presupposes that ‘the family’ will not be the source of danger. More to the point, Harris’ position as a popular known person helped to protect him from the consequences of his abuses for decades, the reality being that abuse from familiar persons was still a taboo subject being overshadowed by the inflated spectre of stranger-danger.¹¹³

The British media’s reporting – and that of the tabloid press in particular – clearly contributed to an exaggerated atmosphere of fear and unrest across the country, however this did not mean the entire moral panic was vacuous. What it did mean was the more prevalent, systemic, personal dangers to children went underreported and as such unacknowledged by the public. Because of this, parents across the country were being given an inaccurate picture of where danger lay, and as such promoted an isolationist approach to the physical and social makeup of homes, schools, and communities via the use of high, opaque walls, fences, hedges, private indoor spaces, curfews, and other restrictions on children’s independent mobility. By privatising childhood environments in this way, whilst also placing ‘the outdoors’ on a pedestal, morally acceptable childhoods became restricted to those families who had large gardens and the time, money, and means to take their kids to sports activities and National Trust landmarks. In this environment, technologies like TVs, games consoles, and computers came to be integral to childhood experience across the three decades of this study.

2.6 Video Nasties

Due to their vulnerable position in society and reliance on adults, children can prove a perfect vessel for moral panic. This is also true because children as historical agents throughout the 20^th century acted as creators of new attitudes, subcultures, and trends that challenged or subverted those of their elders.^¹¹⁴ As such, moral panics in Britain during this period were not always on behalf of children, but about them as well. Unfamiliar and often deliberately insular from adult society, the customs of the young came to be targets of suspicion. The idea of the ‘hoody’ is an example from the 1990s and 2000s where the clothing preferences, drinking habits, and other social choices of teenagers were used in the press to present a negative stereotype of children as menaces to society.^¹¹⁵ As discussed in Chapter One, because such terms were commonly used to describe both adults and children (anyone from 15 to 30 years old), their use was symptomatic of a belief that criminal or antisocial behaviour disqualified children from being children; that they were ‘adult in everything except years’, as Michael Howard said about young offenders in 1993.^¹¹⁶

Similarly, the media frenzy surrounding the dangers of the ‘video nasty’ of the late 1980s and 1990s was exemplary of an attitude that cast an element of youth culture as dangerous, to both themselves and others. Further complicating this was the scare’s entanglement with more general fears over new technology and the increasing influence of technological environments in children’s lives. In many ways this scare was a successor to the comic book moral panics of the 1950s and a progenitor of the video game panics of the 2000s, highlighting the constant connection and suspicion placed on children and their tendency towards early adoption of new forms of media.^¹¹⁷

Historical discourse on video nasties as a moral panic has been focussed on the relationship between media, government, and public, and has sought to debate how the scandal came to materialise and its social and cultural impacts. Julian Petley has argued that the scandal was a case study in how the concept of ‘public opinion’ can be invoked by government and media as a tool with which to shape public opinion.^¹¹⁸ Kate Egan’s work discusses the manner by which video nasty censorship was not simply a product of law, but of a relationship between regulative, cultural, and economic factors that together were primed and utilised by campaigners to influence public opinion.^¹¹⁹ Utilising their work, and that of historians of contemporaneous scandals such as David Miller, I focus on the video nasty panic in order to examine how public discourse came to represent the home and digital environments, and consequently its impact on children’s lives. I argue that tabloid media reporting on video nasties was an early example of what would become a ubiquitous trend during this period: the blaming of the decline in childhood health and mobility on new technologies, and indeed children themselves as willing denizens of these new digital environments. As part of this narrative, the indoor environment of the home, previously cast as a safe space for children, came to be constructed as dangerous due to devices like the TV and video player corrupting it. An important distinction here is that the danger posed was of a different variety to that by strangers, as it was primarily a danger to health rather than safety. Furthermore, the media differentiated the dangers of the technologized home from the stranger-stalked urban street by arguing that, with technology, children became active participants in their own destruction. This narrative left many children, in particular those with worse access to outdoor environments that were regarded as ‘safe’ such as a garden, in a catch-22 situation where almost any environment they could exist in was thought of by adults as either unsafe, improper, or unhealthy.

In 1984 the Thatcher government introduced the Video Recordings Act to classify every film released on video with an age rating. This act was unique in Europe (aside from Ireland) in that its classifications carried legal force and therefore made it a criminal offence to distribute videos to certain people – children being the primary target – with around 3,200 fines issued between 1984 and 2005.^¹²⁰ Why was it, then, that the British system was so uniquely punitive? The answer was a creature known as the ‘video nasty’, around which a significant furore arose in the 1980s and 1990s. Video nasties were home videos that were deemed too inappropriate for even adults to watch and were thus censored in Britain, though the justification for this censorship was primarily based around protecting young people. Public campaigners such as the conservative activist Mary Whitehouse and politicians of all parties helped to create the idea of the video nasty, but it was the national press, often invoking ‘public opinion’ that amplified the message and created a signification spiral in which the threat posed by video nasties was constantly escalated.^¹²¹ The result was an increasingly strident campaign for firm legislative measures to be taken.

Home video took off in Britain after 1979, and at first the industry was dominated by a plethora of small independent film makers. UK video rights could be bought for as little as £1000, and as such the video shelves were stocked with (what was considered at the time as) ultra-violent films and soft-core pornography, usually housed in garish, lurid covers. Indeed, cover art was often analysed more in the press than the actual content of the films, as they were easy symbols to proselytise over, and many film distributers deliberately made violent or sexual covers because they knew the attention they would generate.^¹²² This was a radical departure from what British audiences (and regulators) were used to, as this kind of material had mostly been withheld from view in mainstream cinemas, and at this time the home-video scene was unregulated. The prospect of uncensored home video thus rapidly emerged as a ‘threat to societal values and interests’.^¹²³ The first complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in 1981 but it was when the first national press story about the dangers of domestic video was published in The Mail in 1982 that a real campaign began to emerge. The Mail’s article read:

More and more children… are catching on to the fact that their parents’ machine can give them the opportunity to watch the worst excesses of cinema sex and violence.^¹²⁴

This article also introduced what would be a common theme of this media campaign: a figurehead person as stand-in for public opinion. In this case it was Richard Neighbour, a teacher, who worried that ‘video gives the children access to something that the parents may not be able to control’.^¹²⁵

The Sunday Times followed on the 23 May with the headline How High Street Horror is Invading the Home, and this was the first time that the term ‘video nasties’ was used in the national press.^¹²⁶ The article warned that:

Uncensored horror video cassettes, available to anybody of any age, have arrived in Britain’s High Streets.^¹²⁷

Specific titles singled out by The Sunday Times included The Driller Killer, SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave, and Snuff. As I will show, the totality of newspaper coverage of the supposed dangers of these films came to represent the modern technologically infused home environment as a corrupting influence on young people, and thus problematised the very environment that was simultaneously being promoted as the only safe place left for children. The Sunday Times reported extensively on the video nasty saga, and repeatedly drew attention to itself as a leading actor in the events it described, exemplifying the fact that the parliamentary questions and police actions taken from 1982 onwards were partly a response to journalistic efforts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre featured for the first time in an article for The Express on the 28 May headlined This Poison Being Peddled as Home ‘Entertainment’.^¹²⁸ Richard Neighbour was quoted again, alongside Lord Chief Justice Lane, warning about the ‘positive incentives to commit crime’ offered by scenes of violence ‘depicted on various screens of all sizes’.^¹²⁹ The Express also suggested that video shops should, like sex shops, be licensed by local councils. The Daily Mail was similarly campaigning:

The video boom has meant that thousands of out-of-work, unstable teenagers are currently gorging themselves day-in-day-out on scenes of torture and depravity. We need censorship at the moment as we have never needed it before. And if video censorship of the most stringent kind isn’t brought in pretty damned quick we’re going to have an upsurge in violence and terror and abuse in our land and homes the like of which we never suspected in our wildest terror.^¹³⁰

The reference to the ‘out-of-work’ in this quote again points to the class dimension at play here, suggesting a particular type of young person as being at risk of video corruption. The later call to protect ‘our land and homes’ clearly identifies the environments at risk, and the fact that these out-of-work children are part of an ‘other’.

Around the time of The Express article the news broke that the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad has seized a copy of SS Experiment Camp and had sent a report to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) with a view to his bringing a possible test case against the video under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act (OPA). In another Sunday Times article on 30 May, Detective Chief Superintendent Kruger was quoted saying that ‘horror videos are a new concept, and I think we’re going to get involved in them more and more’.^¹³¹ The following week the newspaper revealed that The Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave had also been referred to the DPP and it was from this point onwards that politicians began to get involved with this moral issue, raising a number of questions about videos in both the Commons and the Lords.^¹³² Of particular note is Mary Whitehouse, the president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA), who is credited with coining the term ‘video nasties’.^¹³³ The NVLA was established in in 1965 by Whitehouse as a pressure group that campaigned to ‘clean up TV’ for ‘taste and decency issues’, but it was under the Thatcher governments she had most success. Whitehouse personally phoned and wrote to Thatcher, forwarded on messages from concerned teachers and parents, and met privately with her in September 1983 after which Thatcher’s private secretary wrote in a letter that she:

…agrees with Mrs Whitehouse that piecemeal legislation on obscenity is unsatisfactory and that the Government ought to be bringing forward proposals for a general reform of the Obscene Publications Acts, which she believes to be ineffective.^¹³⁴

With her message boosted in the media, politicians began to heed her warnings to the extent that she was able to give MPs a private screening of edited highlights from these films in the House of Commons in late 1983, including extracts from her most-hated film, The Evil Dead.^¹³⁵

Whitehouse found this prominence in concert with the national press, particularly The Mail, in which her voice went uncontested in calling for stricter crackdowns. Even after the DPP did begin to prosecute these films as early as August 1982 Whitehouse was publicly calling in The Mail for their resignation due to the punishments being too lenient.^¹³⁶ Even so, since it had now been established that violent videos could be classified as obscene under the OPA, police forces around Britain soon began raiding video distributors and seizing thousands of tapes which they claimed breached the law. The Mail continued to cheer the police on and press for further censorship by running stories that claimed a link between violent films and violent acts. In A Video Nasty Killer the paper called a video nasty the ‘trigger that finally turned a young psychopath into a killer’.^¹³⁷ In Hooking of the Video Junkies, The Mail equated video watching to drug use, saying that ‘more and more children are becoming videoholics’ and that their ‘impressionable minds’ could be convinced to ‘recreate murders or rape’.^¹³⁸ The Daily Express furthered this impression, calling horror videos a ‘new cult… sweeping the country’ and argued the films fuelled ‘sexual psychopathic fantasies’.^¹³⁹ The early 1980s was a period that saw a general rise in violent crime in Britain, and against the backdrop of these newspaper articles, it is perhaps unsurprising – as Dickinson says – that many politicians began to ponder if ‘perhaps there was something in the fact that the 1978-1982 period had seen a rise in both violent crime and video player ownership’.^¹⁴⁰ However, as Grieveson noted, the idea of the highly-impressionable innocent child had been used as a justification for film censorship since the debut of cinema, so what made this moral panic significant was that it was about films that could be watched in the private space of the home.^¹⁴¹

The media played such a crucial role in helping to shape people’s perceptions of the video nasty because most people, including by her own admission Mary Whitehouse herself, had never actually seen one. Cohen argues that nebulous threats like ‘absent fathers, feckless mothers… TV violence and video nasties’ were able to be made into a ‘potent symbol for everything that had gone wrong in Britain’ via a whole series of processed images and coded representations.^¹⁴² Panic-inducing media reporting has the power to make ‘people become indignant or angry, formulate theories and plans, make speeches, write letters to the newspapers…’.^¹⁴³ The threekey ingredients in this process, Cohen argues, are exaggeration, prediction, and symbolisation. Exaggeration is typified by sensational headlines, melodramatic vocabulary, and the deliberate heightening of those elements of the story considered as news – such as with The Mail’s Secret Video Show article warning of children watching ‘the worst excesses of cinema sex and violence’.^¹⁴⁴ Prediction involves a dire warning that the events in question will get worse if nothing is done, such as with Tory MP Peter Lloyd quoted in The Sunday Times saying that ‘these video sales and rentals will be the problem of next year and the year after’.^¹⁴⁵ The final ingredient is symbolisation, which is where certain words or terms come to acquire wholly negative meanings and connotations, as in the phrase ‘video nasty’, and the focus of newspapers on the covers rather than the contents of the films.^¹⁴⁶ The image of the child ‘glued’ to the TV screen came to symbolise a corruption brought into the usually safe environment of the home. As a Loughborough university report in 1993 said, ‘today’s youth culture of discos, computers and video games’ was to blame for dramatic falls in levels of physical activity in children and the birth of the ‘couch potato generation’.^¹⁴⁷ In this way a parallel culture of suspicion arose in indoor as well as outdoor environments, the difference being the threat was an internal corruption of children rather than an external attack.

Concerns in the papers began to filter into the political space as they both invoked and incited public opinion on this issue. On 15 December 1982, Gareth Wardell, Labour MP for Gower introduced a bill which would have made it an offence to rent or sell adult videos to children and young people, describing the video recorder as ‘a potential weapon that may be used to attack the emotions of our children and young persons’ and the videos as ‘a slur on British life’.^¹⁴⁸ The bill failed to win government support however, as Thatcher’s governments were always reluctant to regulate the private sphere despite their desire to return to ‘Victorian values’.^¹⁴⁹ It was the government’s lack of support for Wardell’s bill which set off what would become the next stage of The Mail’s ‘Ban the Sadist Videos’ campaign, with a February 1983 headlined We Must Protect Our Children Now.^¹⁵⁰ Other headlines in the series included Rape of Our Children’s Minds and Sadism for Six Year Olds.^¹⁵¹ The pressure from the press was so effusive that by April 1983 Norman Abbott of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) wrote for the trade magazine Broadcast that he didn’t think the voluntary classification scheme he was setting up was going to be given a ‘fair chance’, and indeed the scheme was denounced by Mary Whitehouse as ‘unworkable’ as soon as it was announced.^¹⁵²

After winning the 1983 general election, Thatcher spoke again on the matter, saying that ‘it is not enough to have voluntary regulation. We must bring in a ban to regulate the matter’ and indeed it soon became apparent that a draft bill had already been completed. Stories in the papers continued apace leading up to the bill’s first and second readings in the Commons, particularly about crimes committed under the supposed influence of a video nasty. One now notorious article in The Mirror titled Pony Maniac Strikes Again quoted a police spokesman as saying that the perpetrator of a series of sexual attacks on ponies ‘could have been affected by video nasties or a new moon’.^¹⁵³ The same year Conservative MP Graham Bright claimed in a TV interview that ‘research is taking place and it will show that these films not only affect young people but I believe they affect dogs as well’.^¹⁵⁴ A claim that four in ten children had seen a video nasty, based on a 1983 academic report, was often banded around both in parliament and the press despite the fact that one of the researchers on that study had said its lead researcher had ‘selectively interpreted, and in some cases outright fabricated, a good deal of the evidence to support the predetermined conclusion that the videos were responsible for criminal activity’.^¹⁵⁵

It was not just children who needed protecting, however. After watching a screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, BBFC chief censor James Ferman said that ‘It’s all right for you middle class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?’ – suggesting that person would take the film as inspiration for violent acts.^¹⁵⁶ Lord Chief Justice Lane was also quoted in The Mail as saying ‘it is not merely children who need to be prevented from seeing these frightful publications. There are others upon whom the effects may be even more disastrous… human beings are imitative, and the less strong-minded the more imitative they are’.^¹⁵⁷ This type of language was reminiscent of the infamous 1960 obscenity trial brought against Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where the chief prosecutor was laughed at for asking if it was ‘a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ or ‘working class youths’.^¹⁵⁸ The Chatterley trial highlighted that social difference was still considered a factor in who could be ‘trusted’ to consume certain pieces of media, and the same was true of the discussion around video nasties, although this time children were also being used as a justification for general censorship.

The video nasty panic erupted and escalated in the media with surprising speed and intensity. Largely this can be attributed to what Hall calls the ‘signification spiral’, wherein an issue is identified and then linked to a much wider fear to the ultimate end of calling for action.^¹⁵⁹ The video nasty panic was particularly rich in links to other perceived issues, such as the tropes of the anti-social family, absentee father, and feckless mother, and therefore could easily be used as a catalytic issue around which to press more general fears. For example, a Mail story about a ‘video rapist’ quoted the director of the NSPCC saying ‘I had a case where a worker was not able to interview a family until all of them, including children, had finished viewing the rape scene in I Spit on Your Grave’.^¹⁶⁰ Links to organised crime were also common. The News of the World lambasted the ‘evil sex-kings’ and ‘get-rich-quick gangsters’ of the video trade.^¹⁶¹ Meanwhile The Mail’s Rape of Our Children’s Minds editorial asked:

Are we insane? Are we bent on rotting our own society from within? Are we determined to spur to a gallop the forces of decadence that threaten to drag us down?.^¹⁶²

The threat identified as coming from ‘within’ shows that technology was considered a substantively different category of to the ‘outsider’ danger of strangers, social workers, or urban cityscapes. The use of this kind of framing also placed more blame on children themselves, as it suggested they had chosen the TV to become an integral element of ‘youth culture’, and as such the threat from ‘within’ came from inside their minds as well as their homes. This is partly why video nasties were so often linked to real-world acts of violence, as it was thought they had the potential to incite violence. DCI Kruger was prominently featured in the press on this point, stating in The Telegraph that ‘the police are here to prevent violence for violence’s sake, which is precisely what these films glorify’.^¹⁶³

Along similar lines in June 1983, under the headline Fury Over the Video Rapist The Mail reported that ‘Demands for action on video “nasties” mounted last night following the case of a teenage rapist who struck twice after watching pornographic films’.^¹⁶⁴ However, according to the rest of the article, it was not pornographic but horror videos that he had watched. Furthermore, it omitted the fact that the teen had seven previous offences for theft and burglary, and that he had just been released from a detention centre when he raped the two women. The shakiness of the story, however, did not deter the reporter from warning that ‘the impact that this sick, beastly money-making corruption is having on innocent minds is going to make previous anxieties about violence on television look like worries about the impact of Enid Blyton!’.^¹⁶⁵ Further links between violent videos and actual violence were drawn by The Times under the headline Rapist ‘Was Addicted to Video Nasties’.^¹⁶⁶ In the article the perpetrator’s wife is quoted as saying ‘He was loving, kind and considerate until he became addicted to watching an endless string of horrifying video films containing detailed scenes of the most depraved and vicious kind’.^¹⁶⁷ However the films named in the paper, The Thing and Last House on the Left do not contain ‘multiple sex attacks’ as the paper suggested and, more to the point, the perpetrator had undergone a severe personality change after suffering brain damage in a car crash in 1979, had taken a cocktail of drink and drugs before the rape, and at the time of the offence was on bail – which had been strongly opposed by the police – for two previous assaults.^¹⁶⁸ In a case such as this, it is clear that the paper selectively reported the facts in order to build a particular case against these at-home videos.

Some critical voices in The Times, Telegraph, Financial Times, and Guardian were apprehensive about Thatcher’s proposed new law, which would give the government censorship rights over a great deal more than simply a few ‘nasties’, most of which had already vanished from the market thanks to police and court actions under the OPA anyway. These were minor interventions, however, against an overwhelming wall of media support for the bill, and as such it passed into law in July 1984. Interestingly, public opinion – whilst being frequently called on in the press as the driver of their campaigns – was not in support of this bill. Firstly, there is very little evidence of any gathering of data about public opinion at all, and what little there is does not support the idea that the ‘nasty’ panic was widespread. A What Video survey in 1982 concluded that for 60% of those who rented or bought videos, horror/science fiction was their favourite category. A MORI poll in October 1983 revealed that 92% of those polled had never been offended by the contents of a pre-recorded video cassette, and another in March 1984 showed that 65% of those interviewed were opposed to the government deciding which videos were available for home viewing. As Miller wrote of the moral panic concept in general:

It is never very clear who is doing the panicking. Is it the media, the government, the public, or who? One reason for this lack of clarity is that distinctions between the media and the state, between the media and public belief, and between the state and other social institutions and groups are dissolved.^¹⁶⁹

Figure VII. Children gathered round a PlayStation, as seen on BBC News, 1999.^¹⁷⁰

The link drawn in the press between video nasties (and digital technologies more broadly) and the correlating decline in children’s physical health was very clear, even though the headlines about declining play were usually based on academic work that would tend to acknowledge that technology was only part of the narrative.¹⁷¹ This disconnect between truth and popular perception meant the computer and TV were often talked about publicly as the problem to the exclusion of other factors. It was certainly the case, as a 2006 report for the NSPCC found, that restricting children to the indoors and digital environments was contributing to rising levels of obesity, diabetes, depression and other health problems, but in majority this was due to children no longer being allowed outside because of the perceived dangers of strangers and cars.^¹⁷² In truth children with a lack of access to new technologies found themselves on the wrong side of a ‘digital divide’ which exacerbated pre-existing social divergences as highly social children more readily adopted digital devices as a means for deepening and expanding relations whereas less social children showed the opposite pattern.^¹⁷³ Furthermore, the ‘billion-dollar industries’ in technology surrounding children were making increasingly enviable profits from the sale of both security and safety devices as well as indoor education and play devices, in essence selling products that were both ‘the problem’ and ‘the solution’.^¹⁷⁴

2.7 Conclusion

Young people during this period found themselves sandwiched between the threats of urban spaces, paedophiles, and new technologies. The British media and the tabloid press especially, working in tandem with figures and groups representing the public, had taken a number of real but minor dangers and had created from them a series of moral panics, based around key ‘signal crimes’, that caused adults to restrict children’s independence and mobility for fear that the environments of childhood had become corrupted. The media not only reflected but actively produced a cultural geography of fear that redefined where children could and should exist. The Orkney scandal, the stranger-danger panic, and the video nasty controversy each reveal how different environments – rural, urban, and domestic – were symbolically charged with moral meaning. These meanings were not neutral but deeply classed, gendered, and spatialised, often privileging middle-class rural domesticity as the idealised space of childhood while casting urban, public, and technological environments as sites of danger, corruption, or moral failure.

Considering these moral panics within the ‘circuit of culture’ framework clarifies how media representations translated into material consequences. They contributed to a widespread culture of restriction toward children’s independent mobility, a reconfiguration of public and private space, and a growing suspicion of both outdoor and indoor environments. The result was a paradoxical situation in which children were increasingly expected to be confined to environments that were themselves problematised either as unsafe or unhealthy. Moreover, the media’s selective focus on certain dangers (strangers, paedophiles, video nasties) over others (cars, environmental degradation, domestic abuse) reveals how public anxieties were not simply responses to risk but were shaped by historically specific discourses of morality, class, and control. In reality the scale of these ‘new’ threats was not evidently greater than those of previous decades. Nevertheless, the belief in these dangers resulted in physical changes to children’s environments, as houses, schools, playgrounds, and neighbourhoods were built to be more insular – shielding those ‘inside’ from those ‘outside’. The threats from cars and car-oriented infrastructure were far more real to children, and indeed were the inciting factors behind the initial decline in children’s outside activity, but they did not provoke moral panic because they were not newsworthy. Instead, the media reporting of tabloids specifically created a climate of fear that represented most childhood environments as unsafe; particularly the tv-homes and stranger-stalked public urban spaces of working-class areas.

As the following chapters will explore through the two North East regional case studies of Byker and Chopwell, national narratives were not uniformly experienced but were mediated, resisted, or reinforced in different ways depending on local context. Understanding this interplay between expert discourse, public discourse, local environment, and individual childhoods is essential for grasping how the landscapes of play, safety, and risk were constructed and contested during this period. This is the context of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in which real families and children, like those featured in the following interviews, had to negotiate the tricky process of growing up.

<- Chapter 1 – Chapter 3 ->

References

1 ‘Tabloid’ as in the style of journalism, as supposed to the format of paper.

2 Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015) 86; Kevin Williams, Read All about It!: A History of the British Newspaper (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 211.

3 Ibid, 217.

4 Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, 224.

5 Finlo Rohrer, ‘In praise of summer mischief,’ BBC News Magazine, accessed 15 February 2022, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7510372.stm.

6 Mora et al., ‘Practice Theories and the “Circuit of Culture”,’ 59.

7 Dick Hobbs, Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 89; Martin Innes, ‘Signal crimes’: Detective Work, Mass Media and Constructing Collective Memory (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 63.

8 Ibid, 66.

9 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10.

10 Susan Cutter, Living with Risk: The Geography of Technological Hazards (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 54.

11 Paul Slovic, ‘Perceptions of Risk: Reflections on the Psychometric Paradigm,’ in Social Theories of Risk, eds. Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Goulding (Westport: Praeger, 1992), 55.

12 In practice they of course did not.

13 S.N. ‘Dangers of Motor Traffic,’ Daily Mirror, 4 August 1910.

14 S.N. ‘The classless society,’ Economist, 19 February 1994, 27.

15 John Myers, The Backlash: Child Protection Under Fire (London: Sage, 1994), 70.

16 Kate Hunt and Jenny Kitzinger, ‘Public Place, Private Issue: The Public’s Reaction to the Zero Tolerance Campaign against Violence against Women,’ in Defining Violence, ed. Hannah Bradby (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1996), 45.

17 Ibid, 59.

18 Ibid, 59.

19 Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 36.

20 Keith Soothill and Sylvia Walby, Sex Crime in the News (London: Routledge, 1991), 118.

21 Paul Skidmore, ‘Telling Tales; Media Power, Ideology and the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse,’ in Crime and Media; David Kidd-Hewitt and Richard Osborne, The Post-Modern Spectacle (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 83.

22 Bingham, ‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade,’ 102; Melanie McFadyean, ‘Sex and the Under-age Girl,’ New Society, 14 June 1984.

23 Audrey Droisen and Emily Driver, Child Sexual Abuse: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 148.

24 Bingham, ‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade,’ 106.

25 Rosaline Barbour, Developing Focus Group Research (London: Sage, 1999), 202.

26 S.N. ‘Evil Mr Staring Eyes,’ Sun, 2 May 1991.

27 S.N. ‘Smile that hid the violent depravity of sex fiend headmaster,’ Star, 12 April 1991.

28 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 194.

29 S.N. ‘Man tells of homosexual abuse by care staff,’ The Independent, 10 October 1991; Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 139.

30 Ian Katz, ‘Child Abuse Case Officer “Framed”,’ Guardian, 30 October 1991, 2.

31 James Dalrymple, ‘Slaughter of the Lambs,’ Sunday Times, 23 June 1991, 5.

32 Ibid, 5.

33 Specific 1980s/90s North East statistics are not available on this point, but more general studies from Britain and other countries around the world support this point: Kathryn Maguire-Jack et al., ‘Rural Child Maltreatment: A Scoping Literature Review,’ Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 22, no. 5 (2021): 1316; Kathryn Maguire-Jack and Kim Hyunil, ‘Rural Differences in Child Maltreatment Reports, Reporters, and Service Responses,’ Children and Youth Services Review 120 (2021): 105792; Ryo Uchida, ‘“Child Abuse” Occurs in Urban Areas,’ The Journal of Educational Sociology 76 (2005): 129-148.

34 Rebecca Hardy, ‘Scandal of sex abuse at top public schools,’ Daily Mail, 10 January 1991, 17.

35 S.N. ‘Twelve years for sex charge headmaster,’ Dundee Courier, 13 April 1991, 8.

36 Eileen Munro, Munro Review of Child Protection: A child-centred system (London: Department for Education, 2011), 19.

37 Ibid, 19.

38 Ibid, 125.

39 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): 1110; Aimee Georgeson, ‘A Feminist Social Work Perspective on Misogyny and the Function of Empathy,’ Feminist Dissent 8 (2025): 103.

40 John Gyford et al., The Changing Politics of Local Government (London: Routledge, 1989), 310.

41 S.N. ‘Poison at Red Ted’s Town Hall,’ Daily Mail, 18 July 1985.

42 ‘Lambeth: The Council that Cares,’ BFI Video, 20:00, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-lambeth-the-council-that-cares-1982-online.

43 S.N. ‘Why did they not save her?,’ Daily Mail, 29 March 1985, 6.

44 Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 86.

45 News at Ten, aired 12 March 1991 on ITV, ITV Archive.

46 News at Ten, aired 4 April 1991 on ITV, ITV Archive.

47 Social Work England, ‘Guidance on the Professional Standards,’ Accessed 27 September 2022, https://www.socialworkengland.org.uk/standards/professional-standards-guidance/.

48 Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 95.

49 Newsnight, aired 15 March 1991 on BBC 2, BBC Archive.

50 Newsnight, aired 15 March 1991 on BBC 2, BBC Archive.

51 Seven O’clock News, aired12 March 1991 on Channel 4, National Archives; S.N. ‘Islanders Trapped in a Nightmare,’ Scotland on Sunday, 10 March 1991.

52 James Dalrymple, ‘Secrets of Orkneys ‘vice ring’ untravel,’ Sunday Times, 1 September 1991, 4.

53 William Paul, ‘Orkney outcry over child abuse,’ Sunday Tribune, 10 March 1991, 7.

54 S.N. ‘Fears of an Outraged Island,’ Mail on Sunday, 3 March 1991; Stephen Oldfield, ‘The day of hope for Satan case children,’ Daily Mail, 2 March 1991; S.N. ‘Orkney Reels,’ Scotland on Sunday, 2 March 1991. Other headlines of the period: ‘Islanders threaten to picket hearing into child abuse,’ Observer, 3 March 1991; ‘Islanders support families,’ Glasgow Herald, 5 March 1991; ‘OUTRAGE: They all came together in the small hall to demand: give us back our children,’ Mail on Sunday, 3 March 1991; ‘Island anger,’ Evening News, 4 March 1991.

55 As described in the New York Times’ review, which also describes that the village ‘casts its spell’ over the main character: Janet Maslin, ‘Film: “Local Hero,” Houston-to-Scotland Odyssey,’ New York Times, 17 February 1983, 25.

56 Anna Smith, ‘Taught to Nick Cars,’ Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 1.

57 Eric Bailey, ‘Family Impatient to Start Work on Rebuilding their Paradise Lost,’ Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1991, 10.

58 Kerry Gill, ‘Orkney parents dismiss child abuse allegations as ridiculous,’ Times, 4 March 1991, 2.

59 S.N. ‘They left here unharmed, they’re coming home abused,’ Daily Mirror, 5 April 1991.

60 Early Evening News, 5 April 1991 on ITV, ITV Archive.

61 Express, 6 April 1991.

62 Scotsman, 6 April 1991; Scotland on Sunday, 7 April 1991.

63 Scotland on Sunday, 24 March 1991.

64 Evening News, 28 March 1991.

65 BBC2, Newsnight, 15 March 1991.

66 Daily Record, 6 April 1991; ‘They taught me how to nick cars, mum’ Daily Star, 6 April 1991.

67 Anna Smith, ‘Taught to Nick Cars,’ Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 1.

68 Daily Mirror, 5 April 1991.

69 Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 5.

70 Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 5.

71 David Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), 186.

72 Independent, 1 April 1991.

73 Independent, ‘The Orkney Inquiry: “Reporter” is central figure in emotional saga,’ 28 October 1992.

74 Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 95.

75 Kathryn Maguire-Jack and Kim Hyunil, ‘Rural Differences in Child Maltreatment Reports, Reporters, and Service Responses,’ Children and Youth Services Review 120 (2021): 105792.

Ryo Uchida, ‘“Child Abuse” Occurs in Urban Areas,’ The Journal of Educational Sociology 76 (2005): 129-148.

76 Geof Newiss, Beyond ‘Stranger Danger’: Teaching Children About Staying Safe from Abduction (London: Action Against Abduction, 2014), 10; Craig John Robert Collie and Karen Shalev Greene, ‘Examining Offender, Victim and Offence Characteristics in Cases of Stranger Child Abduction: An Exploratory Comparison of Attempted and Completed Cases Using Publicly Available Data from the UK,’ Aggression and Violent Behaviour 35 (2017): 73.

77 Aimee Wodda, ‘Stranger Danger!,’ Journal of Family Strengths 18, no 1 (2018): 10.

78 David Pimentel, ‘Criminal child neglect and the “free range kid”: Is overprotective parenting the new standard of care?,’ Law Review 2 (2012): 960.

79 Jenny Kitzinger and Paula Skidmore, ‘Playing safe: Media coverage of child sexual abuse prevention strategies,’ Child Abuse Review 4, no. 1 (1995): 48.

80 NSPCC, NSPCC Fact Pack (London: NSPCC, 1992).

81 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.

82 As quoted in: Kitzinger and Skidmore, ‘Playing safe,’ 47–56.

83 Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 130.

84 Camilla Gleeson Mead and Sally Kelty, ‘Violence next Door: The Influence of Friendship with Perpetrators on Responses to Intimate Partner Violence,’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36 (2021): 7–8.

85 Michele Elliot, Bullying: A Practical Guide to Coping for Schools (London: Longman, 1991), 20, 121.

86 Dougal Shaw, ‘Stranger Danger: Still the right message for children?,’ BBC News 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-45813069.

87 Kate Richardson, ‘Dissecting Disbelief: Possible Reasons for the Denial of the Existence of Ritual Abuse in the United Kingdom,’ International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4 (2015): 77.

88 Thomas Markus, Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993), 13.

89 Home Office, ‘Say no to Strangers’ September 1985.

90 ITV, ‘Strangers – Mr Punch,’ 1980.

91 Ibid.

92 Joe Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments (London: Routledge, 2010), 229.

93 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 254.

94 As seen in the portrayal of cars and slogan of this PIF: Central Office of Information, ‘Never go with Strangers,’ Public Information Film, 1971; Once again, the notion of a ‘strange car’ is a vague one that could mislead children if they do not perceive a particular car to be ‘strange’.

95 Home Office, ‘Say no to Strangers,’ Public Information Film, September 1985.

96 Duncan Staff, The Lost Boy (Bantam Press, 2007), 17-18.

97 Robert Church, Well Done, Boys: The Life and Crimes of Robert Black (London: Constable, 1996), 77.

98 ‘New Safety Strap Wins High Praise,’ Newcastle Journal, 22 July 1993, 9.

99 How Safe are Our Children, Kidscape (1993), 1.

100 NSPCC Annual Report 1985.

101 ‘Attempts to steal children reinforce danger message,’ Newcastle Journal (20 June 1990), 7.

102 The Times, Paedophile lists for police, 19 December 1996.

103 Terry Thomas, ‘The Sex Offender Register, Community Notification and Some Reflections,’ in Managing High Risk Sex Offenders in the Community, ed. Hazel Kemshall and Gill McIvor (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2010), 57.

104 Richard Wright, Sex offender laws: failed policies, new directions (New York: Springer, 2014), 50.

105 Ian Burrell, ‘Paedophile lists prompt mob attacks,’ The Independent (24 February 1997), 2.

106 Crane, Child Protection in England, 33.

107 The Guardian, 24 November 1996; The Observer, 15 December 1996; The Times, 11 January 1997; The Daily Mail, 3 February 1997; The Times, 12 October 1997.

108 Press and Journal, 9 June 1997; Torquay Herald Express, 2 September 1997.

109 Bill Hebenton and Terry Thomas, ‘Sexual Offenders in the Community: Reflections on Problems of Law, Community and Risk Management in the USA, England and Wales,’ International Journal of the Sociology of Law 24 (1996): 430.

110 Guardian, 18 October 1997; Evening Argus, 14 October 1997.

111 Hebenton and Thomas, ‘Sexual Offenders in the Community,’ 427; Daily Record, 25 February 1997.

112 Graham Wade, ‘The Video Nasty that Children Ought to See,’ The Guardian,15 Oct 1985, 13.

113 Mama Fatima Singhateh, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Sale, Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse of Children, United Nations Human Rights Council, March 2024, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4036606.

114 Carolyn Jackson and Penny Tinkler, ‘“Ladettes” and “Modern Girls”: ‘Troublesome’ Young Femininities,’ The Sociological Review, 55 (2007): 251.

115 Ibid, 252.

116 Barry Goldson, ‘A Reasoned Case for Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility,’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 48, no. 5 (2009): 514.

117 April Armstrong, ‘Comic Books, Censorship, and Moral Panic,’ Princeton University Archives,https://blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2018/04/comic-books-censorship-and-moral-panic/.

118 Julian Petley, ‘“Are We Insane?”. The “Video Nasty” Moral Panic,’ Recherches Sociologiques Et Anthropologiques 43, no. 1 (2012): 12.

119 Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 5.

120 Petley, ‘Are We Insane?,’ 35.

121 Ibid, 3.

122 Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 57.

123 Stanley Cohen, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics,’ 2002.

124 The Secret Video Show, The Mail, 12 May 1982.

125 Richard Neighbour, ‘The Secret Video Show,’ Mail, 12 May 1982.

126 As far as I have been able to determine.

127 ‘How High Street Horror is Invading the Home,’ Sunday Times, 23 May 1982.

128 ‘This Poison Being Peddled as Home “Entertainment”,’ The Express, 28 May 1982.

129 Ibid.

130 ‘Switch Off the Nasties,’ Daily Mail, 29 June 1983, 7.

131 ‘Watchdog is unleashed on video horror,’ Sunday Times, 30 May 1982.

132 Commons: John Fraser, ‘Amendment Of Section 21 Of 1956 C 74,’ House of Commons (9 July 1982), https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1982-07-09/debates/3f6e23b2-2866-4721-8a94-f69c2157907f/AmendmentOfSection21Of1956C74?highlight=video%20nasty#contribution-f7ea551f-76c9-4dd3-a757-8e3d847a530b; Lords: Viscount Colville of Culross, ‘Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill,’ House of Lords (9 June 1982), https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1982-06-09/debates/16b0a2b1-4c58-4a93-9233-a6d26a0cc504/Cinematograph(Amendment)Bill?highlight=video%20nasty#contribution-f9f0b05d-c2ea-4c4c-948a-9d7cb32de9b1.

133 Andrew Holmes, ‘Let there be blood,’ Guardian, 5 July 2002.

134 ‘Home Affairs. Obscenity legislation (video nasties): meetings with Mary Whitehouse,’ Margaret Thatcher Foundation, accessed 20 April 2021, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/source/prem19/prem19-1792.

135 Richard Stanley, ‘Dying Light: An Obituary for the Great British Horror Movie,’ in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds.) British Horror Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), 184.

136 Ben Thompson, Ban This Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), 335.

137 Christopher White, ‘A Video Nasty Killer,’ Daily Mail, 13 July 1983, 1.

138 Richard Neighbour, ‘Hooking of the Video Junkies,’ Daily Mail, 13 August 1983, 6.

139 Tony Dawe, ‘This Poison Is Being Peddled as Home “Entertainment”,’ Daily Express, 28 May 1982, 7; David Ross and Owen Summers, ‘God Help Our Little Children,’ Daily Express, 22 August 1983, 8.

140 Kay Dickinson, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132.

141 Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth Century America (Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 14.

142 Cohen, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics,’ ix.

143 Ibid, 18.

144 Ibid, 20.

145 Ibid, 38.

146 Ibid, 28.

147 Lorraine Cale and Joe Harris, ‘Exercise Recommendations for Children and Young People,’ Physical Education Review 16, no.2 (1993): 97.

148 ‘Video porn ban urged,’ Telegraph, 16 December 1982; ‘Video fears for the young,’ Guardian, 16 December 1982.

149 Stephen Evans, ‘Thatcher and the Victorians: A Suitable Case for Comparison?,’ History 82, no. 268 (1997): 607.

150 ‘We Must Protect Our Children Now,’ Mail, 25 February 1983.

151 ‘Rape of Our Children’s Minds,’ Mail, 30 June 1983; ‘Sadism for Six Year Olds,’ Mail, 24 November 1983.

152 Norman Abbott, ‘Film Classification,’ Broadcast, 4^th April 1983.

153 ‘Pony Maniac Strikes Again,’ Daily Mirror, 3 January 1984.

154 Graham Bright, ‘‘Interview: Video Nasties,’ Channel 4, 1984.

155 Brian Brown, “Exactly What We Wanted,” The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 80.

156 James Ferman, speech at London Film Festival, December 1975.

157 Lord Chief Justice Lane quoted in ‘We must outlaw the hard porn,’ Mail, 9 November 1983.

158 JSTOR Daily, Would You Let Your Servant Read This Book?, https://daily.jstor.org/would-you-let-your-servant-read-this-book/.

159 Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (Birmingham: University of Birmingham press, 1973).

160 Lynda Lee Potter, ‘Fury Over the Video Rapist,’ Mail, 28 June 1983.

161 News of the World, 13 November 1983.

162 ‘Rape of Our Children’sMinds,’ Mail, 30 June 1983.

163 ‘War on Video Violence,’ Telegraph, 5 September 1982.

164 Lynda Lee Potter, Fury Over the Video Rapist, Mail, 28 June 1983.

165 Ibid.

166 Times, 5 August 1983.

167 Ibid.

168 Petley, ‘Are We Insane?,’ 52.

169 David Miller, ‘AIDS, the Policy Process and Moral Panics,’ in David Miller et al. (eds) The Circuit of Mass Communication: Media Strategies, Representation and Audience Reception in the AIDS Crisis (London: Sage, 1998), 216.

170 BBC Archive, ‘Children Playing PlayStation, 1999,’ https://archive-downloader.bbcrewind.co.uk/remarc/19990101_Childhood_Playstation?decade=1990s&theme=Childhood.

171 As charted in this literature review of the period 1985-2010: Nor Fadzila Aziz and Ismail Said, ‘The Trends and Influential Factors of Children’s Use of Outdoor Environments: A Review,’ Asian Journal of Environment-Behaviour Studies 2 (2017): 204.

172 Ruth Gardner, Developing an effective response to neglect and emotional harm to children (London: NSPCC, 2008), 14; ‘The Impact of Media Use and Screen Time on Children, Adolescents, and Families,’ American College of Pediatricians, accessed 14 April 2020, https://acpeds.org/position-statements/the-impact-of-media-use-and-screen-time-on-children-adolescents-and-families.

173 Danby, Digital Childhoods, 61.

174 Ibid, vii.
2026.02.03
Chapter 1: Changing Childhoods and Changing Britain: Expert Discourse and the Universal Child – The Natural Habitat of Youth?
<- Introduction – Chapter 2 ->
1.1 Introduction

This chapter looks at how expert discourse both in policymaking and academic circles sought to understand and shape children’s lived experiences of place and play in Britain leading up to and during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, bringing different categories of discourse into dialogue. The framework of rules that experts built up attempted to define where children could be and what they could do there, as well as the physical makeup of those places and parental and societal attitudes towards them. Here this chapter will apply du Gay et al.’s analytical framework of the ‘circuit of culture’ which identifies five key aspects to understand when analysing cultural texts: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation.¹ In particular, Mora et al.’s connection of the circuit to the study of material culture allows this chapter to examine experts’ changing approaches to childhood environments as cultural artefacts to be understood through the circuit’s five key aspects.^² This methodology reveals how the changing attitudes of experts in planning and policymaking circles during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s translated into material changes in the character and policing of the environments of British childhoods. Evolving from the ‘child centred’ pedagogy of the post-war era, the late 20^th century saw the continued development of discourses that conceived of ‘a universalist model of childhood vulnerability, characterised around an ageless, classless, genderless “child”’.³ At the same time public discourse (discussed in Chapter Two) was beginning to challenge traditional sources of expertise and forward child-led experiential methods, which sometimes were incorporated and sometimes rejected by planners and policymakers. Many academics during this period – in conversation with policymakers and planners but also apart – were also in tension with these traditional sources, forwarding an alternative vision of childhood that was less safety-conscious and more freedom-conscious.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century in Britain there were three main expert discourses surrounding children and their environments, each concerned with a factor that was perceived to threaten or degrade those environments. As will also become evident in Chapter Two’s assessment of the impact of media discourse, each of these points of concern reflected the moral panics that were coming to surround constructions of childhood. The first threat was the urbanisation of the landscape, more specifically the increasing dominance of cars and roads. The second was fear over dangerous ‘strangers’ on the streets, and also dangerous ‘youth’ from the 1990s onwards. The third was technologies like the TV, games console, mobile phone, and internet. All three subjects captured the attention of experts, but professional opinion was divided. Whilst almost all experts agreed on what these ‘new’ threats to childhood constituted, policymakers and academics were quickly split on proposed solutions. In general, policymakers approached problems from a health-and-safety perspective that led to greater regulation of children’s independence and mobility in response to these threats, as can be seen in the reports, white papers, speeches, and bills produced by the government and civil service during this period. Conversely, academics addressed the same problems from a freedom-and-agency perspective, consistently arguing for less regulation of children and more regulation toward creating child-friendly public spaces whilst also studying the impacts (health and otherwise) of changing policy.

These competing views interacted during a period when public as well as expert attitudes towards the two realms of the ‘outdoors’ and ‘indoors’ were changing. The threats of urbanism and strangers were said to be pushing children away from the outdoors but it also appeared that technology that was pulling them in. The indoor environment was predictable and safe, yet it was also unhealthy and lazy. The outdoors was unpredictable and dangerous, yet also active and exploratory. A set of social stereotypes was perpetuated and accompanied these representations: indoors was for girls, outdoors for boys. Indoors for young, outdoors for old. Furthermore, because these ideas were about the environment, they were contingent not only on a family’s personal wealth and social class, but that of the community they lived in.

Chapters Three and Four of this thesis will look at the attitudes and actions of children themselves, those most directly affected by the policy and cultural outcomes of this expert discourse, in two specific North East communities. The subject that most impacted them, I argue, was the one that most drastically altered the physical environment: the expansion of urban, car-based, landscapes. This had a very significant impact on where it was deemed appropriate for children to be, and experts played a fundamental role in both implementing and condemning these changes.

1.2 The Urbanised Landscape: Constructions of the Urban as Anti-Child

1.2.1 Driven Out; Driven In: The Rise of the Car

Following the post-war baby boom, the volume of vehicles on Britain’s roads increased as dramatically as did its population. The Preston Bypass, Britain’s first motorway, opened in 1958, and in 1963 the Ministry of Transport’s Traffic in Towns report forecast that the car would soon be taken ‘as much for granted as an overcoat’, even though 70% of households did not yet own one.^⁴ Michael Dower’s 1965 ‘Fourth Wave’ report was also influential on experts in the field, tying the idea of a new ‘leisure oriented existence’ for the British citizenry to car-oriented infrastructure.^⁵ The car was seen not only as inevitable but essential to a modern economy, and in the post-war decades rates of car ownership increased to the point that 1981 marked the first time that more British households owned a car than did not.^⁶ Furthermore, the 1980s itself saw a 50% increase in the volume of vehicles on Britain’s roads, more than had been seen in any decade prior, or has occurred in any decade since.^⁷ In 2011, the Department for Transport (DfT) estimated that whereas there were approximately 12 million vehicles in Britain in 1970, in 2010 there were 34 million, the 1980s being the decade that provided the largest increase.^⁸

In government, this expansion was embraced with a pro-road agenda to serve what Margaret Thatcher called ‘the great car economy’.^⁹ The 1989 Roads for Prosperity white paper, and lesser-known follow-up Trunk Roads, England into the 1990s detailed the plan to embark upon what the government touted as ‘the biggest road-building programme since the Romans’ based upon a predicted 142% increase in traffic by 2025.^¹⁰ The 500 road schemes proposed were to cost £23bn, and as a result of the government’s enthusiasm and funding, 24,000 miles of new road was built between 1985-1995.^¹¹ However, during the 1990s it became increasingly clear that the 142% increase prediction that the Roads for Prosperity programme was built upon was wildly overestimated, the real figure re-estimated to be closer to just 40%, and as such John Major’s Conservative government cut spending on roads significantly during its last years in power.^¹² Furthermore, the road-building agenda had sparked a significant number of protest groups around the country against works in their local areas, alongside national protest organisations like Alarm UK!, formed in 1991 in direct response to Roads for Prosperity.^¹³ The construction of the M3 through Twyford Down in 1992 catalysed popular support for protests against road building, as the site had been the ‘most protected landscape in southern England’ before the incident, having contained two Sites of Special Scientific Interest, two scheduled ancient monuments, seven rare species, and a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.^¹⁴ The European Union issued a complaint and several organisations protested at the site including Friends of the Earth, Alarm UK!, EarthFirst! and the Dongas Tribe, a group of ‘new age’ travellers local to the area, who garnered public support in particular after featuring on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme.^¹⁵ Further road projects that received significant opposition were Newbury road (1994), M77 Glasgow (1994), and the M11 link-road (1995); in the North-East, Newcastle saw one of the earliest protests when the Flowerpot Tribe occupied trees in Jesmond Dene in 1993 to protest the construction of the Cradlewell Bypass.^¹⁶

Due to this local and national protest, and to the forecasted explosion in traffic failing to materialise, by 1996 most of the road schemes had been cut. After coming to power in 1997 Labour cut down further, from an initial 500 schemes to 37, with John Prescott promising ‘many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car’.^¹⁷ Rates of increase in car ownership and traffic slowed, and between 1996 and 2006 the road network expanded in total by just 1.6%.^¹⁸ However, whilst being more gradual, increases over the 1990s and 2000s still led to the point where 2006 was the first year that more households owned 2 cars than none, and indeed Labour embarked on its own programme of road construction following its 2000 10-year transport plan, with £59bn earmarked for new roads.^¹⁹ In Chapters Three and Four, we will see how this car-oriented governance impacted childhoods even in working class North East neighbourhoods where rates of car ownership fell far below the national average (whereas most British households owned a car by 1981, Newcastle and Gateshead only reached this level in the mid-2000s).^²⁰

Figure I. A DfT graph estimating the rise of traffic in Britain over 70 years, 2019.^²¹

The motorisation of the British landscape, driven by the policies of planners and experts in government, saw parents grow more wary of letting their children out to play or walk to school or other activities. The term ‘helicopter parent’ had been coined in 1969, but it became commonplace in Britain and America in the late 1980s as more and more parents ferried their children by car.^²² As will be explored later in this chapter, much was made of this rise in the driven-child by academics across the period such as with Mead’s ‘Neighbourhoods and human needs’ (1984), Bartlett’s Cities for Children (1999), and Frost’s A History of Children’s Play (2010).^²³ These contributions developed existing anxieties about road safety, particularly in working-class neighbourhoods which more often had busy roads running through them and relatively little access to alternative outdoor spaces such as parks.^²⁴ These developments raised serious concerns about the health and safety of children, and expert discourse began to focus on what could be done to keep children safe. Experts presented a range of views, but generally opinion fell into two camps: The first view, which was the predominant concern expressed by both Conservative and Labour governments, was to accept cars as necessary and instead focus on what children and parents could do to protect themselves from road injury. The second view, promoted by the freedom-and-agency school of academic commentators such as Hillman and Adams (and many others who wrote for the Children’s Environments journal) was that cars were not so necessary, and that work should be undertaken to reduce traffic to make streets safer for children.^²⁵

The first view had been held by governments since the 1960s and expressed itself most publicly through road safety advertising campaigns. These campaigns were usually aimed at children or parents, and commonly featured children as road victims: one of the earliest road Public Information Films (PIFs) was Batman’s Kerb Drill in 1963.^²⁶ The 1980 Mark PIF unequivocally told parents to ‘Make sure the under fives stay inside’ and 1987’s Funeral Blues used footage of a real funeral, showing a class of children mourning their dead friend.^²⁷ Many campaigns also centred on the danger caused by drink-driving, such as 1983’s Fancy a Jar? Forget the Car and 1995’s One More, Dave. These PIFs placed the onus on drivers to be responsible on the roads rather than parents or children, but by focussing on alcohol they ignored the 75-90% of road fatalities that did not involve drink drivers in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s.^²⁸ More to the point, these films clearly evidence that their creators did not consider road infrastructure itself to be an issue, only the people using it. The 1990s Kathy Can’t Sleep and 2000s Hedgehog Family PIFs – among many others – condemned bad drivers, but still framed the dangers of the road as inherent and thus emphasised the responsibility of the pedestrian to be safe.^²⁹ Alongside improvements to the safety features of cars this messaging was effective as child injuries and deaths on roads did decrease during this period despite increased road traffic. Indeed, in the long run the death rate of child-per-vehicle in Britain fell consistently from 1922 to 1992 by over 98%, from c.80 deaths per 100,000 vehicles to c.2.^³⁰ In 2000 THINK! was established as a specific government road-safety campaign, and they reported in 2010 that they had reduced road deaths in the decade by a further 46%.^³¹ This did not mean the roads were environmentally safer, of course – although some residential areas did have 20mph speed limits introduced from 1991 onwards – it meant that expectations and behaviours surrounding roads had changed with the rise of a more safety conscious mindset.^³²

The expansion of the road network and the emphasis placed on pedestrian responsibility logically led policymakers and urban planners during the 1980s to the idea of segregating road and footpath networks. If cars and pedestrians never came into contact, both would be safer. Since the beginning of the century the car had already been slowly changing what people saw the ‘street’ as being for, as children’s play came to be understood as being in conflict with its function as a transport corridor.^³³ From the 1960s onwards, guard rails and ‘cattle pen’ road islands became popular in road design as they allowed speed limits to be raised whilst ostensibly keeping pedestrians safe.^³⁴ However as Ishaque and Noland point out, this not only cut people off from using streets, but there is also ‘no conclusive research evidence’ on whether guard rails made pedestrians safer overall.³⁵ This is because they irritated people into crossing at unmarked crossing points, allowed for increased speed limits, and gave drivers a false sense of separation, since they were generally not strong enough to stop a speeding car in the event of a collision.^³⁶ The remnants of Newcastle council’s plans in the 1960s and 1970s to fully separate people and roads via a system of skywalks can still be seen today, an emblematic relic of a vision that sought to separate people from the streets, and demonstrative of the fact that this design ethos was present in both national Conservative and Labour governments and North East Labour councils.^³⁷ While skywalks fell out of fashion in the 1980s, the principle of car-people traffic segregation continued into the 1990s and 2000s. The DfT’s 1995 Design of Pedestrian Crossings paper recommended greater use of guard railings and traffic islands to local councils, along with ‘any other means of deterring pedestrians to prevent indiscriminate crossing of the carriageway’.^³⁸ Segregated networks affected children in an especially acute way, because they allowed the conversion of streets (places of mixed-use) into roads (used only for the purpose of transport), which impacted those most profoundly who had used the street most often as a destination rather than a thoroughfare. It is a much riskier proposition to play football on a road, or skywalk, than a street.

Figure II. One of Newcastle’s last skywalks curving past Manors car park.^³⁹

Throughout the second half of the 20^th century children had been losing ground to cars, but at the turn of the millennium there was an effort to reclaim the street as a pedestrian space with the introduction of the ‘Home Zone’ scheme. In part, home zones were based on Dutch ‘Living Street’ schemes, but they were also a resurrection of the 1938 Street Playgrounds Act which had given local authorities the power to close streets ‘to enable them to be used as playgrounds for children’.⁴⁰ Indeed, playground streets had never technically been abolished, but from the mid-1960s onward they simply started disappearing as councils either removed or stopped enforcing Play Street Orders as cars proliferated.^⁴¹ The DfT described home zones on their website in 2005 as having ‘children in mind’ and being ‘places for people, not just for traffic’.^⁴² The DfT’s 2001 Home Zone Design Handbook also specifically framed the programme as endeavouring to create ‘streets where children can play safely’.^⁴³ Public and local government support for the schemes was strong, so much so that the government launched the £30 million programme whilst the pilot was still ongoing, styling it as a ‘challenge’ where local authorities competed for funding, and ultimately sixty-one projects were undertaken.^⁴⁴ The academic response at the time was unimpressed however, complaining that the schemes were few in number and limited in scope. As Gill argued, ‘few schemes have succeeded in creating spaces between houses that look as if they are genuinely designed for social rather than car use’.^⁴⁵

Ultimately the weight of expert opinion behind policymaking and urban planning in the 2000s had shifted little from the 1980s design principles that had made vehicles a priority and pedestrian protections a lesser one. In comparison to Labour’s investment of £16.2bn over 10-years in new road construction under the 2000 Strategic Road Network Scheme, the one-off £30m Home Zone Scheme was more of a trial rather than a genuine attempt to reconfigure the character of the British road network.^⁴⁶ In its second term Labour invested significantly more into road projects than public transport and in 2002 quietly shelved its target of cutting congestion by 2010.⁴⁷ Whilst New Labour had promised a move away from Conservative car-oriented transport policy – and did initially make moves to do so – over time its approach ‘reverted to the mean’, largely due to the scale of the task and Blair himself having ‘little interest in transport’.⁴⁸

The Department of the Environment (DoE) stated in its 1990 This Common Inheritance paper on the future of British land management that ‘The Government welcomes the continuing widening of car ownership as an important aspect of personal freedom and choice’. By doing so they failed to recognise that the freedom for drivers limited the freedom of non-drivers, children especially.^⁴⁹ As Hillman and Adams reported at the publishing of This Common Inheritance in 1990, their data showed that ‘only 9%’ of 7-8 year-old children were allowed to go to school on their own, whereas 19 years earlier in 1971 this figure had been 80%.^⁵⁰ Hillman and Adams lamented these ‘restrictions on independent mobility’, framing the issue around parental restrictions, but this trend was as much a direct consequence of government policy as parenting.^⁵¹ The DfT’s 1990 Children and Roads: A Safer Way plan concluded with the intention to ‘educate parents so that they more fully understand the risks involved and therefore take responsibility for the safety of their children’, continued the characterisation of the issue of road danger around ignorance.^⁵² Children and Roads notably also involved a plan towards lowering speed limits around schools and residential areas, however in implementation most of the scheme’s efforts were spent on encouraging parents to keep their children off the streets, increasing road safety training in schools, and campaigning against drink-driving. The ‘main elements’ of the scheme, as described by minister Christopher Chope, were ‘a television commercial… designed to bring home to parents and to motorists the scale of the problem and 13 million leaflets for parents and drivers giving advice on what they can do to ensure that children are safe on our roads’.^⁵³ A similar stance was adopted towards cyclists who, it was suggested, should wear dayglo vests when riding as ‘conspicuity is vital for any cyclist who is concerned about his or her safety’.^⁵⁴ That roads were for cars first and foremost was an assumption that went practically unquestioned, and as cars were so dangerous to children, children needed to kept away from them.

1.2.2 Places without Play? Making Space for the ‘Normal’ Children

Children’s physical safety was not the only reason successive governments took a restrictive approach regulating childhood mobility. The practice had a history of being partly an attempt to protect children’s moral health too. Early attempts to remove children from the streets in the 1900s were undertaken in the name of what become known as the ‘child saving movement’. The movement, which first emerged in the US, was initially based around the creation of a juvenile court system but also encompassed more general efforts to combat ‘juvenile delinquency’, more so than stopping kids being run under the wheels of motor cars.^⁵⁵ The development of playgrounds as specific off-street play spaces was closely linked with this movement, which whilst having no specific campaign behind it was mostly centred around Britain’s Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs) that was established as a national charity in 1889.^⁵⁶ The very first such playgrounds in the world were opened in Manchester in 1859, and many more opened in the years afterwards as part of the shift pushing British youth towards more guarded forms of play.^⁵⁷ Octavia Hill, one of the three founders of the National Trust and campaigner for the protection of green spaces like Hampstead Heath, pioneered this type of campaigning in her concern for the poor of London. The playgrounds she created, however, did not provide an equitable alternative to street play. They charged a fee for entry, were supervised by adults, were walled off from the rest of the neighbourhood and were not open all the time. It is, perhaps, little wonder then, that they were often vandalised by local children.^⁵⁸ Because the play space provided was of a single, universal type, it excluded all the children who did not fit the normative idea of ‘the child’ who would be using it, most evidently the children whose families could not pay to access it.

As Anthony Platt argues in Child Savers, the child-saving movement was largely led by parents of upper and middle-class background and largely directed at working-class parents’ children. Whilst intentions may have been noble and the movement was a force for good in many young people’s lives, at its core it was an imposition of a method of social control on many working-class people: people who may have gained a play park but had lost the streets to the vehicles of the middle and upper classes.^⁵⁹ In 2009 when Platt revisited his 1977 edition of Child Savers, his main point of revision was to emphasise the ‘staying power’ of the 19^th century idea of ‘hard-core biological determinism’ in planning and policymaking expert circles.^⁶⁰ By this he meant that, subconsciously or otherwise, the approach to the management of working-class children’s environments in middle and upper class expert circles in the 21^st century still followed a ‘social Darwinist ideology’ that sought to reform children by removing them from the streets which, by being the domain of the working class, would corrupt them.^⁶¹

The child-saving approach waned in the 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1950s and 1960s it took hold again in a changed form known as ‘child centred’ pedagogy.^⁶² In theory child centredness meant talking to children and basing childcare and education around their needs, but as Tisdall argues in A Progressive Education? the underlying logic of this philosophy was that children were ‘fundamentally separate from adults, distinguished by their developmental immaturity’.^⁶³ Everything was to be done for children because children themselves could not be trusted to do things for themselves, in the same vein as the child-saving movement did not trust children to play on the street by themselves. Whilst child-centred pedagogy evolved to be ever more responsive to children throughout this period it never conceded any control to children, only contingent consultation.^⁶⁴ Evidence of this approach in the 1980s can be seen in safety legislation introduced to regulate playground equipment such as the sharpness of edges and the size of gaps between components whilst informal unregulated places of play such as former bombsites and scrublands were increasingly subject to redevelopment, as catalogued by academic works at the time like Robin Moore’s Childhood’s Domain.^⁶⁵ Moore pointed out that the establishment of the Association for Children’s Play and Recreation (ACPR) in 1983, a charity tied to the National Playing Fields Association with the aim of providing play spaces such as adventure playgrounds, was both a response to decreasing outdoor play and a means by which to control it, because recent developments had led Britain to a point where ‘children’s play must be increasingly regarded as a policy imperative’.^⁶⁶

The aim of the ACPR was to provide places for children to play, and this meant getting them off the road. Mirroring closely early 20^th-century ideals, increasingly children playing games in the street were seen as a nuisance or menace, as they might get in the way of moving vehicles, or damage a parked one, as evidenced in the slow but steady un-designation of Play Streets across Britain during this period.^⁶⁷ Teenagers especially were the target for accusations of ‘hanging around’ on streets, although they were also unwelcome on playgrounds, hence the propensity of some to find places abandoned or cut-off to be in, where they could ‘look out and not be seen’, as Patsy Owens’ 1988 interviews documented.^⁶⁸ This fear of the child will be explored in the next section of this chapter, but the point here is that experts in policymaking and planning – by encouraging children to keep out of the street – were following a tradition that cast independent outdoor street play as both physically and morally dangerous.

This aspect of the universalised approach to childhood environments is especially pertinent to the context of the North East in the 1980s and onwards, as more and more of the region’s characteristic urban play space – the back-lane – became less attractive or off-limits to children, with relatively little land provided as replacement in the form of playgrounds. This was further explained by parallel developments in 1980s British society which saw an increasing emphasis on the importance of individual identity and agency, causing communal spaces such as parks to fall out of favour with parents as play areas compared to individualised spaces such as private gardens and living rooms.^⁶⁹ The government’s encouragement of the creation and commercialisation of semi-public-semi-private areas such as malls and town centres led to a situation where even semi-public, car-free places were unfriendly to the idea of young people ‘hanging around’, pushing children to the fringes. This created a new role for the police in ‘protecting the interests of private business and regulating the activities of the “non-consumer”’.^⁷⁰ In 1989, Nikolas Rose characterised recent developments as a pervasive underlying ‘process of bureaucratisation’.^⁷¹ Rob White worried that this situation ‘frequently leads to conflict between the police and teenagers over the use of public spaces’.⁷² Once again, working-class children, less likely to have access to significant private outdoor space and more likely to be in commercial areas as a ‘non-consumer’, were more often impacted by this change in the policing of environments than their wealthier contemporaries.

Experts in the fields of education and urban planning did not always support this trend, but mostly accepted it as unassailable and instead spent energies on discussing how the ‘playground of tomorrow’ could be made into a safe, fun, and integral part of modern Britain.^⁷³ The consequences of focussing on playgrounds over broader play-friendly civic spaces were not lost on designers however, who foresaw that ‘such a setting would not make a good play environment because it would lack many of those elements necessary for meaningful play: variety, complexity, challenge, flexibility, adaptability, etc.’ and that children ‘want to be where it’s at, to see what is going on, to engage with the world beyond’.^⁷⁴ Paul Wilkinson even noted that contemporary playgrounds ‘are not being heavily used because children do not like them; simply put they are neither fun nor challenging. Incidentally, this also gives them the appearance of being safe: few accidents are reported because few children use them’.^⁷⁵ However in the face of a lack of funding and political will, the prospect of changing the entire environment rather than creating better refuges from it – making the world safe for play rather than making a world safe for play – seemed an impossible task and was thus not seriously considered by many.^⁷⁶

However, less constrained by practicalities and more concerned with possibilities, the freedom-and-agency school of academic commentators (prominent voices like Sheridan Bartlett, Ulrich Beck, Louise Chawla, Mayer Hillman, and Robin Moore) took a very different view, even if ultimately – as we shall see – it was the case that the shift away from street play could not be easily reversed. Generally, they argued that it was not the responsibility of individual children and parents to act safely, but the communities they live in to be safe for them. Criticism of the individualist approach to childcare was sharpened by opposition to Thatcherite ideologies, which were associated with social atomisation and marketisation. This critique is commonly remembered through the issue of the free school milk furore, but the 1980 Education Act liberalised the school services more generally, as did the 1986 Social Security Act, 1988 Local Government Act, and 1988 Education Reform Act.^⁷⁷ Although most associated with Thatcher, New Labour governments also adopted the ‘choice agenda’, as evident with the creation of Academies under the Learning and Skills Act 2000. Tony Blair famously sent his own son to a school that had opted out of local government control under Thatcher’s 1988 act, demonstrating his administration’s endorsement of a marketised, individualised approach to childcare.^⁷⁸

The argument that academic proponents of the freedom-and-agency school put up against the prevailing neoliberal perspective was that the personal-choice-and-responsibility approach to childcare was ultimately limiting children’s choices about where they could be. As a first example, Mayer Hillman et al.’s 1990 One False Move took a road safety poster to be exemplary of their issue with the government narrative:

Figure III. A government road safety poster c.1980s/1990s.^⁷⁹

Hillman et al. were concerned that young people’s freedom of mobility was being eroded, finding that whereas in the 1970s ‘nearly all’ British 9-year-olds were allowed to cross the street independently, now in the 1990s only half were.^⁸⁰ They contested the DfT’s claim in Children and Roads as part of the 1990 Safety on the Move campaignthat ‘Over the last quarter of a century, Britain’s roads have become much safer’ and words of the Association of Chief Police Officers which stated that Britain was ‘the safest country… in Europe’ regarding its roads.^⁸¹ Accidents and deaths may be down, Hillman et al. argued, but this did not mean the roads were safer; they contended the statistics indicated that the roads were considered more dangerous than ever, and thus avoided.^⁸² Exceptionally for the time, One False Move attributed reduced rates of child road accidents to a loss of childhood freedoms, saying that ‘the accident statistics are reconciled by the loss of children’s freedom… it is the response to [the] danger, by both children and their parents, that has contained the road accident death rate’.^⁸³

The founding of the Children’s Environments Quarterly journal in 1984 manifested the growth of academic interest in these issues. Based in the US, but with many British and international contributors, the journal was designed to be an interdisciplinary ‘low-cost, highly graphic alternative to more conventional journals, without the detached formality that many were finding troubling in “serious” academic publications’.^⁸⁴ Despite being told the idea was not economically viable by publishers, interest was strong enough to keep the journal running, and it served as a collector of academic work that challenged urban design trends of the day.^⁸⁵ The transatlantic nature of the journal reflected a transatlantic interest in children’s environments, with American academics sharing many of the same concerns as British ones. Indeed, then as now, British academics in this field relied upon and were entangled with work coming out of the US. For example the essay ‘Neighbourhoods and Human Needs’in the opening volume of the journal came from the influential American anthropologist Margaret Mead, but was obviously also applicable to the British context:

When children move into a newly built housing estate that is inadequately protected from automobiles, parents may be so frightened… that they give the children no freedom of movement at all.^⁸⁶

Those writing for the Children’s Environments journal turned the scope against experts in positions of power, questioning their methods and philosophies. Colin Ward’s popular 1978 text on urbanism The Child in the City described the myriad ways ‘a significant proportion of the city’s children have come to be at war with their environment’, and found city planners to hold simplistic notions of children characterized by a concept of a ‘universal child’ which excluded lower-income, non-white, and female childhoods that typically had less access to the cars and technologies that facilitated their vision of late 20^th century life.^⁸⁷ Ward’s text would go on to influence many others, including Claire Freeman’s 1995 Planning and Play, which examined British planning literature of the period and lamented the ‘lack of recognition given to children’s needs’ as ‘clearly evident in the almost total omission of any discussion of children in mainstream planning literature’.^⁸⁸ In a later study (2005), Freeman questioned urban planners on their methods and found that children were considered only in the planning of ‘recreation spaces’, and ignored in the planning of streets, houses, shops, leisure facilities, and infrastructure.^⁸⁹ This is demonstrative of the fact that whilst many scholars had been denouncing planning methods for the past 3 decades, little had changed in response to their calls for action.

Whilst the general argumentative thrust of the freedom-and-agency school of academic work did not much change across these decades, the methods of argument did. In the 1970s, academic literature of this type tended to focus specifically on the benefits the natural world had on children with psychological differences, rather than children more generally. Kaplan’s 1977 Patterns of Environmental Preference found that suburban-child participants with diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) reported beneficial outcomes on their mental health up to several years after being sent on an extended nature-camp expedition.^⁹⁰ Similarly Behar and Stevens’ 1978 Wilderness Camping placed American city children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) on a ‘residential treatment programme’ centred around outdoor activities, and found that the majority of their subjects demonstrated ‘improved interpersonal skills and school performance’ after the activity.^⁹¹ During the 1980s and 1990s, this approach began to change so that it was most common for studies to consider children in general as being under threat from reduced access to outdoor space, particularly natural outdoor space, such as with Boyden and Holden’s 1991 Children of the Cities.^⁹² Media in both Britain and the US picked up on this transatlantic concern during the 1980s and 1990s and indeed was ahead of experts in expressing alarm about the role new technologies were playing in children’s lives – as will be explored in Chapter Two. A 1997 article in Time claimed that a chronic lack of play and physical touch during childhood due to too much time spent indoors could result in developing a brain ‘20 percent to 30 percent smaller than normal’, which whilst being wrong, demonstrates the acute fears of the period, and that academics were far from alone in their concerns.^⁹³

Judy Wajcman’s 1991 Feminism Confronts Technology is exemplary of the parallel growing academic interest in past struggles over urban environments. Wajcman used an assessment of the ‘play streets’ movement of the 20^th century as a lens through which to view contemporary debates over similar issues, the movement being an example of working-class people, predominantly women, creating an alternative vision of how childhood environments could be managed. Beginning in the 1930s, Play Streets sought to stop the frequency with which middle-class drivers, or delivery drivers working for business-class bosses, were running over working-class children.^⁹⁴ Wacjman argued that increased traffic was a major factor in the decline of working-class street sociability because adults were no longer required to be out on the streets to watch over their and others’ children.^⁹⁵ As formerly unassuming activities such as playing football or tag became acts of delinquency or hooliganism, working-class people – women and children in particular – were ‘literally left stranded in… cities designed around the motor car’.^⁹⁶ Katrina Navickas describes this as a lost form of ‘commoning’ (a process that generates relationships) in a forthcoming book.⁹⁷ Wacjman framed play streets as a form of counter-cultural resistance, one that ‘started from the assumption that city children had the right to play in the streets where they lived, and that cars, not children, were the main problem’.^⁹⁸ Indeed, it was common for academics to invoke a form of ‘nostalgic progressivism’ that used memories of the past to argue for a radical shift in policy. Conversely, government experts offered a kind of ‘futurist conservatism’.

Although practical experts and theoretical and historical experts had their differences over urban design, both tended to overlook dangers that children faced in environments aside from the street. For example, the AA motoring trust’s 2003 report Accidents and Children found that the deaths of children as passengers in cars was considerable and overlooked; for young children in particular the risk of being killed in a car was greater than for being hit by one.^⁹⁹ There was no wide debate about whether children should or should not be driven. The National Children’s Bureau also found that in the 2000s three times as many children were taken to hospital each year for falling out of bed than from falling out of trees.^¹⁰⁰ The National Trust’s 2012 Natural Childhood report found that during the 2000s one million children aged 14 or under went into A&E departments from home injuries: ‘30,000 with symptoms of poisoning, mostly from domestic cleaning products, and 50,000 with burns or scalds’.^¹⁰¹ Additionally, it found that 500,000 infants and toddlers each year were injured in the home, 35,000 from falling down stairs, and that almost half of all fatal accidents to children were caused by house fires.^¹⁰² In terms of sheer numbers, this meant that the home for a child was by far the most dangerous place to be. While cars had made the streets unsafe, the home was not the haven it was perceived to be, and the dangers it posed were, in general, far more serious than the injuries a child could sustain from outdoor play. On a much bigger scale, in relative terms the dangers of cars, strangers, and natural spaces were nowhere near as important in determining children’s lifespans as those of poverty and inequality between children.^¹⁰³ All this to say that the danger of the outdoors was real, but it was also specifically focussed on as a danger to children in a way that the dangers of being in the home or being a car passenger were not.

The debate between the health-and-safety approach of policymakers and planners and the freedom-and-agency approach of many academics defined much of how the physical environments that children inhabited came to change and be understood across these decades, especially in response to the rapid growth in car ownership and campaigns to take children off the streets. This debate was not an equitable one, however. The work of Chawla and others did not materialise in any extensive physical changes to the landscape; New Labour’s experimental and limited home zone scheme being the largest attempt to rebalance streetscapes.¹⁰⁴The process of further restrictions being placed on children’s mobility continued, with the burden falling especially on those that did not fit the mould of the universal child. Thus a health-and-safety approach brought reductions in the spaces available to children who could not easily access a park, garden, sports centre, National Trust property, or some other outdoor space.

1.3 Safeguarding, Crime, and Children: Challenging Traditional Expertise

Girls in particular were said to be threatened by one of the most enduring dangers of late-20^th and early 21^st Britain; not the motor car but ‘The Stranger’, an ideathat captured the public imagination. Promoted by parents, newspapers, charities, and indeed experts in government, a national ‘stranger-danger’ discourse arose which asked: ‘what can be done to protect our children?’. This section will explore the impact of this popular and media discourse on experts, and how – once again – policymakers and academics differed in their response to the rise of this new threat, whilst also grappling with a movement that challenged their traditional authority. I will also explain how expert discourse that conceived of child safeguarding as a societal issue rather than individual one both clashed with the dominant individualist culture of the period and perpetuated solutions based on the idea of a universal child. Safeguarding solutions, whilst partially valid, inevitably led to the undervaluing of issues with children who did not fit the normative model.

The strangerprovoked a response in the public that the motor car did not, even though the latter was evidently more deadly. Why? First, strangers posed an intentional threat rather than accidental, making the danger more malicious. Second, the inherent humanness of stranger-danger made it feel more personal and immediately understandable as compared to the more complex system of factors that constituted car danger. Finally, the unknowability of the strangergave the idea power. Its theoretical, semi-fictional quality gave it an air of mystery so often used in fiction to create atmospheres of anxiety, suspense, or horror – feeding people’s fears of a threat that they knew was out there but could not see. Indeed, whilst abductions, abuses, and murders by strangers did pose a threat to children, the specific idea of the stranger that emerged during this period arose largely on the back of what Jennifer Crane calls a ‘sensationalist’ media narrative that began with the Moors murders in 1966 and entered its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s.^¹⁰⁵ The construction of the idea of strangers during this period – which contributed to parents being more restrictive over their children’s mobility – overstated the dangers and underplayed the benefits of allowing children independent outdoor play.^¹⁰⁶ Additionally, particularly following James Bulger’s murder in 1993, a second construction arose in public, media, and expert discourse which argued children themselves (teenagers especially) were something to be fearful of. Like the idea of ‘The Stranger’, the idea of ‘The Youth’was representative of a broad fear: that the younger generation had lost discipline, leading them to become antisocial and dangerous menaces to society. As with cars, experts were divided into two camps on the issue. In general government experts of the health-and-safety school endorsed stricter control of children’s independent mobility to protect them from strangers and to protect strangers from them. Meanwhile, academics of the freedom-and-agency school supported less control over children’s mobility. For example, in 1992 historian Philip Jenkins called the recent focus on stranger-danger a baseless effort to ‘induce fear and moral panic’ from politicians and the press.^¹⁰⁷

The stranger narrative of the 1980s had its roots in the high-profile reporting of child abuse (also called child maltreatment) cases from 1960s onwards, most notably the 1966 Moors murders of five children. The fact that one of those convicted in that case, Myra Hindley, was a woman gave it particular traction in the press, with Hindley earning the tagline ‘the most evil woman in Britain’.^¹⁰⁸ Later investigations into possible other victims and Myra’s repeated appeals for release from prison in subsequent years kept the case alive in public consciousness. The nature of the media coverage into the Moors murders and subsequent similar cases was twofold. First, its aim was to covey the horror of the story to the public and condemn the criminals, but simultaneously it was to critique the organisations which had failed to prevent the crimes occurring. Indeed, traditional experts such as social workers, police, doctors, psychiatrists, government officials, and teachers were often heavily criticised in the press for their failures in cases of child abuse and murder, particularly if the perpetrator was related to the child.^¹⁰⁹

In the infamous 1973 case of Maria Colwell, where the seven-year-old was abused and murdered by her stepfather, much of the reporting, and the ‘primary focus’ of the subsequent expert-led public inquiry, was into the failings leading up to Maria’s death of institutions such as social services, the NSPCC, and the health service.^¹¹⁰ Criticisms centred on poor communication between services, a general lack of competence, and institutional intransigence. Maria Colwell was by no means a one-off; the media responded analogously throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to similar cases including a spate of three in 1984: the murders of Jasmine Beckford, Tyra Henry, and Heidi Koseda, all young girls killed by their father or stepfather. Black children and girls especially were at disproportionate risk of such a danger, including Jasmine, Tyra, and, 16 years later, Victoria Climbié, whose death kickstarted several pieces of child-protection legislation under Tony Blair. In the report into the case of Tyra Henry, white social workers were found to have failed to intervene despite being aware of domestic abuse because they ‘lacked the confidence to challenge the family because they were black’.^¹¹¹ Once again, the experts had failed, and media coverage encouraged the public to take notice.^¹¹² Stephen Bubb, the leader of Lambeth Council where Tyra had lived, called for an end to a ‘trial in the press of the social workers’.^¹¹³ Margaret Thatcher’s government responded to the 1984 cases with new guidelines for social workers on how to handle child abuse cases and by passing the 1984 Child Abduction Act, which more explicitly recognised the rights of the child than the old 1861 Offences Against a Person Act, created separate categories of crime for ‘Abduction by a Parent’ and ‘Abduction by Other Persons’.^¹¹⁴

In the Noth East the Cleveland scandal of 1987/1988, which a local MP called ‘the greatest child abuse crisis that Britian has ever faced’ also spawned a national media storm surrounding social workers.¹¹⁵ 121 children were taken away from their parents in the borough under accusations of sexual abuse, only for 94 to be returned after being determined to have been ‘incorrectly diagnosed’.¹¹⁶ Some scholars have since argued that many of the original diagnoses were in fact correct, and that government officials suppressed evidence supporting the diagnoses because acknowledging the scale of abuse would have required significant new resources.¹¹⁷ Either way at the time and in popular memory the Cleveland case became a totemic example of expert overreach, and is popularly credited with part-inspiring the 1989 Children Act,which shifted the focus of responsibility for children away from the state and towards individual families.¹¹⁸

By the mid-to-late 1980s, following two decades of increasingly publicised cases of child abuse, the issue of sexual abuse in particular entered expert discourse as a significant political talking point and agenda. Moreover, the growing recognition of the idea of ‘Battered Child Syndrome’ amongst medical professionals after 1962, following an article of the same name in the Journal of the American Medical Association, gave legitimacy among experts to the problems of child protection and abuse.^¹¹⁹ The overall conception of abuse was moving away from being understood as a medico-social problem of mental or physical health and toward a socio-legal problem with multitudinous societal influences and effects. This, together with the increased interest from the public and media in cases of child abuse, represented an experiential and emotional turn in the study of child abuse; that being a greater value placed on ‘normal’ people’s views over the views of experts. The Childline charity, established in 1986, was founded on this principle. Esther Rantzen, Childline’s founder, described the organisation’s concept of child abuse as ‘incorporating sexual abuse, but moving beyond it to encompass physical and emotional abuse, and neglect’, something she criticised experts of the period for ignoring.^¹²⁰ Thus, experts found themselves asking: how are we to address this ‘new’ Battered Child condition, for which our traditional methods are inadequate?

The direction of travel of expert analysis on this issue from the 1970s through into the 1990s involved turning away from thinking about child protection in the (now old-fashioned) paternalistic sense, wherein those in authority assumed they knew what was best for children. Instead, Tisdall explains, it became accepted amongst theorists that parents or even children themselves could be treated as sources of expertise on such issues, and this widened the discursive space surrounding what forces in society contributed to environments in which cases of abuse occurred, and who was best-placed to understand those forces.^¹²¹ When child abuse had been seen as primarily a medical issue in the first half of the 20^th century, assessment of it had been taken at the level of the individual, asking: ‘what is wrong with this person?’, when considering either the abused or the abusers. Now child abuse was understood as a social issue with medical consequences, the question had become ‘what is wrong with society?’. The older individualistic medical approach was deeply flawed in its inability to address patterns and trends of abuse, but the social approach also had its problems. As Crane argues, the impact of this new expert discourse was to bring about the emergence of ‘a universalist model of childhood vulnerability, characterised around an ageless, classless, genderless “child”’.^¹²²

This was connected to the ‘child-centred’ pedagogy of the era which, as discussed in the Urban Landscapes section, was an approach to teaching and parenting that ostensibly put children at the centre of its philosophy, but was mostly interested in fitting ‘incomplete and incapable’ young people into a particular universal societal mould.^¹²³ Child-centredness influenced many aspects of children’s lives from the way school buildings were designed to the way social services operated, because, as Roy Kozlovsky explains, the idea of catering to ‘child’ as supposed to ‘children’ led to certain groups being excluded from supposedly inclusive environments.^¹²⁴ For children with disabilities, for example, the poor accessibility of school buildings built during the 1970s and 1980s mirrored the ill-provision of their education, which by treating all children as one actually furthered certain inequalities between them.^¹²⁵ Furthermore, because the child-centred approach to child protection was far more attentive to identifying and addressing threats to children from outside the universal model rather than inside, it disproportionately focussed on the dangers of strangers. People known to children – parents, teachers, and peers – were inside the model, and so even though the majority of child maltreatment cases (sexual abuse cases especially) were and are perpetrated by people already known to the child, considerably less emphasis was placed on the dangers those ‘internal’ threats posed.^¹²⁶ Waters highlights how this institutional suspicion of the unfamiliar also fed into other societal prejudices, notably that of race.¹²⁷

Policymakers under Thatcher governments endorsed this universalised ideal of childhood as evidenced in the acts they introduced to centralise control over children’s lives at home and school. There were obvious efforts such as the imposed ‘prohibition on promoting homosexuality’ placed on schools and local authorities under the Local Government Act 1988, but there were also a number of acts that enforced family uniformity by more indirect means. To the Thatcher administrations of the 1980s, home and family meant – even symbolised – safety and normality, and the way they approached the legislation of childhood reflected that. The 1980 Child Care Act,for example, focussed on keeping families together by encouraging councils to work with private organisations to ‘diminish the need to receive children into or keep them in care… or to bring children before a juvenile court’.^¹²⁸ John Major’s government continued this approach with the 1991 Child Support Act,and consequent establishment of the Child Support Agency in 1993, which required the tracking down of ‘absent’ parents (fathers primarily) to get them to pay child support instead of the government; the intention thereby being to make sure parents met their legal obligations and discourage family breakups.^¹²⁹

The 1989 Children Act is the crucial piece of legislation to examine on this issue, as it introduced the most significant changes to encourage the Conservative model of family life. Somewhat following ideas of the new ‘child-centred’ approach to childcare the Act specified that local authorities should give ‘due consideration’ to children’s wishes about where they wanted to live, but that ultimately parents had total authority on the matter:

‘Any person who has parental responsibility for a child may at any time remove the child from accommodation provided by or on behalf of the local authority’

– Children Act 1989, Part 3, Section 20 (8).^¹³⁰

The law stipulated that only unmarried fathers could lose parental responsibility (PR); mothers and married fathers could only ever have PR restricted in rare and severe cases.¹³¹ This, along with the rule that unmarried fathers did not automatically have PR, meant the act tacitly endorsed a ‘traditional’ nuclear-family structure.^¹³² Even in cases where it was deemed that a child should be taken away from their parents, the act still required that they be housed as close to their parents’ home as possible, and that they keep the family name.^¹³³ Furthermore, in part 5 (‘The Protection of Children’), the act firmly established child abuse as a legal issue first and social/medical issue second, which – after implementation – led to a greater reliance on hard to gather forensic evidence to convict in such cases, leaving children stuck in ‘forensic limbo’ as cases drew out longer, and fewer were processed overall.^¹³⁴

Figure IV. ‘Estimate average duration of care proceedings across all courts’.^¹³⁵

The focus of the Children Act was thus on addressing exceptionally horrific newsworthy individual cases of child abuse as opposed to the broader pervasive issue of child abuse, an approach which was supported by the press’ own fascination with such cases. This type of legislation which assumed a singular preferred family model lost sight of the specificity by which any one child’s life differs from another’s under the same societal forces, altered by crucial variables including race, class, gender, and environment. The Children Act’s insistence on the home and family being thepreferred safe space for children, for example, and that authorities should only intervene if a child is ‘beyond parental control’, failed to consider the increased risk of sexual abuse that girls faced in the home, particularly from father-figures, and the protection that being outdoors with other children could offer from such threats.¹³⁶

To say that the child-protection agenda of experts in government and social services during the 1980s and 1990s was totally based around efforts to encourage ‘family values’ however, would be untrue. As part of the experiential and emotional turn of the era and the Thatcherite distrust of the civil service, policymakers were also keen to consult about new approaches to the management of the systems of child protection with non-traditional sources such as feminist critics, charities, and public campaign groups who ‘spoke for children’.^¹³⁷ This led to a considerable degree of independence being given to small-scale voluntary-sector groups – at the expense of government and social services – to run often quite radical programmes of education and activity.^¹³⁸ For example, in 1986 the Central Office of Information (COI) hired one such small charity, Kidscape, to create official child-safety public information films (PIFs) on their behalf, because they had assessed their own Charley PIFs to have been ineffective.^¹³⁹ More broadly, this approach devolved the responsibility for child-support programmes to local authorities and charities, which allowed certain groups to pursue new approaches to child protection, but it also meant less regulation and uniformity in the support available to children. The largest of these groups founded in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Kidscape, Kids Company, Childline, Children in Need, KidsOut, and the WAVE Trust were based in London, and as such their services were harder to learn about and access for children in the North East.^¹⁴⁰ Groups in the North East, like the Gateshead Young Women’s Outreach Project (GYWOP), which drew on the experiential and emotional expertise of the children they worked with to discuss issues of contraception and sexual abuse, were smaller and had less influence over experts in government.^¹⁴¹

Figure V. Scene from stranger-danger film ‘Adult & Child’ (1994).^¹⁴²

The growing significance of charities marked an important shift in the government’s concept about who was considered an authority on issues of child protection, as now parents and even children themselves were being consulted as experts, not directly by policymakers, but by the private organisations they worked with. This approach complemented Thatcher’s distrust of the public sector and drive to focus on new alternative sources of expertise such as those in private charities.^¹⁴³ ChildLine is one prominent example, the charity coming out of the success of the BBC show Childwatch at the insistence of its producer Esther Rantzen.^¹⁴⁴ Many traditional experts such as those at the NSPCC and National Children’s Home (NCH), whilst supportive of the effort, expressed doubts as to its longevity because it was run by journalists and inexperienced volunteers, but it proved extremely popular.^¹⁴⁵ In a retrospective seminar in 2016, the MP Shaun Woodward said of Childline:

Thirty years ago we didn’t talk about child abuse. Child abuse was something that most people thought happened in extreme cases in places that had nothing to do with them… What Esther brought to it was her journalism and what she found was that there were these kids who for whatever reason weren’t being picked up by the NSPCC, weren’t being picked up by the statutory services.^¹⁴⁶

Interestingly though, whilst policymakers in the 1970s and 1980s were often keen to consider popular sentiment and consult with non-traditional experts, academics were not so quick.^¹⁴⁷ The trust in experiential and emotional expertise that organisations like Childline represented, in some respects undermined the value of traditional experts, challenging their authority. Until the 1990s the academic response to the topic of stranger-danger and child protection was notably muted, especially when compared to the literature about the threats that urbanism posed to childhood, for example. Why was this? Experts often failed to grapple effectively with these emotionally charged public debates because they were unfamiliar with them. Debating the dangers of cars and urbanism was known territory for many, as this involved relatively formalised and detached discussions within expert circles. In the realm of strangers, however, the prevalent discourse was non-traditional: it was passionate, experiential, and led by journalists and public campaign groups who were often distrustful of established sources of authority. For example, Colin Ward’s The Child in the City (1978), Robin Moore’s Childhood’s Domain (1986), and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1992) were three influential texts from across the era which lamented the loss of childhood freedoms – and have been subsequently frequently referenced in academic work – but did not address the topic of strangers or child abuse.^¹⁴⁸

The arguments these academics made about ‘lost childhoods’ may be seen as largely legitimate and, indeed, the work of this thesis supports many of their ideas, but because they were written in response to what they saw as an emerging threat to childhood liberties, they did not engage with the stranger-danger narrative as they did the urbanism narrative. A scepticism about the protection debate led those scholars who did write about child murder cases to talk less about issues of child protection, and more about policy responses to issues of child protection. For example, Nigel Parton’s 1986 analysis of the official report into Jasmine Beckford’s murder found its conclusions to be ‘very much open to doubt’ and ‘misdirecting our attentions from the major issues’ because of its tight focus only on issues within the Beckford family, classifying them as the problem, and not thinking more broadly about societal forces acting upon the family.^¹⁴⁹ Reading the report, its focus on ‘high risk’ cases does distract it from addressing how child abuse could be better prevented generally, but similarly Parton’s critique can also be judged as paying too little attention to the importance of these high-profile cases. Much academic discourse in the field was preoccupied with structural analyses, and critiqued ‘experientialist’ approaches taken by policymakers in conjunction with the media as being too often anecdotal, sensationalist, and lacking a serious methodology. However, the value in ‘experientialism’ came to be more recognised in the 2000s.

An emphasis on experience and emotion initially acted to exclude traditional experts but by the mid-1990s more and more academic work started to address the stranger-issue and, indeed, to engage with experiential and emotional sources of expertise.^¹⁵⁰ In an article for Children’s Environments in 1994, one of the journal’s first to assess the topic of strangers, the researchers interviewed parents about their fears for their children and found that ‘for most parents the fear of random physical assault by a stranger superseded all other fears of violation or harm’.^¹⁵¹ The researchers also concluded that ‘Parents commonly fail to recognize that children’s safety is an illusion’- meaning that danger was an inherent and in some ways essential part of childhood, and this quote is exemplary of the broader academic approach to the stranger.^¹⁵² Whilst not dismissive of public and media concerns about strangers, many academic contributors argued the issue had been overblown by newspapers and that the measures parents and policy-makers were taking to combat stranger-danger were disproportionately restrictive. Pain’s ‘Paranoid Parenting?’(2006) described ‘risk-averse’ parents as ‘cosseting their children indoors’.^¹⁵³ Katz in Power, Space and Terror (2006) made the point that street crime had been falling since the 1970s and 1980s, meaning that – in terms of crime – parents generally played in more dangerous streets than those they denied their children.^¹⁵⁴ Handy et al.’s 2008 ‘Neighbourhood Design and Children’s Outdoor Play’ similarly emphasised that it was the ‘parental perception of neighbourhood safety’, rather than actual safety, that was the significant restrictor of child mobility.^¹⁵⁵

This tendency toward disagreement in expert discourse over child protection between academics and policymakers was expedited by the rise of a new fear following the murder of James Bulger in 1993. James Bulger’s case was as widely publicised as those of Maria Colwell or Jasmine Beckford, but what made it particularly notable was that the killers were children themselves. Two ten-year-old boys who led James away from his mother in a busy shopping centre and were caught on CCTV doing so. The evocative image of the toddler been led away spread widely, and the event sparked much discourse surrounding ‘the state of the youth’ in modern Britain.^¹⁵⁶ In the North East, response to the Bulger case was shaped by the memory of 11 year old Mary Bell, who in 1968 had murdered two young boys by strangulation on Tyneside, and loomed large in popular memory. This was so much the case that soon after the story of James Bulger broke, reporters tracked down the now 41-year-old Bell, who had assumed a new identity, and consequently was forced to do so again after members of the public caught wind of her address and threatened assault.^¹⁵⁷

The media and public concern that arose following the Bulger case in particular led to a notable change in policy approach from the government, with both John Major and Tony Blair promising to ‘crack down’ on child-crime. In the 1980s the Thatcher governments had been comparatively lenient towards youth crime with the 1982 Criminal Justice Act significantly reducing the imprisonment of under 21s and limiting the use and length of custody in young offender institutions, subsequently leading to reduced crime rates and prison populations for young people.^¹⁵⁸ In the 1990s however Major and Blair’s governments took a much harder – and electorally popular – stance toward youth crime. Major’s notorious 1993 ‘Back to Basics’ speech summed up the approach succinctly in the insistence that society should ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’.^¹⁵⁹ One month later the home secretary Michael Howard increased the maximum sentence of detention for 15-17-year-olds and the 1993 Criminal Justice Act introduced Secure Training Centres (STCs), privately-run facilities in the style of US ‘boot camps’.¹⁶⁰ Despite Blair calling the proposal a ‘sham’ in 1994, Labour would go on to further invest in the programme once in power.^¹⁶¹ On the announcement, Howard stated that child offenders ‘are adult in everything except years’ and between 1993 and 1998 the number of imprisoned teenagers doubled.^¹⁶² Similarly, the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and 1997 Confiscation of Alcohol Act gave the police greater powers to break-up and move along groups of young people on the street.^¹⁶³

Under Tony Blair’s premiership this basic approach changed little, first introducing the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act which abolished the principle that children under 7 were ‘doli incapax’ (incapable of committing a crime) and creating a system of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which could be used in any event where a child behaved ‘in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons’.^¹⁶⁴ Under the same legislation ‘parenting orders’ were introduced, which legally required parents of children with ASBOs to impose curfews and attend parenting classes.^¹⁶⁵ The 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act strengthened the ASBO system, giving police the power to disperse groups of 2 or more children in any public place if their presence ‘has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed’.^¹⁶⁶ This was strong policy that matched Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ slogan, paired with an emphasis on personal responsibility.

This philosophy enabled an approach towards crime that not only focussed more on punishment of individuals but, particularly in the case of children, distanced government from responsibility towards them. Major and Blair’s more punitive policy platforms increased the level of state intervention but decreased the level of care the state was expected to provide or take responsibility for. For example, the 2007 paper The Children’s Plan: Building Brighter Futures placed emphasis on children specifically as being outside of the government’s remit. In language reminiscent of the Thatcher administrations, the stated first principle of the paper was that ‘Government does not bring up children – parents do’.^¹⁶⁷ What differentiated Blairite youth-justice from Thatcherite youth justice however, and what meant Blair brought far more children into contact with the youth justice system, was the belief that young people had become dangers to society, not only that society was a danger to them. This can be seen in how the term ‘child’ was often withheld from child-criminals, instead being referred to as youths, yobs, teens, young offenders, delinquents, or any number of other terms. Emblematic of this was the Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw’s comments in 2008, when questioned on Britain having ‘more young people in custody than any other comparable country in Europe’, that:

Most young people who are put into custody are aged 16 and 17 – they are not children; they are often large, unpleasant thugs, and they are frightening to the public.^¹⁶⁸

This categorisation of young offenders as ‘not children’ is indicative of the perception held of them in policymaking circles during the 1990s and 2000s, and of the STC and ASBO systems set up to deal with them. In some respects, this child-danger discourse was a response to the 1980s stranger-danger narrative construction of the child as being pure and powerless.^¹⁶⁹ Children are not so innocent, the argument went, they are not always the ones to be fearful for, but to be fearful of. The Bulger case was only an extreme symptom of a wider problem. This was not only the view in expert circles, and indeed the strong public and media response to the Bulger case galvanised government action (this will be explored further in Chapter Two). To give an understanding of the nature of the response, the Daily Star’s headline after Bulger’s killers were convicted read: ‘How do you feel now, you little bastards?’.^¹⁷⁰

1.4 Technology: Exploring an Unknown Environment

The role that technologies played in the trend toward indoor childhoods from the 1980s onwards was different to that of urban landscapes or strangers. Cars and ‘creeps’ kept children inside through fear, creating an atmosphere where many parents decided it was too dangerous to let their children out of sight. Technology, on the other hand, was something about the indoors that was attractive to children, something to make them choose it over outside play, or indeed just something to do when they weren’t allowed out.

By 1980 97% of UK households had a TV and after the first home computers launched in 1977 they too became commonplace, first in schools during the 1980s, and then in homes during the 1990s and 2000s.^¹⁷¹ The children of this generation were thus the first to grow up with these technologies meaning that, as Peter Buchner observed in 1995, many parents’ frames of reference for childhood had become ‘invalidated’.^¹⁷² The World Wide Web launched in Britain in 1991 and as household adoption grew (from 9% in 1998 to 73% in 2010) the ‘digital world’ grew as an entirely new environment of childhood that young people often understood better than adults.¹⁷³ This was not the case for all children however. Just as the dangers of cars or strangers disproportionately affected BAME kids, working-class kids, and girls, access to many of the benefits of technology was more difficult for them.

As Helsper and Livingstone contend, whilst most children had access to new technology, disparity lay in the fact that the white children, middle-class children, and boys were given a better-quality technical education, allowing them the skills to make the most of technological opportunity.^¹⁷⁴ The GCSE for Information Technology (started in 1986) is a good example of this, as it had consistently low take-up rates with female, black, and Free School Meal students throughout the 1990s and 2000s.¹⁷⁵ This meant, I argue, that the pervasive concept of the universal child that had for so long gone unnoticed in expert circles started to adopt a new characteristic – that the universal child was technologically literate. Digital devices, conceived of as universal tools, fell prey to the same notions of the universal child which meant little provision was given for accommodating differences.

Technology was not seen only as a source of opportunity however, as during the 1980s and onwards media and public fears grew significantly over the negative impacts that TVs, games consoles, and computers might have on childhood. Technology’s effect on addiction, obesity, anxiety, bullying, social exclusion, and antisocial attitudes were all talking points. Perhaps the ‘white heat of technology’ was too hot for kids to handle? Different to fears over cars and strangers though, this fear emphasised the dangers of the indoors over the outdoors. The theme of the BBC show Why Don’t You? (which ran from 1973 and 1995) asked why children did not ‘just switch off your television set and go do something less boring instead’.^¹⁷⁶ The irony that this was a tv programme is self-evident, and not lost on children at the time,¹⁷⁷ but the greater irony is that after 1988 the show mostly dropped its central message to morph into a more standard drama, resulting in a threefold increase in viewing numbers from 0.9 to 3 million per series.^¹⁷⁸ Public and media concern (which will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Two) over the issue of ‘square-eyed’ children was common, but these concerns ultimately had little impact on the technologisation of youth, and the fact that parents were choosing to keep their kids at home more than ever in the face of cars and strangers only accelerated the process.

Expert discourse, both in academia and government, took a different path to the popular. As part of efforts to expedite Britain’s continuing post-war transition away from a manufacturing to a services economy, policymakers under Thatcher, Major, and Blair encouraged a general development toward, adoption of, and education in new technologies.^¹⁷⁹ Indeed, the computer was at the heart of this effort, and the perception that children needed education in digital literacy was strong, with Thatcher’s government promising to ‘put a microcomputer into every secondary school in the country by the end of 1982’ because, in her own words:

We must remember that today’s school children will still be working in the year 2030… My generation has perhaps been too cautious about accepting new technology in micros. Younger people are quick to use new things and have an aptitude for them… familiarity with keyboards and TV screens will help them to take in their stride the new technologies on the shop floor, in the office and in the home.^¹⁸⁰

Similarly, Blair’s commitment to ‘education, education, education’ in large part was underpinned by an understanding that ‘the age of achievement will be built on new technology’, and a promise to connect all schools, colleges, and universities to the ‘information superhighway’.^¹⁸¹ In regard to TV, Thatcher described it as ‘one of the great growth industries, creating jobs, entertainment, inspiration and interests’.^¹⁸² It is not unsurprising, then, that whilst in government neither took steps to significantly restrict or regulate children’s TV or other media. The closest thing to this was the founding of Ofcom in 2003 under the Communications Act which formalised the requirement to consider ‘the vulnerability of children’ when deciding the media they could be shown.^¹⁸³ Ofcom’s establishment did not respond to contemporary fears over the dominance of TV in children’s lives however, its prerogative being to strictly concern itself with the content of children’s media, as it was founded off the back of public fears over children’s exposure to violence and pornography.^¹⁸⁴ In other words, regulators were not concerned about how much TV children were watching, only that they weren’t watching ‘the wrong things’.

During the 1990s and 2000s, in response to reductions in unstructured outdoor play time many more families started to send their children to pre-booked sessions for sports, hobbies, and lessons, which often came with a price tag.^¹⁸⁵ This commercialisation of play meant that opportunities for free play, in both senses of the word, were further reduced and considered lower status than those with an associated cost, as the price connoted quality.^¹⁸⁶ This disadvantaged families without the money or time to take their children to such sessions, pushing them by necessity towards indoor play and technologies like the TV. A 2001 study for British Telecom (BT) which found that working-class children were significantly more likely to have a TV, games console, or video recorder in their room than middle-class children was indicative of this fact and showed how the use of technology was linked to a lack of access to outdoor environments.^¹⁸⁷ It was also the case that middle-class parents were generally more receptive to arguments about the dangers of the TV than both working and upper-class parents, and therefore stricter over their children’s access to it.^¹⁸⁸

Concerns over childhood obesity linked to technology were also rising, but policymakers generally framed this as a parenting problem rather than a government one. On the release of the 2004 health white paper the Department of Health stated that ‘parents know that their children’s health is primarily their responsibility’; similarly, the Children’s Commissioner for England in 2006 argued that ‘[parental] education should start in ante-natal classes’ on how to manage their children’s relationship with technology.^¹⁸⁹ This expanded on the remit of the universal child. With regard to use of technology, children were assumed to be healthy and have a healthy relationship to it, but this was the preserve of those children who had families who could facilitate outdoor play and exercise as alternatives. Once again this meant middle class white boys most benefitted.

The overarching expert discourse in government over children and technology, then, was one that concentrated on positives at a policy level and delegated management of negatives to the family level. Attempts to restrict children’s access to technology would have been seen as draconian and limiting towards their future prospects; furthermore, dealing with the issues that had driven most children indoors in the first place (cars and strangers) would have been both an enormous undertaking and one experts in government would not have endorsed, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter. Public and media discourse stood in stark contrast to this approach, often viewing technology with far greater suspicion. The health consequences for children of increasingly indoor lifestyles were obvious to all parties, but they did not agree on the cause or the solution. The policymakers’ view was that education for parents and children was the answer, whereas the popular view was that the technology itself was the problem. Both views denied any agency to children themselves, assuming them too naïve to do what was best for themselves, when in reality most children weren’t given much of a choice.

Figure VI. A satirical cartoon illustrating parental fears (2007).^¹⁹⁰

The relationship between technology and children gained attention in academic research in the 1990s. In contrast to academic work on cars and strangers which tended to reach similar conclusions, academic opinion on technology generally covered a broad spectrum. Much work was concerned with understanding the impacts of an indoor lifestyle and spending long periods of time in front of a screen, and the benefits of outdoor activity, but much also looked at the benefits technology could have for young people.^¹⁹¹ The conversation was new and the consequences for childhood were far-reaching, complicated, and mostly speculative at this stage. As David Buckingham observes, the discussion was ‘marked by a kind of schizophrenia that often accompanies the advent of new cultural forms. If we look back to the early days of the cinema, or indeed to the invention of the printing press, it is possible to identify a similar mixture of hopes and fears’.^¹⁹²

Early academic interest in technology often had a parallel interest in late-20^th century neoliberalism, closely relating the two. For example Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992) drew a connection between the increasingly diverse and individualised ways people were able to consume media and a broader ‘western trend towards individualisation’.^¹⁹³ Whether technology was accelerating this trend or was a symptom of it is beside the point, but it certainly was the case that the majority of the modern technology sector in both the UK and US was born into a market seeing widespread deregulation of financial services and emphasis on private over public ownership.^¹⁹⁴ Many scholars during this period castchildren as innocent participants in a process of their own decline, pushed towards embracing a technological ‘media environment’ that was damaging for their healthy development. Sandra Calvert’s Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (1999) and Kirsten Drotner’s Dangerous Media? are two examples that described mass media as a ‘moral threat’ to young people.^¹⁹⁵ Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992) and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) both identified the TV in particular as part of a wider problem of ‘lost childhoods’, Postman writing that ‘children today are captive in their homes… They are institutionalized, over programmed, information stuffed, TV dependent, “zoned in” and age segregated’.^¹⁹⁶

For other academics, though, technological promise resurrected some of the visions of the inter-war years of a connected, intelligent, globalised world. Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word (1993) argued that digital technologies, with the particular aid of the internet, would enable a mass form of democratic literacy that would allow countries to ‘enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways’, as did John Tomlinson’s Globalisation and Culture (1999).^¹⁹⁷ Likewise Jon Katz in Post Politics in the Digital Nation (1997) saw the digital as a means of children’s liberation from the increasingly restrictive adult physical world, where computer games and TV technology offered an escape to children from restrictions, a place where they could engage in unstructured play, when their outdoor activities were increasingly timetabled.^¹⁹⁸ Much of this work was based on the potential of technology however, and such assessments diminished as academic work became increasingly sceptical during the 2000s. This duality of the moment in academic thought between seeing technology in either dystopian or utopian terms was reflected in Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind (2003) where he argued that children were on the verge of either being able to harness technology to help them become ‘creative problem solvers’ or falling victim to ‘computerisation and commercialization careening out of control’.^¹⁹⁹

This duality was also seen in assessments of the rise of mobile phone use among children. Sonia Livingstone’s Young People and New Media (2002) found that the mobile phone was allowing children to cross ‘hitherto distinct social boundaries’, by allowing them to talk and arrange meetups with kids from different neighbourhoods.^²⁰⁰ Marilyn Campbell’s 2005 study demonstrated the negotiating power that a mobile phone could grant children when discussing curfews and boundaries for roaming with their parents, allowing more freedom.^²⁰¹ Simultaneously though, Williams and Williams’ 2003 study suggested that the expectation of parents to be able to communicate with their children at all times created an environment where children felt they had no private space and their mental health suffered for it.^²⁰² A 2002 study pointed out how phones could exacerbate existing inequalities as those without a mobile (mostly likely working-class kids) were excluded from the friendships and communities built around them.^²⁰³ Additionally, as Dominique Pasquier highlighted in Children and Their Changing Media Environment (2001), the problem was not always access to devices like mobile phones, but the skills necessary to operate them; Pasquier found that both girls and working-class households demonstrated a ‘problematic skills gap’ in the use of digital devices.^²⁰⁴

Livingstone also argued that because technology, like the mobile phone, had invalidated many parents’ frames of reference for childhood they had been forced to become ‘involved in a process of negotiation with their children over mutual identities, rights and responsibilities’.^²⁰⁵ This contributed, she argued, to the fall of the nuclear family in favour of the ‘democratic family’, wherein traditional parental and child roles of the authority and the subordinate were replaced by a mutual expectation of love, respect, and intimacy.^²⁰⁶ However, as Joe Frost reasoned in A History of Children’s Play, changing family formations also meant that people were increasingly moving away from their hometowns once reaching adulthood, isolating their own children from traditional familial networks such as cousins and grandparents.^²⁰⁷ Then again, Frost admitted, technology like the phone or internet could facilitate reconnection.^²⁰⁸ Tonya Rooney’s Trusting Children (2010) also noted the multiplicity of technology’s impact on childhood freedoms. On the one hand, the monitoring and safekeeping of children in a ‘just in case’ model meant parents gave children more freedom.^²⁰⁹ One the other, she warned: ‘Rather than simply “playing it safe”, parents and carers may be depriving children of the opportunity to be trusted and to learn about trusting others, and the opportunity for growing competence and capacity that can result from this’.^²¹⁰

In 1999, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined the term ‘Plant Blindness’ to describe the idea that children were becoming disconnected from the natural world, and therefore unable to recognise or name common species.^²¹¹ During the 2000s, arguments of this nature became popular in academic work, catalysing around the term ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (NDD), coined by Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods (2005).^²¹² In this work the focus was not explicitly on technology, rather it was on a lack of time being spent outdoors ‘close to nature’, but technology was always very closely associated with this discussion.^²¹³ This association was unavoidable as it was clear that time which children of previous generations had spent playing outdoors was being spent by children of current generations watching TV or playing computer games.

However, this association was somewhat misleading, as it appeared to logically lead to the conclusion that technology was the cause of the problem. This was not really the case. Technology played a role, but parental restrictions based on fears of cars and strangers had already been moving kids inside for decades. The 2003 study Cyberkids found that ‘children overwhelmingly preferred to be outside if the weather and light allowed’ and that the time they spent doing indoor activities like watching TV was a replacement for ‘doing nothing time’, when they or their friends were not allowed outside.^²¹⁴ These results were echoed in a 2014 study for the National Children’s Museum where ‘81% of children said they preferred outdoor play’ to watching TV.^²¹⁵ The same study also found that 59% of children were not allowed to leave their house unsupervised, and half were not allowed to play in a garden unsupervised.^²¹⁶ A 2020 study for the Biomedical Public Health journal found that ‘screen media activity does not displace other recreational activities’ amongst children, instead concluding the amount of time a child spent playing outdoors was much more dependent on their socio-economic background.^²¹⁷

Whilst academic work may not have explicitly cited technology as the cause of the growing concern around decreased outdoor play, this was a conclusion that could be easily inferred (and often was by the press) from work that compared the healthiness of kids based on how many hours they spent watching TV, for example.^²¹⁸ The concept of NDD in particular, though not recognised as an official psychological ‘disorder’, gained traction in the 2000s with a wide variety of UK groups such as The National Trust, The Council For Learning Outside the Classroom, and The Children and Nature Network. Louv did not say in Last Child in the Woods that technology caused NDD, but he did use language which implied as much, such as: ‘as electronic technology surrounds us, we long for nature’ and ‘television remains the most effective thief of time’.^²¹⁹ The clear purpose of academic interventions like Louv’s was to argue for a material change in modern childhoods, attempting to draw the attention of experts in government to an issue which they thought not properly recognised. This work was influential in the media, and on the work of charities and organisation like the National Trust, but in the 2000s policymakers did not much address it. In 2010 Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows took a graver view even than Louv, arguing that children’s ‘malleable minds’ were being degraded by exposure to the digital world.^²²⁰ Carr wrote that: ‘What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization… we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting’.^²²¹

Work such as Louv and Carr’s gained interest from the media as the issues they raised unsurprisingly played into common parental fears over safety, health, and freedom. Indeed, many authors did not obscure the fact that they regarded resolution of the issue not only as a practical but moral imperative; the solution of course being, as Louv defined it, for children to be ‘reunited with the rest of nature’.^²²² In translation from academic to public discourse however, an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of childhoods was lost, particularly from a historical perspective. Often reports that were assessing the state of contemporary childhood would recall childhoods of earlier generations, such as that of the authors, and these recollections portrayed dualistic notions of childhood as a ‘now versus then’ phenomenon. For example, Louv’s statement that ‘baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems… like a quaint artifact’ or Lenore Skenazy’s reference to ‘the freedom we had as kids’.^²²³ The world of child’s play does not stand apart from factors of gender, race, class, region, and ability, but when speaking on what ‘children used to do’, experts, charities, and journalists could overlook this. Furthermore, Holloway and Valentine’s Cyberkids highlighted how computer use was highly controlled and negotiated in homes, and that parents were not at all powerless to prevent children being ‘drawn in’ to screen-time if they wanted to stop them.^²²⁴ The crux of the problem lay neither with children, parents, or with technology, but with the reality, or the perception of the reality, that children’s outdoor environments were dangerous, and their indoor environments were safe.

1.5 Conclusion

Examining the course of expert discourse across this period we can identify common factors that led to children spending less time outdoors than their parents’ generations. Policymakers under Thatcher, Major, and Blair, by encouraging car-oriented expansion and urbanism, the segregation of road and footpath networks, and stringent parental restriction over children reduced the number of outdoor places children could use. By concentrating on the threat of stranger-danger, and later also youth-danger, they encouraged people to view even car-free outdoor environments as unsafe, and children themselves as sometimes the danger that should be kept out. Furthermore, by encouraging technologization at a policy level whilst delegating management of its negative effects to the family level, they left parents to negotiate technology use with their children without accounting for differing family circumstances. The futurist conservatism of experts in government perpetuated existing trends towards cars, stranger-danger fears, and adoption of technology that significantly reduced children’s access to quality outdoor spaces, particularly those in working-class neighbourhoods. Conversely the nostalgic progressivism of academics invoked memories and notions of the past to inform their calls for change.

Academics’ proposals focussed mostly on cars and strangers and argued for a reclamation of public land for pedestrians and against the moral panics over child safety that had been fuelled by sensationalist media stories. In their arguments for structural change, however, they were also often dismissive of the experiential and emotional knowledge that individual children and parents could provide which – to a certain extent – threatened their authority. Regarding technology many academics were also critical, concentrating on the health risks of screen time and sedentariness, and in doing so they, like experts in government, placed significant emphasis on the idea that it was by the choice of individual children and families that playtime had moved indoors. In truth technology played a supplemental role to cars and strangers. Indeed, despite the efforts of those with expertise, the public perception of the dangers of all three factors was very different to their reality. This was due, in large part, to the role that newspapers and public campaign groups played throughout this period to inform popular opinion. What was the extent of this role? In the next chapter I will explore this subject and explain the origins and legacies of the period’s most influential public scandals, both legitimate and otherwise.

<- Introduction – Chapter 2 ->

References

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

2 Emanuela Mora et al., ‘Practice Theories and the “Circuit of Culture”: Integrating Approaches for Studying Material Culture,’ Sociologica 13, no. 3 (2019): 59.

3 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 13.

4 Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns. Reports of the Steering Group and Working Group appointed by the Minister of Transport (London: H.M.S.O, 1963), 223.

5 Michael Dower, ‘Fourth Wave, the Challenge of Leisure,’ Architects’ Journal 20 (1965): 123; ‘Leisureopolis’, Yorkshire Architect May/June (1969).

6 David Leibling, Car ownership in Great Britain (London: RAC Foundation, 2008), 4.

7 Department for Transport, Road Traffic Estimates: Great Britain 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/916749/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2019.pdf.

8 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; Joe Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments (London: Routledge, 2010), 202.

9 Geoffrey Lean, ‘Tories ditch the “car economy”,’ The Independent,21 January, 1996, 21.

10 John Prescott, speech in the house of commons, 18 May 1989; Department for Transport, Towards a Sustainable Transport System: Growth in a Low Carbon World (London: Department for Transport, 2007): 85.

11 Prescott, speech in the house of commons, 18 May 1989; Department for Transport, Towards a Sustainable Transport System: Growth in a Low Carbon World (London: Department for Transport, 2007): 85.

12 Ben Webster, ‘Broken promises leave dozens of towns in queue for a bypass,’ The Times, 11 September, 2006, 16; 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; Lean, ‘Tories ditch the “car economy”,’ 21.

13 John Stewart, Roadblock: How People Power Is Wrecking The Roads Programme (Alarm UK, 1995), 1.

14 Chris Miller, Environmental Rights: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2012), 86.

15 Gerard Gilbert, ‘Motorway madness,’ The Independent, 17 February, 1993. ‘An unlikely alliance has grown up between conservationists, Nimbys and a New Age tribe called the Dongas.’

16 Kate Evans, Copse: the Cartoon Book of Tree Protesting (Self Published, 1998), 12.

17 As quoted in: Paul Brown, ‘Prescott Points Buses to Fast Lane,’ The Guardian, 6 June, 1997, 10.

18 Webster, ‘Broken promises,’ 16.

19 Leibling, Car ownership in Great Britain, 4.

20 RAC Foundation, ‘Car ownership rates per local authority in England and Wales,’ https://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/downloadables/car%20ownership%20rates%20by%20local%20authority%20-%20december%202012.pdf.

21 Department for Transport, Road Traffic Estimates: Great Britain 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/916749/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2019.pdf.

22 Patricia Somers and Jim Settle, ‘The helicopter parent: Research toward a typology,’ College and University 86, no.1 (2010): 18.

23 Margaret Mead, ‘Neighbourhoods and human needs,’ Children’s Environments Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1984); Sheridan Bartlett et al., Cities for Children: Children’s Rights, Poverty and Urban Management (London: Earthscan, 1999); Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments.

24 Ibid, 202.

25 Mayer Hillman and John Adams, ‘Children’s Freedom and Safety,’ Children’s Environments 9, No. 2 (1992): 10-22.

26 The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, A History of Road Safety Campaigns: Drink Drive, Seat Belts and Speeding (Birmingham: ROSPA, 2018), 1.

27 Ibid, 3.

28 Department for Transport, ‘Reported road casualties in Great Britain, provisional estimates involving illegal alcohol levels: 2019,’ https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2019/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2019.

29 ROSPA, A History of Road Safety Campaigns, 5.

30 Hillman and Adams, ‘Children’s Freedom and Safety,’ 11.

31 ‘Story of THINK!,’ Think!, accessed 15 February 2022, https://www.think.gov.uk/about-think/story-of-think/.

32 Department for Transport, Traffic Advisory Leaflet 9/99 (London: Department for Transport, 1999).

33 Muhammad Ishaque and Robert Noland, ‘Making Roads Safe for Pedestrians or Keeping Them Out of the Way?: An Historical Perspective on Pedestrian Policies in Britain,’ The Journal of Transport History 27, no.1 (2006): 123.

34 Ibid, 129.

35 Ibid, 131.

36 Ibid, 132.

37 Karl Whitney, ‘“A brave new world”: what happened to Newcastle’s dream for a vertical city?,’ The Guardian, 7 February, 2017.

38 Department for Transport, The Design of Pedestrian Crossings (London: Department for Transport, 1995), 2.

39 Mark Pinder, ‘The “parallel world” of Newcastle’s walkways,’ photograph, 2017, The Guardian.

40 StreetPlaygrounds Act1938, Chapter 37, Section 1.

41 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 254.

42 Tim Gill, ‘Home Zones in the UK: History, Policy and Impact on Children and Youth,’ Children, Youth and Environments 16, no.1 (2006): 91.

43 Mike Biddulph, Home zones: A planning and design handbook (London: The Policy Press, 2001), 1.

44 Gill, ‘Home Zones in the UK,’ 92.

45 Ibid, 93.

46 House of Commons, ‘Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions Eighth Report,’ 2002.

47 House of Commons Transport Committee, ‘Better roads: Improving England’s Strategic Road Network,’ 2014, 7.

48 Anthony Seldon, Blair’s Britain, 1997-2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15.

49 Department of the Environment and Department of Transport, This common inheritance: Britain ‘s environmental strategy (London: HMSO, 1990), 13.

50 Hillman and Adams, ‘Children’s Freedom and Safety,’ 18-19.

51 Ibid, 18-19.

52 Department of Transport, Children and roads: A safer way (London: HMSO, 1990), 16.

53 Christopher Chope, speech in the House of Commons, 16 November 1990.

54 Ibid.

55 Elizabeth Clapp, ‘Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement,’ Journal of American Studies 28, no. 3 (1994): 360.

56 Jon Winder, Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010 (London: University of London Press, 2024), 227; Monica Flegel, ‘“Facts and Their Meaning”: Child Protection, Intervention, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Late Nineteenth-Century England,’ Victorian Review 33 (2007): 38.

57 Manchester Guardian, ‘England and Its Playgrounds,’ The Manchester Guardian, 25 November 1927.

58 Cranwell, ‘Street play and organized space,’ 45.

59 Platt, The Child Savers, 10.

60 Ibid, 126.

61 Ibid, 126; Winder, Designed for Play, 47.

62 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 248.

63 Ibid, 248.

64 Ibid, 20.

65 Moore, Childhood’s domain, 14, 223.

66 Ibid, 20.

67 Rob White, ‘Youth and the Conflict Over Urban Space,’ Children’s Environments 10, no.1 (1993): 89.

Play Streets are discussed in further detail later in this chapter.

68 Patsy Eubanks Owens, ‘Natural Landscapes, Gathering Places, And Prospect Refuges: Characteristics of Outdoor Places Valued by Teens,’ Children’s Environments Quarterly 5, no.2 (1988): 21.

69 Pete King and Polly Sills-Jones, ‘Children’s Use of Public Spaces and the Role of the Adult – a Comparison of Play Ranging in the UK, and the Leikkipuisto (Play Parks) in Finland,’ International Journal of Play 7 (2018): 28; Mark Francis and Randolph Hester, The Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place, and Action (London: MIT Press, 1990), 28.

70 White, ‘Youth and the Conflict Over Urban Space,’ 85.

71 Nikolas Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (London: Routledge, 1990), 203.

72 White, ‘Youth and the Conflict Over Urban Space,’ 85.

73 See these works of the period: Paul Wilkinson, ‘Safety in Children’s Play Environments,’ Children’s Environments (1985); Peter Heseltine, ‘Accidents on Children’s Playgrounds,’ Children’s Environments (1985); Tom Jambor, ‘Risk-Taking Needs in Children: An Accommodating Play Environment,’ (1986); Joe Frost, ‘Play Environments for Young Children in The USA: 1800 – 1990,’ Children’s Environments (1989); Kaj Noschis, ‘Child Development Theory and Planning for Neighbourhood Play,’ (1992); Lorraine Maxwell, Mari Mitchell, and Gary W. Evans, ‘Effects of Play Equipment and Loose Parts on Preschool Children’s Outdoor Play Behavior: An Observational Study and Design Intervention,’ Children, Youth and Environments (2008).

74 Wilkinson, ‘Safety in Children’s Play Environments,’ 10; Rob Wheway and Alison Millward, Facilitating Play on Housing Estates (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1997), 15.

75 Wilkinson, ‘Safety in Children’s Play Environments,’ 10.

76 Maxwell et al., ‘Effects of Play Equipment and Loose Parts on Preschool Children’s Outdoor Play Behavior,’ 60.

77 Stephen Wagg, ‘“Don’t Try to Understand Them”: Politics, Childhood and the New Education Market,’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1996), 18.

78 John Carvel, ‘Blair Relives School Dilemma,’ The Guardian, 20 January 1999, 2.

79 Wikimedia Commons contributors, ‘File: Campaign – One false move and you’re dead.png,’ Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Campain-_One_false_move_and_you%27re_dead.png&oldid=127818792 (accessed 3 June, 2021).

80 Mayer Hillman et al., One False Move: A Study of Children’s Independent Mobility (London: PSI, 1990), 106.

81 Department of Transport, Children and roads, 3; Letter to The Times on 27 March 1989, from the Chief Constable of Warwickshire writing in his capacity of secretary to the Safety Committee of ACPO, as quoted in Hillman et al., One False Move, 7.

82 Hillman et al., One False Move, 105.

83 Ibid, 2.

84 Roger Hart et al., ‘Introduction,’ Children, Youth and Environments 13, no.1 (2003): I.

85 Ibid, II.

86 Mead, ‘Neighbourhoods and human needs,’ 4.

87 Ward, The Child in the City, 206.

88 Claire Freeman, ‘Planning and Play: Creating Greener Environments,’ Children’s Environments 12, no. 3 (1995): 382.

89 Claire Freeman and Elizabeth Aitken-Rose, ‘Future Shapers: Children, Young People, and Planning in New Zealand Local Government,’ Environment and Planning 23 (2005): 233.

90 Rachel Kaplan, ‘Patterns of Environmental Preference,’ Environment and Behaviour 9 (1977): 213.

91 Lenore Behar and David Stevens, ‘Wilderness camping: an evaluation of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed children,’ Orthopsychiatry 4 (1978): 644, 653.

92 See also such studies as Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb, ‘Defining an agenda for the geography of children,’ Progress in Human Geography 23 (1999): 61-90; Jo Boyden and Pat Holden, Children of the Cities (London: Zed, 1991); Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Bartlett et al., Cities for Children.

93 Madeleine Nash, ‘Fertile minds,’ Time 149 (1997): 51.

94 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 254.

95 Ibid, 233.

96 Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, 129.

97 Katrina Navickas, Contested Commons (London: Reaktion Books, 2025), abstract.

98 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 241.

99 AA Foundation for Road Safety Research, The facts about road accidents and children (London: AA Motoring Trust, 2003), 8; Michael Ungar, ‘Kids Are Safer Outside Than Inside Their Homes,’ Psychology Today, 11 June, 2015; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2017 Data: Pedestrians: 2019 (Washington: NHTSA, 2019).

100 Play England, as quoted in: Anushka Asthana, ‘Kids need the adventure of ‘risky’ play,’ The Observer, 3 August 2008, 6.

101 Stephen Moss, Natural Childhood (Corsham: Park Lane Press, 2012), 13.

102 Ibid, 13.

103 Cindi Katz, ‘Power, Space and Terror: Social Reproduction and the Public Environment,’ in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low(New York: Routledge, 2006), 31-32.

104 As discussed in 1.2.1.

105 Crane, Child Protection in England, 33.

106 Ibid, 33.

107 Philip Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), 154.

108 Thérèse Murphy and Noel Whitty, ‘The Question of Evil and Feminist Legal Scholarship,’ Feminist Legal Studies 14, no. 1 (2006): 8.

109 Crane, Child Protection in England, 6.

110 Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare: How British Public Policy is Made (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 88.

Ashley Wroe, Social work, child abuse and the press (Norwich: Social Work Monographs, 1988), 11.

111 ‘What have we learned? Child death scandals since 1944,’ Community Care, accessed 30 September 2021, https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2007/01/10/what-have-we-learned-child-death-scandals-since-1944/.

112 Ted Oliver, ‘Baby death case workers rapped,’ Daily Mail, 1 October 1984, 10; Sarah Boseley, ‘Social Workers Denounce Councils,’ The Guardian, 27 July 1985, 3; BBC Radio News, ‘Lambeth social services failure,’ archived by British Universities Film and Video Council, accessed 2 November 2021, http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0011300005011.

113 BBC Radio News, ‘Social services criticised over Tyra Henry death,’ archived by British Universities Film and Video Council, accessed 2 November 2021, http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0000400037008.

114 Child Abduction Act 1984, Introductory Text (1).

115 Nick Basannavar, Sexual Violence against Children in Britain since 1965: Trailing Abuse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 186.

116 Ibid, 188.

117 Beatrix Campbell, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Cover-up (Bristol: Policy Press, 2023), 5-6.

118 See analysis of the 1989 Children Act later in this chapter.

119 Following the publication of this article: Henry Kempe et al., ‘The Battered-Child Syndrome,’ Journal of the American Medical Association 181 (1962): 143-154.

120 Esther Rantzen, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ Witness seminar held 1 June 2016, at the BT Tower, London, transcript held at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.

121 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 86-87.

122 Crane, Child Protection in England , 13.

123 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 3.

124 Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 18.

125 As revealed in the dismissive approach to the issue in: Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures of Childhood.

Elizabeth Anderson, The Disabled Schoolchild: a study of integration in primary schools (London: Routledge, 1973).

126 Crane, Child Protection in England , 6; Lorraine Radford, Child abuse and neglect in the UK today (London: NSPCC, 2011), 11.

127 Chris Waters, ‘“Dark strangers” in our midst: discourses of race and nation in Britain, 1947–1963,’ Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 222.

128 Child Care Act 1980, Part 1, Section 1.

129 Child Support Act 1991, Part 1, Section 4.

Academic response to these pieces of legislation will be explored later in this sub-section.

130 Children Act 1989, Part 3, Section 20 (8).

131 Peter Rothery, ‘Terminating and Restricting Parental Responsibility,’ Deans Court Chambers, accessed 17 August 2025, https://www.deanscourt.co.uk/articles/terminating-and-restricting-parental-responsibility.

132 Children Act 1989, Part 1, Section 2.

133 Ibid, Part 2, Section 8.

134 Chris Beckett, ‘Waiting for Court Decisions: A Kind of Limbo,’ Adoption & Fostering 24 (2000): 55-62; Children Act 1989, Part 5, Section 8; Nick Allen, Making Sense of the Children Act 1989 (Chichester: Wiley, 2005), 204-205.

135 Bridget McKeigue and Chris Beckett, ‘Care Proceedings under the 1989 Children Act: Rhetoric and Reality,’ The British Journal of Social Work 34, no. 6 (2004): 835.

136 Nellie Trickett et al., ‘The Impact of Sexual Abuse on Female Development: Lessons from a Multigenerational, Longitudinal Research Study,’ Development and Psychopathology 23, (2011): 453; Paul Mullen et al., ‘Childhood Sexual Abuse and Mental Health in Adult Life,’ The British Journal of Psychiatry 163 (1993): 721; Lucy Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”: Disclosures of Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century Britain,’ Journal of British Studies 57 (2018): 79.

137 Jane Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After: Children and Sex in the 1980s and 1990s,’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1996), 77.

138 Local Government Act 1988, Part 4, Section 28 (1).

139 Crane, Child Protection in England, 85.

140 ‘Child Protection Charities,’ Charity Choice, accessed 3 August 2021, https://www.charitychoice.co.uk/charities/children-and-youth/child-protection.

141 Other charities of this nature from the North East include: Children North East, The Children’s Foundation, Being Children, and Home Start Teeside.

142 Central Office of Information, ‘Think Bubble – Adult & Child,’ public information film aired 1994, 1 minute, National Archives.

143 Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After,’ 77.

144 Eve Colpus, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ witness seminar held 1 June 2016, at the BT Tower, London, transcript held at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.

145 Shaun Woodward, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ witness seminar held 1 June 2016, at the BT Tower, London, transcript held at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.

146 Woodward, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ witness seminar.

147 Matthew Hilton et al., A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 84.

148 Other examples of popular academic texts of this nature include: Howard Gadlin’s Child Discipline and the Pursuit of Self (1978), Marion Shoard’s The Theft of the Countryside (1980) and This Land is Our Land (1987), Nikolas Rose’s Governing the soul (1990), Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992), Sheridan Bartlett et al.’s Cities for Children (1999).

149 Nigel Parton, ‘The Beckford Report: A Critical Appraisal,’ The British Journal of Social Work 16, no. 5 (1986): 569.

150 Alex Mold and Virginia Berridge, Voluntary Action and Illegal Drugs: Health and Society in Britain since the 1960s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 22.

151 Kim Susan Blakely, ‘Parents’ Conceptions of Social Dangers to Children in the Urban Environment,’ Children’s Environments 11 (1994): 23.

152 Ibid, 24.

153 Rachel Pain, ‘Paranoid Parenting? Rematerializing Risk and Fear for Children,’ Social & Cultural Geography 7 (2006): 221.

154 Katz, ‘Power, Space and Terror,’ in The Politics of Public Space, 31-32.

155 Susan Handy et al., ‘Neighborhood Design and Children’s Outdoor Play: Evidence from Northern California,’ Children, Youth and Environments 18, no. 2 (2008): 162.

156 Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98-99.

157 Nicci Gerrard, ‘The mob will move on, the pain never can,’ The Observer,3 May 1998.

158 Tim Newburn, ‘Back to the Future? Youth Crime, Youth Justice and the Rediscovery of “Authoritarian Populism”,’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1996), 64.

159 John Major, ‘Back to Basics,’ transcript of speech delivered at Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool, 8 October, 1993, http://britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=139.

160 Barry Goldson, ‘“Difficult to Understand or Defend”: A Reasoned Case for Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility,’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 48 (2009): 514.

161 Tony Blair, speech in the House of Commons, 11^th January 1994.

162 Ministry of Justice, ‘Youth Justice Statistics,’ GOV.UK, accessed August 22, 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/youth-justice-statistics; Barry Goldson, ‘A Reasoned Case for Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility,’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 48, no 5 (2009): 514.

163 Tim Bateman and Neal Hazel, Youth Justice Timeline (Manchester: Beyond Youth Custody, 2014), 3.

164 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Part 1, Section 1 (1A).

165 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Part 1, Section 8.

166 Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003, Part 4, Section 30 (3).

167 Department for Children, Schools and Families, The Children’s Plan: Building brighter futures (London: Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2007), 5.

168 Simon Hughes, Commons Debate, 10 June 2008; Jack Straw, Commons Debate, 10 June 2008.

169 Ishita Pande, ‘Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”,’ The American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (2020): 1304.

170 Brian Hitchen, ‘How do you feel now you little bastards?,’ Daily Star, 25 November 1993, 1.

171 Yago Zayed, TV License Fee Statistics (London: House of Commons Library, 2022), 7.

Jennifer Zosh, Learning in the Digital Age: Putting Education Back in Educational Apps for Young Children (Montreal: Encyclopaedia on Early Childhood Development, 2016), 1.

172 Peter Buchner, ‘Growing Up in Three European Regions,’ in Growing Up in Europe: Contemporary Horizons in Childhood and Youth Studies, ed. Lynne Chisholm (Berlin: Gruyter, 1995), 47.

173 Petroc Taylor, ‘UK Households: Ownership of Internet Connection 1998–2018,’ Statista, published January 18, 2023, accessed July 22, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/369035/uk-households-internet-connection/.

174 Ellen Helsper and Sonia Livingstone, ‘Gradations in Digital Inclusion: Children, Young People and the Digital Divide,’ New Media & Society 9 (2007): 684.

175 ‘Gender Insights in Computing Education,’ National Centre for Computing Education, April 2023, 7.

176 Finlo Rohrer, ‘In praise of summer mischief,’ BBC News Magazine, accessed 15 February 2022, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7510372.stm.

177 Matthew Kelly, written message to author, August 2025.

178 Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray, T is for Television (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2008), 38-41.

179 Office for National Statistics, ‘170 Years of Industrial Change across England and Wales,’ The National Archives, accessed 15 February 2022, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20160106001413/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/170-years-of-industry/170-years-of-industrial-changeponent.html.

180 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech on Microcomputers in Schools,’ transcript of speech delivered at unknown location, 6 April, 1981, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104609.

181 Tony Blair as quoted in: Ewen MacAskill, ‘Blair’s Promise: Everyone,’ The Guardian, 2 October, 1996, 6.

182 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Remarks visiting TV South,’ transcript of speech delivered at Vinters Park, Maidstone, Kent, 6 January, 1984, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105595.

183 Communications Act 2003, Part 3, Section 4.

184 Kevin Browne and Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, ‘The influence of violent media on children and adolescents: a public-health approach,’ The Lancet 365 (2005): 702-704.

185 Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 229.

186 Martin Herbert, Clinical Child Psychology: Social Learning, Developments and Behaviour (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 170.

187 Moira Bovill and Sonia Livingstone, Families and the Internet: An Observational Study of Children and Young People’s Internet Use (London: British Telecom, 2001), 31.

188 Cora Martin and Leonard Benson, ‘Parental Perceptions of the Role of Television in Parent-Child Interaction,’ Journal of Marriage and Family 32, no. 3 (1970): 411.

189 Norman Warner, speech in the House of Lords, 16 November, 2004.

Al Aynsley-Green as quoted in: ‘Mothers ‘must learn obesity risk’,’ BBC News, accessed 15 February 2022, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6078490.stm.

190 Gary Varvel, ‘Nature Deficit Disorder,’ Indianapolis Star, January 2007.

191 Ann Heilmann et al., ‘Longitudinal associations between television in the bedroom and body fatness in a UK cohort study,’ International Journal of Obesity 41 (2017): 1503; Alice Goisis et al., ‘Why are poorer children at higher risk of obesity and overweight? A UK cohort study,’ European Journal of Public Health 26 (2015): 8.

192 David Buckingham, ‘New media, new markets, new childhoods? Children’s changing cultural environment in the age of digital technology,’ in An Introduction to Childhood Studies, ed. Mary Jane Kehily (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 158.

193 Beck, Risk Society, 10.

194 Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1 (New York: TV Books, 1999), 178.

195 Sandra Calvert, Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (Pennsylvania: McGraw, 1999); Kirsten Drotner, ‘Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity,’ Paedagogica Historica 35 (1999): 593-619; Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 199.

196 Ray Lorenzo, Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (UNICEF International Child Development Centre, 1992).

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte, 1994), 52.

197 Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)¸ 60; John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

198 Jon Katz, Media Rants: Post Politics in the Digital Nation (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1997), 159.

199 Oppenheimer, The Flickering Mind, 218.

200 Livingstone, Young People and New Media, 20.

201 Marilyn Campbell, ‘The impact of the mobile phone on young people’s social life,’ in Social Change in the 21 Century, ed. Karen Barnett (Queensland: Queensland Press, 2005), 10.

202 Stephen Williams and Lynda Williams, ‘Space Invaders: The Negotiation of Teenage Boundaries through the Mobile Phone,’ The Sociological Review 53 (2003): 314-331.

203 Tony Charlton et al., ‘Mobile Telephone Ownership and Usage among 10- and 11-Year-Olds,’ Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 7 (2002): 156.

204 Dominique Pasquier, ‘Media at home: domestic interactions and regulation,’ in Children and Their Changing Media Environment, ed. Sonia Livingstone (London: Routledge, 2001), 145.

205 Buchner, ‘Growing Up in Three European Regions,’ 47.

206 Livingstone, Young People and New Media, 169.

207 Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 239; Freeman and Tranter, Children and Their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds, 23.

208 Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 239.

209 Tonya Rooney, ‘Trusting children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child’s experience of trust, risk and responsibility?,’ Surveillance & Society 7 (2010): 344.

210 Ibid, 350.

211 James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, ‘Preventing Plant Blindness,’ The American Biology Teacher 61, (1999): 82.

212 Ian Rotherham, Cultural Severance and The Environment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), V; Louv, Last Child in the Woods, 3.

213 See many texts from this period including: Louv, Last Child in the woods; Carr, The shallows; Skenazy, free range kids; Frost, A history of children’s play ; Lorenzo, Too Little Time and Space for Childhood; Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood; Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).

214 Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine, Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 51.

215 Rebecca Caswell and Tom Warman, Play for Today (Halifax: The National Children’s Museum, 2014), 5.

216 Ibid, 5.

217 Briana Lees et al., ‘Screen Media Activity Does Not Displace Other Recreational Activities among 9-10 year-old Youth: A Cross-sectional ABCD Study,’ BMC Public Health 20, no. 1 (2020): 1792.

218 Heilmann et al., ‘Longitudinal associations between television in the bedroom and body fatness in a UK cohort study,’ 1503. For press see: Christine Ro, ‘Why ‘plant blindness’ matters,’ BBC, 29 April 2019, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190425-plant-blindness-what-we-lose-with-nature-deficit-disorder; Neil Midgley, ‘The explosion of countryside TV helping treat our “nature deficit disorder”,’ The Guardian, 27 March 2016, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/27/countryfile-bbc-nature-deficient-disorder; Tamara Cohen, ‘Let Granny teach our children how to play outside, say National Trust as it warns of “nature deficit” curse,’ The Daily Mail, 30 March 2012, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2122543/Nature-deficit-latest-curse-hit-children-obesity-health-safety.html; Alice Wilkinson, ‘Have you got Nature Deficit Disorder? Then ditch the gym – it’s time to get outdoors,’ The Telegraph, 6 February 2017, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/have-got-nature-deficit-disorder-ditch-gym-time-get-outdoors/; Caroline Lucas and Mary Colwell, ‘Children are developing a nature deficit disorder,’ The Sunday Times, 25 October 2018, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/children-are-developing-a-nature-deficit-disorder-z50bhflxz.

219 Louv, Last Child in the Woods, 73, 127.

220 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 32.

221 Ibid, 141.

222 Louv, Last Child in the Woods, 3.

223 Ibid, 33.

Lenore Skenazy, Free Range Kids (San Francisco: Wiley, 2009), 228.

224 Holloway and Valentine, Cyberkids, 52.
2026.01.30
Introduction – The Natural Habitat of Youth?
Chapter 1 ->
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).
2026.01.30
Reconnecting… Considering Digital Environments in Narratives of British Childhood Decline 1977-2010CE

Download this Article (includes footnotes and bibliography)

Update Jan 2026: This article is 5 years old as I am publishing it, and since it was written I feel I have come a long way in my understanding of the topic. It is, however, an important precursor to my doctoral thesis, the North East Environments of Childhood Project, and as such I think it is worth preserving.

We could never have loved the earth so well,

if we had had no childhood in it.

– George Eliot, ‘The Mill on the Floss’.

INTRODUCTION

Play Across Time

Across cultures and continents our archaeological records teach us of children at play. In 2017 in southern Siberia archaeologists uncovered a rare collection of dolls and figurines dated to c. 2,500BCE, buried in graves alongside their childhood owners. In 1,000BCE, Ancient Egyptian children played with spinning tops, bouncy balls, and dice. In 200CE, Mesoamerican children played with wheeled toys, especially noteworthy as the wheel was only ever designed for the purposes of play in in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies, never transport. Alongside and earlier than any of these, natural playthings such as sticks, stones, streams, and bones are tools of play with which almost any child in history will be familiar, and indeed other creatures such as dolphins and chimpanzees have also been observed to toy with such objects. In your own youth you will undoubtedly have played with objects like these, and took part in other ancient pastimes such as hide and seek, tag, hopscotch, and leapfrog, games passed down the centuries by childhood oral traditions. In the 21^st century, however, there is growing debate and concern surrounding the survivability of these millennia-old entertainments, the very concept of childhood itself has been said to be under threat. Calls arise for a ‘much needed child-saving movement’, but from where have they sprung? What threatens these time-honoured traditions?

‘kids used to play all day outside, ride bicycles, play sports, and build forts’, so affirms the opening lines of Digital Childhood: The Impact of Using Digital Technology on Children’s Health, a 2019 report written for the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research & Allied Science (IJPRAS). The idea of what kids ‘used’ to do is operative in this context, a framing that places all young people under the roof of the same broad church. Another article for an educational advice group, Consequences of the New Digital Childhood, reads: ‘Think back on your childhood, and you probably remember hours spent in active, imaginative, and outdoor play. It’s likely that you rough-housed with friends or neighbours, engaged with nature, and built entire worlds from sheer imagination’. Sentiments such as these are frequently expressed in both contemporary academic and journalistic writing, often accompanied with an argument that “kids these days”, as Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s The Nature of Childhood asserts, waste their energy ‘watching television, or looking at their computers, cell phones and video games’. ‘Whatever happened to ‘go outside and play’?’, decries a 2017 CNN article. In reading contemporary writing on children and their environments there is one inescapable and united conclusion, that today’s young spend too much time in the digital world and too little time outdoors engaging with nature and physical play. However, division quickly surfaces when it comes to questions about the origins of this situation, and how it is best addressed.

Applying predominantly to what can loosely be called “western childhoods” several academics have sought to put a name to this phenomenon. Ian Rotherham called it ‘Cultural Severance’, the sectioning of an essential natural element of humanity, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined ‘Plant Blindness’, however it has been Richard Louv’s ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (NDD) that has proved the commonly adopted term. Though not recognised as an official psychological ‘disorder’, NDD has gained traction with a wide variety of UK groups such as The National Trust and The Council For Learning Outside the Classroom as well as being a foundational principle behind The Children and Nature Network. During the 2010s it was also picked up by the majority of the country’s major news distributors from across the political spectrum including the BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. NDD has been associated with increases in ‘obesity, diabetes, autism, coordination disorder, developmental abnormalities, speech, learning difficulties, sensory disorder, anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders’ as well as ‘risky sexual behaviours, drug use, poor academic performance, and aggression’. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows takes an even more serious view, arguing that prolonged time spent in the digital world, particularly for youthful minds, is degrading the very quality of human thought itself. As Carr puts it: ‘What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization… we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting’. The issue unsurprisingly plays into common parental fears over safety, health, and freedom and its resolution is regarded by many not only as a practical but moral imperative; the solution of course being, as Louv defined it, for children to be ‘reunited with the rest of nature’.

Figure 1. A satirical cartoon illustrating parental fears over NDD.

In Britain, as digital technologies continue to pervade aspects of childhood from the classroom to the living room, so too has scepticism and criticism arisen of the ways in which these new virtual environments are influencing the culture and quality of youth. Across the press, academia, and popular non-fiction writing there is a growing literature, some of it more declarative than others, that warns of digital dangers, particularly for the ‘malleable’ minds of children. From historical, educational, biological, psychological, geographical, and anthropological perspectives such works are making parents and educators more aware than they have ever been of the relationship between environmental factors and the happiness and healthiness of their children. However, popular conceptions of where digital cultures of childhood originated, what they constitute of as virtual environments, and how they have evolved over time, are generally dualistic notions that portray childhood as a “now versus then” phenomenon. Far too often a conclusion is reached that only reflects one aspect of the reality behind the development of late-20^th and early-21^st century childhoods in Britain in the search for something to blame as the cause of NDD, cultural severance, plant blindness, or whichever term is favoured for the separation of Britain’s children from its landscapes.

Technology itself is often assigned the blame for cajoling children away from nature, designed to be addictive and to constantly require attention;the finger is also pointed at unnecessarily protective parents who confine their children indoors, and at children themselves who choose the virtual over the physical. On the opposite end of the scale a form of technocratic utopianism, the ‘silicon valley way’, is a less common but still influentially adopted stance that hails a digital panacea for childhood’s ills; this approach conceptualises of a problem like NDD as ‘merely a physical Earth problem, and not an ethical one’. Either way, both perspectives take the view that modern childhood needs a “fix”. As David Buckingham observed in 2015, the discussion has become ‘marked by a kind of schizophrenia that often accompanies the advent of new cultural forms. If we look back to the early days of the cinema, or indeed to the invention of the printing press, it is possible to identify a similar mixture of hopes and fears’. Indeed looking much further back, as Carr notes, Socrates voiced fears that reliance on the written word as a substitute for personal memory would reduce the ability of the human mind. Anti-digital rhetoric often leans toward the nostalgic and romantic, with quotes such as Roald Dahl’s plea from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory still adorning many a café-bookshop wall:

‘So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.’

Discussions and analysis of the ways in which the technological advances of the modern era have impacted children in Britain are certainly valuable, but the present discourse in large part lacks a nuance founded on a complex understanding of the multiplicity of childhoods, children as ‘dynamically configured, diverse and entangled assemblages of natural, cultural and technological elements’.²⁸ The digital world does not stand apart from factors of gender, race, class, region, and ability; when we speak of what children “used” to do, should we not be asking which children? Furthermore, virtual environments themselves must be understood in multiplicity and analysed for their specific qualities, not only as general “devices” and “screens” so often explored only in concept, merely antitheses to popular conceptions of what constituted pre-digital childhoods.

Methodology and Historiography

The focus of this study is consequently upon the transitionary period during which digital technologies became adopted and then prevalent facets of childhood in Britain, beginning its analysis in 1977CE, with the widespread availability of personal computers, and finishing in 2010CE, with the introduction of the Digital Economy Act. The primary route of analysis will be through documents produced throughout this period from academic and government sources that undertook to study and report upon childhood and the digital environment. From an environmental and child-focussed perspective these sources will be used to explore the changing face of childhoods during this period as well as to study how those changes were implemented and interpreted by wider British society in a rapidly evolving environment. Part 1 will contextualise the discussion and explain the already contentious debates that were surrounding the nature of children’s play and education before the introduction of technological factors. Part 2 will continue chronologically, assessing the environments surrounding British childhoods in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries that pushed them towards digitisation, and how those technologies both facilitated and impeded that transition. Finally, this study will conclude that the stereotype of children choosing to spend their time indoors, inveigled by flashing screens, does not take into account wider structural and societal changes taking place in Britain at the time and characterises a very diverse category of people as a monolith. Even more so than their elders, a child’s individual life is subject to a set of intricate, interconnected systems of economy, culture, and environment over which they have little influence. Particular attention will be paid therefore to conceptualising the digital development of childhoods as a continuum in which there are no straightforward states of “before” and “after”.

This study provides an alternative narrative to many of the existing histories of childhood and the digital environment during this period which predominantly fall into two categories, histories of childhood than do not consider the digital, and digital histories that do not consider children. Nerds 2.0.1, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, On the Way to the Web, and Spam are all examples of prominent cyber histories in which childhood presence and influence is affectively considered naught, their furthest mention in relation to the development of technologies that can help children with disabilities or illness. That is not to say that these are not good publications which competently examine many aspects of digital history, and all were certainly useful in the writing of this study, but it must also be said that they neglect to consider children as the prominent users of new technologies which they are.

From within the existing historiography on the history of childhood there have been a number of works that have examined children’s lives during this period such as Children and Their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, and Children in the Anthropocene. These texts offer some excellent insights into many of the contemporary factors behind the movement of children indoors and some of the consequences of that movement. Particularly beneficial for this study has been the multitude of research projects on youth undertaken throughout the period that they point to and evaluate, offering valuable insight into the changing nature and aims of these studies over time. However, a general omission in these texts is the digital space. And one dangerous pitfall that much of this writing falls into is the vagueness so often applied in arguments that evoke the “before times”, construed as periods of de facto childhood liberty, happiness, and quality without being critically engaged with. These declensionist narratives of degradation and corruption are particularly prevalent when authors in the existing historiography frame their assessments around experiences of their own childhoods and ‘the freedom we had as kids’. Louv’s Last Child in the Woods puts that ‘baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems… like a quaint artifact’. Analysis directs itself towards the processes of change with the implicit understanding that this change is moving away from something that was previously good and little attention is paid towards identifying children as a diverse group whose lives have differed greatly across this period based on factors such as class, gender, and region. Furthermore, this contrivance assumes a past intimacy with nature that runs counter to ‘a long history of environmental degradation and disconnectedness’ starting well before the childhood of anybody alive today.

The question must be asked: to what extent are our historical conceptions of childhood moulded by the experiences of middle-class academics whose criticisms of modern childhoods fall most pertinently on working class households who historically and contemporarily have had more obstacles between themselves and access to nature? Such a comment may appear wantonly critical but is only to ask us to deepen our conceptions of what digital childhoods can mean. Indeed, as Jennifer Ladino identifies, we cannot miss that the forms of eco-nostalgia presented in many texts are intentionally designed to be a ‘mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice’. The intersection between digital environments and digital environmentalism. Whilst it is undoubtable that concerns should be raised over the changing nature of youth in Britain since the emergence of digital childhoods, and indeed this study raises many, it is also important to recognise and challenge arguments that present common notions of a timeless “golden” period of early life which only in the 21^st century has come under threat. This is a trend also common outside of academia, what Peter Kahn named ‘environmental generational amnesia’.

As William Neuman identified in 1991, research in this field must tread a fine line between a technologically determinist narratives that disregard social and cultural change and construct such ‘mythical objects of anxiety as the computer addict, the screen-zombie… the Nintendo-generation, the violent video fan, etc.’ and culturally determinist narratives that romantically assume, at least implicitly, that “our” children are too intelligent to be duped by the messaging of ‘consumer-culture capitalist economies’. A multiplicity of childhoods approach is a good method to avoid falling into either of these traps as it does not assume any individual outside force to be deterministic over a category of people’s lives. In future research however, it will be useful to employ new interdisciplinary methods that engage with the computational social sciences as well as explore emerging fields such as digital ethnography and other forms of digital social research. This will allow scholars to better interrogate relationships between children and the specificities of the programmed architectures of digital devices and environments.

Two foundational texts on which this study has been built and seeks to build on are Matthew Thomson’s Lost Freedomand Sian Edwards’ Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside, both of which are important historical studies of the relationship between child and environment. Susan Danby’s Digital Childhoods: Technologies and Children’s Everyday Lives and Sonia Livingstone’s Young People and New Media have also been instrumental texts from outside of the historical field in their examinations of cyberspace on its own terms and their attempts to look beyond, as Danby says, ‘simplistic descriptions of digital technology somehow having inherent ‘effects’ or ‘impacts’’. Affrica Taylor’s article “Reconceptualising the ‘nature’ of childhood” was also very helpful in warning against portraying an ‘essentialised’ view of children and environment that has been used in the past as a means to oppress or exclude certain children from a society by branding them as “natural” creatures, apart from the rest of humanity. Still however, these texts offer little consideration of digital factors as a part of the ecosystems of children’s environments. Not all digital histories can or should take child-focussed or environmental approaches, and not all histories of childhood environments must consider the digital, but the extent to which the history of childhood cyberspace has been overlooked in favour of physical space, to this day, is surprising.

As the history of the relationships between children, their environments, and the way the adult world has sought to shape them in Britain receives increasing attention as contemporary cultures struggle to come to terms with new digital normalities, ideas of a golden past are invoked frequently as models to which Britain should be returning. However, there are also strong arguments made to the contrary, as Lloyd DeMause provocatively wrote in 1974: ‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused’. Is a loss of nature and freedom in childhood a necessary cost of increased protection and quality of life? Contemporary debates surrounding these issues are not inventions of the modern world and indeed are surprisingly reflective of far more pedigreed discussions; their development is the most recent stage in a long historical tradition of interrogating the relationship between environment and childhood. It is crucial, and interesting, therefore that we appreciate the longer view of the pre-digital history of British childhoods as both comparison and context within which to assess the changes they would start to face in the late 20^th century which so fundamentally shifted the environmental landscape.

Part 1

KIDS THOSE DAYS

The Longue Durée of Work and Play

The British and wider European tradition of play and education is commonly traced to Classical Greece which produced a number of foundational theories on the relationship between these two activities. Plato wrote extensively on the topic of childhood pursuits, both in regard to advising parents on practical advice for child rearing, and in pushing for legislative changes surrounding children’s games. Plato taught that child’s play could moulded and diverted into ‘productive channels’, where games and toys could be used to identify in which skills children were most apt and then to prepare them for an adult occupation that utilised those skills. A child who played with blocks, for example, would be encouraged to become a builder and another who played with dolls to become a teacher. Aristotle also believed that what a child did in play was important to their growth, and that a person would become lazy and unproductive if they did not have an active childhood. Indeed, he argued that children should receive no formal education until they were at least 5 years old, as inhibiting play during early years would be detrimental their development. Many Greek children’s games are still recognisable today such as Heads or Tails, Blind Man’s Buff, and Kiss in the Ring. Quintilian, a famed Roman educator, continued this legacy, insisting that it was essential for parents and teachers to observe pupils’ play in order to recognize individuality in their temperaments and intellects.

Study of medieval children has been characterised since 1962 by the French historian Philippe Ariès’ now infamous work Centuries of Childhood which studied paintings and diaries of the period across a span of 400 years. Controversially, Ariès concluded that during the medieval era in Europe the category of “child” did not exist as could be understood for periods prior and hence, youngsters being seen as ‘small-scale adults’. He argued that parents lost too many children to attach any form of unique significance to them and furthermore that they raised their children to believe that play led to idleness, truancy, and inattentiveness. However, several scholars have since criticised this approach, with the research of Nicholas Orme, Shulamith Shahar, and Sally Crawford rebuking the majority of Ariès’ arguments. Orme demonstrated evidence of adults providing tailored items of culture for their children such as toys, games, and books, also noting children’s tendency to rebel and spend time by themselves away from adult supervision creating their own games and cultures. Shahar pointed out that the medieval and renaissance periods equally enjoyed a proliferation of play with small objects such as marbles, balls, and dice and references to equipment to help with jumping, swinging, and balancing known as “merry totters” being not uncommon. Crawford, mirroring Plato, explained how girls and boys ‘extended their skills’ through play in relation to tasks they would later be required to perform when they were older; girls learning household tasks and boys the trades of their elders.

In the 16^th century Martin Luther espoused extensively for the reformation of education as well as religion, describing schools as ‘a hell and purgatory… in which with much flogging, trembling, anguish, and wretchedness, they learn nothing’. He proposed a universal state school system that would be compulsory for every child but would also be part of a wider education structure that would also include time for work at home, learning trades, and, of course, play. A century later the Czech theologian John Amos Comenius built upon Luther’s work and proposed the idea of the educational ladder for both boys and girls, a staged set of schools to cater for children as they grew, beginning with a ‘mother school’ (or nursery) for young children and progressing all the way through to university. He also advocated for using outdoor play as a technique for fostering the healthy development of mind and body, saying that ‘it is necessary to put the body in motion and allow the mind to rest’. Comenius’ teachings were exemplary of a strange consistency across the history of childhood theory and philosophy throughout the European tradition where there has been a tension between intellectuals arguing for greater emphasis to be placed on outdoor activity and play against educational systems that leant toward more sedentary pursuits. It was with the enlightenment however, particularly in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, that many of the specific educational dichotomies that are characteristic of contemporary discussion over digital childhoods today came into being.

Figure 2. Ancient Greek statuette of girls playing knucklebones.

Enlightenment Thought

Rationalism and romanticism were two intellectual movements of the enlightenment that had a significant impact upon the development of approaches to children and environment. The rationalist perspective, characterised by the works of thinkers such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke, is still very much influential on the official structures and regulations of modern British childhood. This stance framed the natural world as a force of reason, in some ways the very foundation of order and reason. On this basis, rationalists understood nature as fundamentally logical, and as such could be understood and controlled with the application of appropriate reason. This same approach was adopted towards children who, as natural creatures, were seen to be intrinsically governable. John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is famous and exemplary in this regard as he describes the child as being ‘tabula rasa’, a “blank slate” which need only be impressed upon. Locke’s observations of children at play led him to the concept of ‘educative play’, using playtime as a space for semi-structured tuition. He described how, in his experience, the children of wealthy families were done great harm by being showered with toys and gifts which only taught them ‘pride, vanity, and covetousness’; they did not learn to value what they had. In Locke’s view a child was much like any other natural organism in that they had to be carefully managed otherwise they would become wild. With the correct instruction, however, they could be formed into an instrument of reason.

Where rationalists such as Locke sought to control a nature that was logical, romanticists sought to learn from a nature they saw as inscrutable. In large part the romantic phenomenon arose in response to the increasingly rationalist-informed industrialised landscapes of Europe that authors such as William Blake, Mary Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau found themselves surrounded by. Predominantly an artistic movement, romanticists forwarded emotional countercultural arguments in which children and the natural world were often construed as intertwined joint symbols of innocence and purity. Children were a part of the natural world in a way that adults were not and could not be. As Rousseau argued in On Education (1763), childhood should be defined by teaching that is ‘beyond our control’ and follows ‘the goal of nature’. Indeed, Rousseau saw no distinction between work and play for children. Games were the work of the young, and in them ‘the child brings everything: the cheerful interest, the charm of freedom, the bent of his mind, the extent of his knowledge’. He saw the work of rationalist tutors such as Locke as pedantic and damaging, filling children’s head with facts rather than skills.

This romanticist connection is well demonstrated in the lines William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”, published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.Therein Wordsworth marvels at the beauty of a rainbow, considering how it takes him back to a state of child-like joy, before concluding with this reflection:

‘The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety’

Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel were heavily influenced by Rousseau’s writings and built much of his theoretical work into their practices. Like Rousseau, the core concept of their position was that the key to a good childhood education was in creating an environment, both physical and social, that fostered creativity and development. Pestalozzi also emphasized an aspect of Comenius’ teachings which said that true learning must take place through actions; that you ‘thought by thinking, not by appropriating the thoughts of others’. Fröbel, creator of the kindergarten, believed that educative programs should be moulded around the natural interests of the child and, once again, that constructive, enjoyable play was the best method by which to determine what an individual was intuitively inclined towards. He highlighted the keeping and cultivation of allotments and gardens as a particularly helpful pursuit, as these were spaces in which children could watch the fruits of their labour develop over time, and eventually harvest a reward that would be appropriate to the quality of their efforts. This idea that young children learn most effectively from being able to interact with and actively manipulate the materials of their environments was explored further in the 20^th century with the works of Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.

As with rationalism, romanticist ideas still inform greatly on contemporary British childhoods, although in a less structural format. Aside for children of kindergarten age where it can be reasonably argued that romanticism is a guiding structural principle, romantic notions of childhood exist outside of official practices and educative systems and more in the realm of popular conceptions and representations of childhood; in children’s books, television, and in the kinds of outdoor activities parents are encouraged to nurture their children with. However, whilst the two philosophies can appear at first blush to be opposed in a “nature versus nurture” form, they are ultimately two sides of the same coin. Both emerged during a period of European history where confidence in the traditional role of religion to act as a moral compass, spiritual guide, and force of reason, was being eroded. The natural world, and the child by association, was able to act as a unifying, present force that both movements drew upon as motivation and justification for their actions and beliefs. As Sara Maitland writes in Gossip from the Forest: ‘wilderness finds its complement and counterpart either in conceptions of childhood moral innocence or the child as tabula rasa’. Indeed, the founding theoretical framework at the heart of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century child saving movement was a fusion of both philosophies.

Play Manufactured

‘Life without play is a grinding, mechanical existence organized around doing the things necessary for survival’.

In 1859 the very first purpose-built playground in the world was opened in Manchester, a prototype for a model that would see mass adoption in Britain in years to come. The rise of the motor car in the early 20^th century accelerated this trend as city streets shifted in purpose away from acting as areas of public domain and towards avenues of mass transport. The provision of specialist playground environments and equipment for children was an urban creation, a key point of principle being to move children out of the streets (and other public areas) and into specialised environments of safety. During this same period Britain saw a boom in the commercial mass production of toys, and the birth of the toy shop as a common feature on British high streets. Where previously crafted toys had been the provision of the upper and middle classes, over the century they steadily “democratised”, becoming available to working class households, but also becoming more standardised and controlled. In majority and increasingly toys of the democratised market were designed for yard and indoor play. This would lead to the phenomenon of toy “trends”, and an ever-expanding library of choice for children and parents. However, as Natalie Canning explains in Play and Practice in the Early Years Foundation Stage, and as this study will go on to further demonstrate, there are many developmental benefits that unpredictable, unstructured, informal environments of play can offer a child over domesticated ones.

This shift towards pushing British youth towards more “guarded” forms of play was campaigned for by a number of organisations, namely the various Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs) that were set up throughout the country’s cities during this period, the first being in Liverpool in 1883 before the national organisation coalesced in 1889. This was the birth of the child saving movement, primarily designed as Anthony Platt describes, as a romanticist conservativemovementthat cherished children but also controlled them. It was during this period that aspects of youth that had previously been dealt with informally became categorised and increasingly thought of as distinct identifiable phenomena; phenomena that could be addressed, controlled, and even eliminated. To name something is to ascribe it identifiable characteristics and members of the child saving movement were, in a sense, in the business of “inventing” new categories of youth behaviour, particularly misbehaviour, as exemplified with the creation of the juvenile court system during this time.

Figure 3. Print of an early 20^thcentury toy shop.

This increased attention paid to children and childhood came with substantial benefits for many young people who previously had been overlooked by powers of authority. Those neglected, bullied, and beaten, those with dependencies, and those considered “delinquent” were now more likely to receive official support. In America, where the child saving movement was developing roughly in parallel with Britain, Baronet Charles Chute called the juvenile court system ‘one of the greatest advances in child welfare that has ever occurred’. At the same time however, the same system necessarily resulted in expanded restrictions surrounding where all children were allowed or supposed to go and what they should do as safety became a mainstream political concern. Exemplary of this new attitude sweeping Europe and North America was a precedent-setting 1915 legal case in Tacoma City, Washington where the parents of a boy who was injured falling from a swing successfully sued the school board for financial compensation. Following that lawsuit, playgrounds across Washington state and indeed America were taken down in fear of prosecution.

After the first world war there was a brief flourishing of progressivist, even utopian, writing that argued for increased freedoms for children, particularly in Britain; the collective trauma of that conflict bolstered new approaches to childhood, alongside the changing court system and a falling birth rate. However, after the second world war utopian freedom-oriented thought reverted to a ‘child-centred’ pedagogy which placed more emphasis on protecting children, creating purpose-built environments for them separate from the adult world. In A Progressive Education? Laura Tidsall sums up the logic of child-centred education and parenting as seeing children as ‘fundamentally separate from adults, distinguished by their developmental immaturity’. Tidsall argues that this pedagogy took a half-hold over Britain and that it still exists today in tension with movements that want to do away with specially manufactured environments and supervision in favour of more informal methods of childhood management. When technology entered the scene it was not doing so to a previously stable understanding of childhood; the social upheavals of the 20^th century had already created a volatile environment wherein the older generation was bringing up the younger in a significantly different world to the one they themselves had been raised.

Part 2

KIDS THESE DAYS

‘This is an era when ultrasound scans are routinely shared on social media by expectant parents… Thus, the cliché of millennial children being ‘born digital’ might perhaps be updated to ‘preborn digital’’.

The Modern Child

After 1977, as home computers, games consoles, and later mobile phones in the 1990s became available, British children were among their most early adopters. In Young People and New Media Sonia Livingstone forwards that these children were ‘a distinctive and significant cultural grouping’ which pioneered the use of new technologies, due to existing in a stage of life characterised by learning and experimentation. ‘Cyber playgrounds’ were an environment of play unlike any that had come before them. However, whilst “children” may have been prominent adopters of new technologies in 20^th century Britain, that conclusion does not satisfy the need to consider a multiplicity of childhoods. Multiple studies have demonstrated that ‘boys, older children and middle class children all benefited from more and better quality access’ to digital devices and then later the internet than girls, working class, and younger children. Helsper and Livingstone describe this in terms of ‘digital opportunity’, whilst a child may have access to a computer, they may also have poor quality hardware, connection, or be ill equipped with the knowledge and skills required to fully utilise the tool. The largest determining factor as to whether someone is an active web user has been found to be confidence, not age. In Olin-Scheller and Roos’ 2015 study they found that rural Swedish children only peripherally engaged with digital activities at both school and home, problematising the view that young people were ever a ‘homogeneous group of digital natives’. Indeed, today’s children generally, even those of privileged backgrounds, have been found to spend the vast majority of their time online on only a few websites, their lack of “travel” mirroring those with low opportunity in the physical world.

Existing research such as that of Kidron and Rudkin has thus shown that young people, being ‘firmly on the lowest rung of the digital opportunity ladder’, are advocates for more management and control of digital environments. The authors of a 2017 report, The Internet on Our Own Terms, also found that British children wanted more regulation of online content and more control they could exert themselves over what they encountered online. In some respects these reports fly in the face of popular conceptions of children as natural-born inhabitants of the digital wilderness. To be clear however, these reports did not conclude children to favour restriction to freedom, but rather a greater balance between the two. Childhood is a process of development, a key element of which is moving from a state of high dependency during your first 5 years of life, through a state of semi-independence and self-care from 6 to 11, and towards increasing autonomy and growing reliance on peers over carers from 12 to 18. Therefore, children prefer an environment that can evolve with them, and be flexible in terms of the degrees of independence it allows.

The 1970s and 1980s

It is well known that play is among the most fundamental behaviours human beings engage in, and indeed is a signifier of intelligence in multiple species. Important to play itself is the environment it takes place in, as different environments allow for different kinds of play, and furthermore different people experience those spaces in different ways. Digital environments such as computers and games consoles, for example, can allow for a great deal of intellectual and social play, but evidently less physical sporting play. Since the late 1970s a loss of physical play for children was an area of keen interest to educators, commentators, and academics who feared a loss of tactility and healthy activity in play alongside a sense of a ‘centuries-old freedom’ being eroded. Indeed, these fears were not unfounded, a National Trust survey in 2016 found that today’s children spend half as much time outdoors as their parents did in 1970s and 1980s. A lack of outdoor play has been linked to a number of physical and emotional illnesses, depression, low educational achievement, and social abnormalities, so establishing the role of digital childhoods within this trend is important.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s home-computing became accessible to an increasingly expanding audience with the release of models such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. During this period however, whilst research into environments of childhood was prevalent, little was made of the role that digital technologies might be playing. Instead, the dominant theme of the literature was the urban child, and the ways in which the modern world restricted childhood freedoms more structurally, in both the sense of physical and social structures. Studies increasingly focussed on the positive effects of “getting out into nature” for city kids, with a particular interest in those living with poverty or learning disabilities. A 1973 report for the Department of Environment found that 75% of children, when asked to describe their favourite places, talked about spaces where they could play outdoors. However Peter Townsend’s Poverty In the United Kingdom (1979) found that working class children were four times less likely to have access to an outdoor space of size or quality enough sit outside in than middle class children. Rachel Kaplan’s Patterns of Environmental Preference (1977) focussed on longitudinal measures and found that her suburban-child participants reported beneficial outcomes up to several years after being sent on an extended nature-camp expedition. Similarly Behar and Stevens’ Wilderness Camping (1978) placed city children on a ‘residential treatment programme’ centred around outdoor activities, and found that the majority of their subjects demonstrated ‘improved interpersonal skills and school performance’ after the activity. Both of these reports chose children with learning disabilities and conditions such as ADD (today called ADHD) to study.

Figure 4. A Prize Gold-Plated BBC Micro for the accompanying magazine, 1985.

Kevin Lynch’s Growing up in cities (1977), funded by UNESCO, was also concerned with rising urbanism around the world, particularly the ways cities were designed to cater increasingly for adults in cars rather than children on foot. This affected all children but was acutely felt by girls who, being seen as more vulnerable to such dangers, were more likely to be restricted from street activity. Howard Gadlin’s Child Discipline and the Pursuit of Self (1978) connected urban environments to a new ‘modern ideology… in which the goal of individual self-realisation overshadows community solidarity and stability’. Gadlin argued that the enclosed environments of the city both mirrored and encouraged enclosed internal cultures that were based on a desire to ‘control the personality of children’. Colin Ward’s The Child in the City (1978) was a popular text of the period that similarly challenged the adult centric-ness of the city environment, arguing for ‘a city where children live in the same world as I do’. Ward highlighted “micro-places” such as footpaths, greens, and kerbsides that were important spaces of play and refuge for children. Matthews and Limb’s later study Defining an agenda for the geography of children (1999) also found that small informal spaces which could be manipulated by children were the most valued; these included trees, ponds, dens, lanes, and climbing and hiding spaces generally.

The Child in the City, alongside texts like Urie Bronfenbrenner’s The Ecology of Human Development (1979) attempted to adopt an ‘ecologically valid psychology of development’, looking to study children in their “natural” environments as a direct response to the perception that children were losing them. During this period it is certainly true that city planners held simplistic notions of children characterized by a concept of a “universal child” which of course excluded lower-income, non-white, and female childhoods that typically had less access to the cars and technologies that facilitated their concepts of late 20^th century life. The overwhelming academic cause of the period was an attempt to understand how cities could be designed differently to better accommodate young people, however this too skewed towards the types of childhoods that the academics writing the studies had had.

One contrary voice of the period however was Alasdair Roberts, whose Out to Play: The Middle Years of Childhood (1980) argued that childhood games and play were just as lively as they had ever been in Britain. He popularised the idea of the “middle childhood”, from ages 8 to 13, as a time he had observed during the 1970s as one ‘of secret societies and clubs with many rules… the age of collecting (sea-shells, football cards, stamps), of jokes and riddles and odd customs’. Roberts’ research was specifically focussed upon Aberdeen however, so his conclusions drawn across the whole country stretch thin, but his work is a strong piece of evidence to support regional differences in childhood trends. In provincial cities such as Aberdeen, it is logical that urbanism was less pronounced. Digital environments were thus not considered drivers of the “decline” of childhood during this period that so many publications lamented, instead the city and adjacent factors such as cars and insularism were singled out. Cars in particular were a force that enhanced social polarization, as those children who did not have access to a car or a parent available to drive them had less access to activities and nature. Busy roads and pollution also tended to centre around poorer areas, reducing independent mobility. As can be seen in Newson and Newson’s Seven Years Old in the Home Environment (1976) however, whilst the language of the time always discussed a loss of “childhood” play, in majority the play that was under threat was boys’ play, as girls were already more restricted to indoor activities by the expectations of parents and society at large.

During the 1980sthe field of research began to widen to include children more generally, as supposed to just those living in poverty or with learning disabilities, and indeed adults were increasingly included in studies looking at the negative impacts of urban environments. Gary Evans’ Environmental Stress (1982) pulled together much of the disparate research of the 1970s into one volume that attempted to systematically explain the impacts of ‘noise, heat, air pollution, crowding, and architectural dysfunction’ on city dwellers generally. Similar studies were those such as Altman and Wohlwill’s Behaviour and the Natural Environment (1983)and Roger Ulrich’s Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment (1983). Research projects into the positive impacts of nature on children continued with broader bases of participants, like Kaplan and Talbot’s Psychological benefits of a wilderness experience (1983) that found time in “wilderness” to give children ‘self-confidence and an improved sense of self-identity’. The founding of the Children, Youth and Environments academic journal in 1984 was proof that research interest in this field had become substantial, however one of the central concerns that had given rise this interest was proving to be only a concern. Robin Moore’s Childhood’s domain (1986) reported that 96% of urban children (aged 9 to 12) told researchers that outdoor places were their favourite places, children were not abandoning the outdoors. Moore coined the term ‘terra ludens’, the idea of a child’s personal play spaces being a crucial developmental support mechanism that gave them an ‘intuitive sense of how the world is by playing with it’. This was a recognition that environments are the necessary nexus where concepts of place and society converge in a child’s life.

Whilst research proved over and over again the benefits of outdoor natural activity for young people and adults, (see: Mary Ann Kirkby’s Nature as refuge in children’s environment, Rachel Kaplan’s The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective) and that urban children, particularly the working class had diminishing access to it, there was no indication that children were “going off” the outdoors, even though this was a fear that prompted much of the research to begin with. What the concerned academics of the 1970s and 1980s revealed and detailed were the forces of the period that were pushing children towards the indoors and digital environments such as newly released games consoles like the NES and Atari 7800. The losses of childhood freedoms in the real world left a slack that digital freedoms could pick up.

The 1990s

The theme of “children and the city” continued in the 1990s literature, this time in extensive monographs that utilised all the research of the previous two decades. This included Boyden and Holden’s Children of the Cities, Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice, and Sheridan Bartlett et al.’s Cities for Children. This was now well understood and accepted theory, but new areas of academic interest were arising, most significantly around the role of digital devices in children’s lives, the fragmentation of traditional family and community structures, and the idea of a person’s “independent mobility”. Mayer Hillman et al.’s One False Move (1990) found that whereas in the 1970s nearly all British 9-year olds were allowed to cross the street independently, now only half were.

Nikolas Rose’s Governing the soul (1990) suggested that childhood was undergoing a ‘process of bureaucratisation’, by this meaning that their participation in public spaces and activities was being constrained as focus increasingly rested on ideas of forwarding individual identity and agency in children. Ulrich Beck in Risk Society (1992) put that technology, by facilitating increasingly diverse individualised ways to consume media, was accelerating a ‘western trend towards individualisation’. Communal spaces such as parks, streets, and plazas which catered to a generalist user base were falling out of favour compared to individualised places such as private gardens and living rooms. Family formations had also been changing throughout this period as children increasingly moved away from their hometowns once reaching adulthood, isolating their own children from traditional familial networks such as cousins and grandparents. This left a time vacuum in children’s lives that technology was able to fill, home and mobile phones picking up the slack of a lost physical connection and enabling children to keep in contact with distant family and friends.

Thinking solidified around theories of the restorative qualities of natural environments to city dwellers, as both social science and medical studies continually affirmed the concept to be true. A 1997 study even found that a chronic lack of play and physical touch during childhood could result in developing a brain ‘20 percent to 30 percent smaller than normal’. Linked to this, academics, educators, and commentators turned their eye upon home technologies like televisions, mobile phones, games consoles, and personal computers as they continued to increase in prevalence, and upon the world wide web after it launched in Britain in 1991. Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992) and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) both identified the television in particular as part of a wider problem of “lost childhoods”, Postman writing that ‘children today are captive in their homes… They are institutionalized, over programmed, information stuffed, TV dependent, ‘zoned in’ and age segregated’. It was during this period of writing that attitudes started to shift on technology, which previously had not been considered an influential factor over children’s lives of learning and play, and was now starting to be seriously considered.

Not all interest in technology for children was pessimistic however, indeed there was a great deal of optimism during the 1990s over the role that technology would play in children’s lives in the present and close future. The creation of the internet in particular brought with it a wave of utopian ideals, one such being that online, all users were equal. The idea of a connected, intelligent, globalised world resurrected some of the visions of the inter-war years. Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word (1993) argued that digital technologies, with the particular aid of the internet, would enable a mass form of democratic literacy that would allow countries to ‘enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways’. Likewise Jon Katz in Media Rants: Post Politics in the Digital Nation (1997) saw the digital as a means of children’s liberation from the increasingly restrictive adult physical world. The online space, seemingly an infinite space of possibility, tempted grand claims of hope or despair on the behalf of commentators of the time. However, because the internet was designed as a universal tool this necessarily meant that no special concessions were made to make it an accessible tool for certain groups. As Kidron and Rudkin point out in their Digital Childhood report, in the early days there were ‘not any design concessions for child users’, and that legacy continues today despite the fact that children make up over a third of the internet’s 3 billion users. A study in the Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood journal in 2003 concluded that children found the internet a more interesting and useful tool when presented with a ‘child-friendly interface’. At the time the New York Times disagreed with Jon Katz’s assessment of technology as “liberating”, writing that ‘The computer teaches a child to expect to be entertained; the lump of clay teaches the child to entertain herself’.

Figure 5. A child watches TV in a TV Shop, 1993.

Peter Buchner’s Growing up in Three European Regions (1995) explained how the rapid development of technologies had invalidated many parents’ frames of reference for childhood and as such they were forced to become ‘involved in a process of negotiation with their children over mutual identities, rights and responsibilities’. The 1950s model of the nuclear family was giving way at the end of the century to what Sonia Livingstone called the ‘democratic family’, wherein traditional parental and child roles of the authority and the subordinate were replaced by a mutual expectation of love, respect, and intimacy. This was also linked to ‘explicit discourses of identity construction’ in a neoliberal individualist society where children were encouraged to develop identities based on personal preferences over a sense of belonging to a particular community.

The long-term implications of technologically saturated childhoods were as of yet unknown, giving rise to many hopes and fears but also contributing to individualist perspectives on childhood that favoured the use of home technologies. Marco Hüttenmoser’s Children and their living surroundings (1995) showed the downward spiral a neighbourhood enters in to when children are restricted from outside play, deteriorating social cohesion and a ‘society capable of mutual help’, thus making it less likely for children to be allowed out. Rebekah Coley et al.’s findings in Where Does Community Grow? (1997)supported this thesis and furthered that natural spaces in an area which allowed child’s play were particularly beneficial to fostering communities. Representations of nature via technology were tackled by Edward Reed in Encountering the World (1996), finding that television and computer screens could contribute to learning processes, but were poor replacements for direct experiences that facilitated a ‘dynamic, dense, multisensory flow of diversely structured information’.

Linking broader social issues to discussions of childhood environments became increasingly popular in the late 1990s, particularly criticism of neoliberal ideology that had already come under significant attack from the field in the form of criticisms of “individualism”. The dawn of the personal computer ‘coincided with the widespread deregulation of the financial services industries in the United States and UK’ and the computing industry was moulded by that environmental context in its early years. Wheway and Millward’s Facilitating play on housing estates (1997) criticised the practice of putting children’s spaces such as playgrounds and skateparks “out of the way” behind buildings and on unwanted bits of land because it cut children off from the rest of society when ‘they want to be where it’s at, to see what is going on, to engage with the world beyond’. Children’s access to transport, social spaces, and shops was framed as key to maintaining them as integral participants of society. Access to natural spaces was again identified as beneficial in giving children an ‘increased sense of personal autonomy, improved self-concept, a greater capacity for taking action and being decisive’. Digital environments were thus eschewed as pale imitations of “the real thing” when it came to education and play, Lieberman and Hoody’s Closing the Achievement Gap advocating for outdoor classroom environments physically separated from digital devices as the best way to improve academic achievement. Likewise Sorrayut Ratanapojnard’s Community-Oriented Biodiversity Environmental Education (2001) also demonstrated that children learnt more in ‘hands-on’ outdoor classrooms than on a standard indoor curriculum.

Sandra Calvert’s Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (1999), encapsulated many of the arguments that would follow in the first decade of the 21^st century, construingchildren as innocent participants in a process of their own decline, pushed towards embracing a technological ‘media environment’ that was damaging for their healthy development. Kirsten Drotner’s Dangerous Media? (1999) similarly described mass media as a ‘moral threat’ to young people. Somewhat ironically, the media of the period’s obsession with the dangers of street play encouraged parents to instruct their children to stay indoors, and thus set off a new paranoia about the media itself. Whilst technology like mobile phones meant some parents gave their children more time and space to play this did not necessarily translate into more “freedom” because, as Freeman and Tranter contend, whilst children may have been physically alone they were still within the parental ‘gaze’, always on call. This was a trend that would only continue in the following years as the advent of smart phones and GPS tracking allowed parents even greater remote control over their children, what Lenore Skenazy in Free Range Kids (2009) called ‘anxiety on speed dial’.

In the absence of time and space for “free play”, British children’s activities became increasingly structured, scheduled, and organized during the 1990s, centred around pre-booked sessions of sports, hobbies, and lessons. This came hand-in-hand with an increased commercialisation of play whereby opportunities for free play, in both senses of the word, were reduced and considered lower status than those with an associated cost. This disadvantaged poorer families who could not afford to take their children on as many activities, and as such were pushed more towards the use of digital play. Furthermore, the cars being used to take children to these activities contributed to the problem of unsafe outdoor space for free play in working class neighbourhoods. Timetabled physical activities, whilst being physically healthy, have also been proven not to provide the same mental benefits for children as self-directed play, including a comparative lack of stimulation of cognitive development, social and language development, independent learning, and ability to cope with stress and trauma. The loss of children’s independent mobility to adult-dependent mobility was beginning to be linked to rising problems of ‘obesity, diabetes and other diseases associated with more sedentary lifestyles’. The literature’s narratives over the role of digital devices in this process, however, was ambivalent in a technological environment that was evolving faster than academic studies and research.

The 2000s

‘Children will always be children and will always find a way to play’.

The first decade of the 21^st century saw the real emergence of what became a defining argument surrounding the role of technology in children’s lives, a declensionist narrative of childhood degradation based around the rise a ‘media-saturated environment’ and the fall of “natural” outdoor activity. As is evident from looking at research from the previous three decades however, Britain’s ‘screen entertainment culture’ was more of a symptom than a cause of the loss of childhood freedoms, and children particularly of disadvantaged backgrounds were pushed towards technology by outside factors. Exemplary of this, Wigley and Clark’s survey Kids.net (2000) found that working class children were significantly more likely to have a television, games console, or video recorder in their rooms than middle class children. Digital spaces offered play and freedoms to children that they could no longer enjoy as easily outside, but as the Digital Education Act of 2003 proved, the digital world too was becoming a more highly regulated and less “wild” place.

Figure 6. A child recharges their mobile phone credit on a street machine, 2009.

Academic research increasingly reflected the domesticity of British children’s lives, Nancy Wells’ At Home with Nature (2000) looking at children who moved house to an area with greener views out the window and finding marked improvements in peacefulness and ability to concentrate. Similarly Wells and Evans’ Nearby Nature (2003) found that children with more natural space near home were less prone to anxiety, depression, and behavioural problems; the same children also rated themselves higher than their peers on measures of self-worth. Andrea Faber Taylor et al.’s Views of nature and self-discipline (2002) randomly assigned a group of girls to architecturally identical apartments in the same building and discovered that the greener a girl’s view from her window, the higher she scored on concentration tests. The “child in the city” literature such as Louise Chawla’s Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (2002) and David Driskell’s Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth (2002) took on a more reformist bent, lamenting the decline of ‘street culture’ and even the shift from family television time to ‘bedroom culture’. Such works moved from simply the study of the issues of urban childhoods to advocacy for ways in which change could be enacted. Freeman and Aitken-Rose’s Future Shapers (2005) cross-examined urban planners to find that children were only considered in the planning of ‘recreation spaces’, but ignored in the planning streets, houses, shops, leisure facilities, and infrastructure.

Technology became a key facilitator of childhood sociability in 21^st century Britain. A study from the Journal of Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (2002) found that British children who did not own a mobile phone, those of working class backgrounds in majority, were especially vulnerable to social isolation, as the phone had become a key device around which friendships and communities were built. The digital divide also exacerbated pre-existing social divergences as highly social children more readily adopted digital devices as a means for deepening and expanding relations whereas less social children showed the opposite pattern. These children were thus not just socially excluded, but also denied an opportunity to develop digital skills. Those children who did have mobiles were also more likely to be able to cross ‘hitherto distinct social boundaries’. The problem was not always access to devices like mobile phones however, but also the skills necessary to operate them as Dominique Pasquier highlighted in Media at home (2002); both girls and working class households demonstrated a ‘problematic skills gap’ in the use of digital devices, as providing an opportunity for access to technology was easier than providing knowledge for use.

Digital devices that allowed young people to “travel”, either physically or online, had mixed impacts upon their freedoms. One the one hand as Williams and Williams’ article Space Invaders (2005) suggested, the expectation of parents to be able to communicate with their children at all times, and the children’s constant awareness of being under surveillance, created an environment where children felt they had no private space which can be damaging to mental health. On the other hand Marilyn Campbell’s The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Young People’s Social Life (2005) demonstrated the negotiating power that a mobile phone could grant children when discussing curfews and boundaries for roaming with their parents, allowing more freedom than peers who did not have phones. On a more structural level familiarity with technology was rightly assumed to be a key skill for children in a future that would see a job market progressively more reliant on digital literacy; so whilst many areas of adult society and much of the academic literature encouraged children to get outdoors, Britain at large was forging an environment where the skills associated with outdoor activity were less valued than those of the digital and indoors. Todd Oppenheimer’sThe Flickering Mind (2003) reflected this duality of the moment, whereby children were on a boundary, as he saw it, between sensibly harnessing technology to help them become ‘creative problem solvers’ or falling victim to ‘computerisation and commercialization careening out of control’.

Contrarily, whilst time spent in digital environments was often framed as a detracting from time spent in physical outdoor play, Holloway and Valentines’ study Cyberkids (2003) found the opposite. Echoing earlier studies such as the Department of Environment’s 1973 report and Robin Moore’s Childhood’s domain (1986), they found that children overwhelmingly preferred to be outside if the weather and light allowed. Time spent in front of a TV, phone, or monitor tended to replace ‘doing nothing’ time where they weren’t allowed outside or their peers weren’t. Later studies have also shown technology use to promote social interaction and allow children of differing abilities to become a part of everyday social practice. Furthermore, their research highlighted how computer use was highly controlled and negotiated in homes, and that parents were not at all powerless to prevent children being “drawn in” to screen-use if they wanted to stop them. The crux of the problem lay neither with children, parents, or the technology, but with the reality, or the perception of the reality, of a dangerous outside domain.

Building on a now well-established literature of the benefits of nature, an increasing body of work was produced in the 2000s focussing simply on the benefits of play itself, under a fear of regimented children’s’ lives leading to depression and stress. Garry Landreth’s Play Therapy (2002), Joe Frost’s The Developmental Benefits of Playgrounds (2004), and Louise Chawla’s Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (2002) all advocated for the therapeutic powers of play that yielded ‘positions of cognitive clarity, power, and primacy to the player’. Chawla and Malone’s Neighbourhood Quality from Children’s Eyes (2003) gave insight into the ways play in natural environments created confidence in children as they were more able to physically affect them, conversely urban environments over which children could exert little control often instilled feelings of powerlessness. As Karen Malone pithily identified in her study of children in suburban Sydney: ‘places shape children and children shape places’. The safety of play in the digital world was also coming under question, Rachel Pain’s Paranoid Parenting? (2006) describing online bullying and harassment as ‘far from a parental bogeyman’. David Cohen’s The Development of Play (2006) saw the play crisis as one that also included the adult world, asking: ‘If the purpose of play is to prepare the child in various ways for adult life, what is the motive for adult play?’. As Cohen and many other academics and commentators saw it, the child was a useful tool through which to understand and criticise wider society, as children were seen as some of that society’s most vulnerable members.

A particularly prevalent criticism of the period was popularly put by the influential British sociologist Frank Furedi in Therapy Culture (2004). Furedi was primarily concerned with the number of safety regulations being erected around children as part of what he called the ‘new security state’. This proliferation of regulation, he argued, was eliminating any possibility for learning, excitement, play, or risk, and shifting perspective away from the real dangers of modern childhood, the restrictions themselves. Marianna Papastephanou in Education, Risk and Ethics made the parallel point that western structures of education based around a ‘discourse of control’ were unhelpful in that they did not reflect the reality of risky uncertain human lives. Her observational studies led her to the conclusion that both children and adults had a ‘longing for the risks that make life meaningful’ but were being consistently denied them. The ‘billion-dollar industries’ in technology surrounding children were making increasingly enviable profits from the sale of both security and safety devices as well as indoor education and play devices.

Whether these restrictions, often bolstered by the use of technology, were even making people safer was also on the agenda, or whether as Tim Gill’s No Fear (2007) put it, the risks of play in modern city streets had been ‘blown out of all proportion’. Torin Monahan’s Questioning Surveillance and Security (2006) pointed out that whilst surveillance technologies like CCTV cameras had been shown to be effective in tracking down criminals after a crime, ‘they do not actually prevent or reduce crime in any significant way’. Cindi Katz in Power, Space and Terror (2006) wrote that in relative terms the dangers of cars or strangers were nowhere near as pressing as those of poverty and inequality between children, and that street crime had been falling since the 1970s and 1980s, meaning parents generally played in more dangerous streets than those they denied their children.

Restricting children to the indoors and digital environments created its own dangers a 2006 report for the NSPCC found, citing rising levels of obesity, diabetes, depression and other health problems that proportionally were more dangerous to children than what mostly concerned policy makers and parents. Technology’s role in this was multifaceted: through television and online media it propagated not wholly unjust fears over children’s outdoor safety, through CCTV, mobile phones, and GPS trackers it facilitated restrictions over childhood freedoms, and through computer games and television it offered an escape to children from those restrictions. A longitudinal study in 2010 found that long periods of time spent playing video games gave children difficulties with their attention spans, however a separate study from 2012 found exactly the opposite, so the health impacts of this too was ambivalent.

Idolising Children (2007) by Daniel Donahoo ascribed issues of lost childhood freedoms to a the slightly contrary problem of parents wanting too much for their children. He argued that the promise of technology helped to foster ideas of impossibly “ideal” childhoods that neither the children or the parents could realistically achieve. As such in the attempt to create perfect personalised childhoods parents, educators, and policy makers were inadvertently making them worse. This trend extended far beyond Britain or “the west”, Pergrams and Zaradic’s Is love of nature becoming love of electronic media? (2008) found a fundamental shift away from ‘nature-based recreation’ globally over a period of 50 years by looking at visits to national parks. Along similar lines Dorothy Singer’s Children’s pastimes and play in sixteen Nations (2009) found a universal erosion of childhood across continents due to a lack of ‘experiential learning opportunities’. Furthermore parents’ ideas around what outdoor “play” was were also beginning to change, Kelly Fischer’s article Conceptual Split? (2008) finding that unstructured play was increasingly seen as a waste of time by parents who were also more likely to regard structured activities and sports as play. This was partly due to neoliberal competitive conceptions of children centred around personal narratives of success, that “messing around” was not productive.

Physical city environments were also still changing in the 21^st century in ways that disadvantaged children. Whilst roads were sometimes being built more considerately, new housing developments in particular were constructed to child-unfriendly specifications. The housing stock generally since the 1980s grew larger on the internal footprint but smaller on the external, so people’s indoor living space grew at the expense of yards and gardens. Furthermore, modern housing façades were increasingly built with smaller windows in the front, garages, and smaller front porch areas. This meant that children had less physical outdoor space to play in modern developments and also, due to the houses being built more insularly, parents and neighbours had less ability to keep a passive watch on their children in the lane. The demographics of families also changed during this period, as parents tended towards having fewer children and guarding the ones they had more carefully, thus creating the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”. One of the promises of technologically interwoven childhoods for the adult world was the possibility of persistent monitoring and thereby controlling and safekeeping of children in what Tonya Rooney called as a ‘just in case’ model in Trusting Children (2010). However, as she warns: ‘Rather than simply “playing it safe”, parents and carers may be depriving children of the opportunity to be trusted and to learn about trusting others, and the opportunity for growing competence and capacity that can result from this’. Indeed, little evidence has been presented to show that people in the 21^st century are more untrustworthy than in prior decades, but there is increasing evidence of a culture of suspicion.

By 2010 academic research was beginning to assess digital environments of childhood holistically, incorporating them into understandings of environment more generally, and as such recognising the complications that arise by thinking of digital devices as simply either “good” or “bad” for children; some were even advocating for a blended use of technology in order to help children get outdoors, advice that would have raised many academic eyebrows only a few years prior. In terms of education whilst the internet and other digital tools, providing the world at their fingertips, discouraged the use of a child’s memory for the memorising of specific facts, they encouraged an ability to scan information rapidly and efficiently. As Jim Taylor wrote in How Technology Is Changing the Way Children Think, not having to retain this sort of information in the brain allows it to ‘engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem-solving’. Digital technologies certainly comprised an element of the story of the loss of freedom in British childhoods, but that element was more liminal than much of the literature examined individually suggests. Taken together over time, however, an image emerges of digital childhoods not as piteous sources of degradation but as an element enmeshed in a much wider diverse narrative of shifting social dynamics of power, control, and freedom in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

CONCLUSION

An apparent cultural paradox lies at the heart of British digital childhoods today, and indeed our digital lives more broadly: a culture of individualism that operates inseparably withina culture of connectivity. Technology is ever-more tailored to the individual in terms of personalised “smart delivery” of recommendations, advertisements, news, and voice-activated digital assistants, however at the same time it is also ever-more universal with the majority of this individualised content being served by a minority of companies, devices, and services. The mobile phone, television, and computer have acted as facilitators for a new spontaneity and flexibility in young people’s lives, being able to arrange and rearrange social events with the rapidity of a ‘more fluid culture of information social interaction’. However this option has been historically more open to some more privileged children than others, and at the same time technology has been a facilitator of increasing restriction upon children’s lives. Yet the spectres of the “screen zombie” and occasionally the “nature nymph” still hang over the debate, encouraging a polarisation of opinion over whether children have been “taken in” by technology or the belief that they never could be. Either way the idea that ‘children have won the battle, they are exactly where they want to be’ does not capture the complexity of the situation.

The impacts of digital technologies are not inevitabilities that form changes beyond human control or understanding, they are socially shaped elements of both childhood and adulthood. Adopting this perspective allows the reader to see these devices as within a space of continual negotiations in shifting economic, social, and political circumstances. As children’s lives become ever more digital it is important that historians begin to grapple with the digital environment and conceive of it as a “space” where children have existed, a space that both moulds children, is moulded by them and other factors, and is experienced differently by different people. Future research could pursue multiple avenues, but particularly helpful would be interdisciplinary research alongside computer scientists who could investigate specific design qualities of technologies and how they have influenced behaviours over time. Oral histories of digital childhoods would also constitute an important archival resource for the future when academics want to consider the crucial transitionary generation between the pre and post digital worlds.

Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

Date of Publication: 22nd of January 2026

2026.01.22
Children of the Anthropocene: The Implications of the “Human Age” for the History of Childhood

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Positioning the History of Childhood Within the Anthropocene Debate

Across the historical discipline the concept of Anthropocene is being used to redefine how we interpret and describe the relationships between humanity and the rest of the natural world. The notion of a “human history” and a “natural history” existing as two separate streams of academic interest has met the Anthropocene confluence, thrusting the two together into one inseparable river. Our acceptance that ‘Humanity has initiated an environmental “phase shift”’ as Jason Kelly puts it, has opened new fields of historical enquiry into the manner in which people influence the environments of which they are a part, and the manner in which those environments influence them in turn. The ever-increasing contemporary relevance of climate change to the everyday of people’s lives has furthered this interest, and has led many historians to note the ways in which the Anthropocene does not constitute a universalising force. That, as Jason Moore writes, ‘because of existing power relationships, the ‘new reality’ will be more ‘real’ for some than for others’. Gender historians have taken a leading role in considering how the Anthropocene relates to the disparities between men and women as both contributors to, and subjects of, the consequences resulting from our new “human age”. Since Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) it has been recognised that both women and the natural world have been depoliticised, diminished, and distanced from the “standard” social order by the same dualistic enlightenment narratives. Both have been othered, defined as inferiors by an elite that has pretended ‘an illusory sense of autonomy’ rather than acknowledge its reliance upon them. The introduction of Anthropocene has evolved these arguments, shifting historians toward more wholistic understandings of an earth-system of wider interconnected dependency. As Jessica Weir notes, the Anthropocene has proven to be a useful conceptual tool in criticising prior narratives of ‘hyper-separation [that place] humans in a relation of mastery with respect to earth others and limit their capacity to respond to ecological devastation’.

Many other historians, including those of empire, race, ethics, and materialism (to name but a few) have also adopted the language of Anthropocene. Importantly, however, none have done so wholesale and instead each new voice has provided critique and novel perspective on the conceptual framework the Anthropocene provides. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Kathleen Morrison have argued that from a postcolonial perspective the term’s use is too often western centric and shaped by a set of ‘cultural blinders [that] impede our understanding of the complex and diverse history of the earth system’. This is likely because ‘much of the discourse on the Anthropocene has been dominated by Western scientific perspectives’. Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham have put up ‘capitalocene’ for consideration as an alternate that highlights the economic system’s role in contemporary climate chaos. Donna Haraway has contended ‘cthulucene’ and ‘plantationocene’ to be non-anthropocentric descriptors that better include life forms other than humans within their remit and ‘the ways that plantation logics organize modern economies, environments, bodies, and social relations’. Ultimately however, whilst the criticisms behind these proposed alternate terms are valid, they have remained as subcategories rather than risen to prominence because of Anthropocene’s preestablished prevalence and the fact that many academics see a utility in positioning ‘mankind’s growing influence on the planet’ at the centre of the debate during the present age of threat to the planet’s existing climatic structures. ‘Saying that we live in the Anthropocene is a way of saying that we cannot avoid responsibility for the world we are making’, as Jedediah Purdy frames it.

The possibilities of exploring the history of childhood through the lens of the Anthropocene is the area of study this essay will seek to define. Compared to histories of gender or race this relationship is an underexplored one within the historiography to date, although outside the discipline there has been greater interest in this line of enquiry. Education studies, perhaps unsurprisingly, has proven the pioneer in exploring the relationship between children, childhood, and the Anthropocene and has sought to ‘understand children and their lives as social actors enmeshed in complex social and material networks’ and to challenge the ‘presumed naturalness of childhood’, as David Blundell argues in Children’s Lives Across the Anthropocene. However, where articles such as these are rightly concerned with what Lili-Ann Wolff calls ‘the mission of early childhood education… in the epoch of the Anthropocene’, the lacking angle of the historian is one that explores how the Anthropocene as a concept can help us understand the manners in which environments have influenced childhoods in the past and how children have influenced them in turn.

In great majority the historical analysis that has addressed this relationship thus far has come from the works of historians of childhood and has focussed on how children’s spaces have been constructed, construed, and controlled by adult society. In the British context Matthew Thompson’s key work Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement is a typical example of such work that argues for a post-war transition of the relationship between children and the environment tending toward a ‘loss of freedom’ and a ‘turn toward increasing protection and restriction’ due to parental fears of strangers and cars. Similarly Sian Edwards’ Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside interrogates how the concept of the rural was adopted by organisations such as the scouts as an ‘antidote’ to a problematised urban sphere. In the study of more recent history there has been an interest from historians such as Richard Louv in the denaturalisation of childhood in the “digital age”, that which mainstream media has branded ‘nature deficit disorder’ or what Ian Rotherham calls ‘cultural severance’.

There have been fewer works on this topic from an environmental historian’s perspective, those there have been beginning with the history of the American frontier. Elliott West’s Growing Up With the Country (1989) is one foundational text of this type wherein West finds that the fundamental difference between children and their elders on the frontier was in how they related to the landscape. For adults the frontier was something new but for children it was familiar, giving them a ‘kinship’ with it that was unique. The only attempt in monograph at a work such as this since has been Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865 which, similarly to Lost Freedom, charts what the author frames as a declension in the quantity and quality of interaction between children and environment over time. However, as with the publications of education studies, the central perspective at the heart of all these works is one of the adult. The trend has been to ask how factors such as parenting, social policy, and architecture can influence and shape children and childhoods via changing environment, and whilst these are important questions to ask, there is a surprisingly absent space left for “child-centred” and “environment-centred” narratives. This is one thing the introduction of the Anthropocene concept to the history of childhood affords, as with histories of gender and others before it, an opportunity for historians to highlight the unique experiences and relationships of children with their environments that stem from their independent agency. Whilst we might argue with some justification that the use of an alternative term such as “adultocene” or “ageocene” would better suit our needs, it will be more useful (and indeed, simpler) to explain how stories of children and childhood can be brought forward and made distinct from the “human experience” when using the Anthropocene as a framework of understanding.

Approaching the history of childhood with this perspective gives the historian new questions to ask of their source material and new ways of answering them. How do children, through exploration, work, and play shape their own environments? How do their wants and needs, or those perceived, influence the attitudes and actions of adults toward children’s environments? In what ways does the Anthropocene as a force and a concept uniquely affect the lives of children, and in what ways do children affect the Anthropocene? Before investigating these further however, it must be acknowledged that it would be hypocritical whilst proselytising the importance of acknowledging divergent experiences of environment not to point out that “childhood” itself is not a universal experience. Within childhood there are a multitude of identities that will to greater or lesser extents modify one’s relationship with the Anthropocene. As one example from Fikile Nxumalo’s Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene:

‘school gardens for young Black children in urban schools are often positioned from deficit perspectives, as a way to bring nature to certain children who lack it. Here nature becomes entangled with anti-blackness as it is positioned as a site of potential transformation for Black children deemed at risk or lacking “normal” connections with nature’

A similar argument could be made with regard to working class children who are perceived to be lesser for their lacking something that those of middle-class parentage typically have. As Affrica Taylor summarises: ‘The assertion that children need nature has become commonplace, but should we ask which children?’. This essay, iterating and evolving upon the existing historiography and source material pertaining to British childhoods (predominantly southern urban ones), cannot claim to speak with authority on the childhood or environmental experience. However, it is an example of how the Anthropocene can assist us in examining a history of childhood, and a pointer toward new avenues for inquiry and potentials in exploring this conceptual marriage further.

“Presencing” Children in the Anthropocene

Despite the present dearth of historical material that seeks to presence children in the Anthropocene, the basis for study of such a relationship is strong, as western societies have long presupposed a connection between children and the natural world deeper than that of their elders. As historians of race and gender have already demonstrated, the dichotomy built between the human and natural worlds in the past has been inextricably bound to dichotomies drawn between certain groups of people and what society considers the “normal”. Anthropocene narratives that require a radical shift in the way humanity as a species constructs its own image of self are useful challengers to these old oppositions. However, for this essay it is important to understand the enlightenment philosophies of the 18^th and 19^th centuries which defined (and still define) the strong perceived links between children and nature in European society today before we can appreciate how the Anthropocene concept contests them.

In broad perspective the enlightenment birthed two competing schools of thought regarding children and environment, the rationalist, and the romanticist. The romantic movement began with works such as those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then William Blake, Mary Shelley, and Alfred Tennyson in reaction to the increasingly rationalism-informed industrial European world those authors inhabited. The predominantly emotional countercultural arguments they presented knotted children and the natural world together as joint symbols of hope that were not only innocent and pure in and of themselves but lent an innocence and purity to one another. Their relationship was symbiotic, children were a part of the natural world in a way that adults were not, and could not, be. As Rousseau argues in On Education (1763), childhood should be defined by teaching that is ‘beyond our control’ and follows ‘the goal of nature’. William Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) similarly conjures images of an ideal youth as natural and pure:

‘When the voices of children are heard on the green

And laughing is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast

And every thing else is still’

On the other, more instrumentally influential, side of this debate were the rationalist thinkers such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Their lines of philosophy, just as present in the 21^st century as those of the romanticists, saw nature as a force of reason, the basis of order and reason, even. However, where romanticists sought to learn from a nature they saw as inscrutable, the rationalists desired to understand and control a nature they considered as being fundamentally conquerable. John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) exemplifies this approach with his famous description of children as being ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate. In Locke’s view the child, like nature, would become wild if not carefully managed, but with the correct instruction they could be formed into an instrument of reason. Whilst it is tempting to reduce this tension between romanticism and rationalism to “nature versus nurture”, as William Cronon and Thomas Dunlap warn in Faith in Nature, both ideologies incorporated aspects of the other and looked to the natural world as a unifying, present force that could replace a role in society that had traditionally been fulfilled by religion. As Sara Maitland writes in Gossip From the Forest: ‘wilderness finds its complement and counterpart either in conceptions of childhood moral innocence or the child as tabula rasa’. Most importantly for this essay however, both drew a line between the natural and human worlds, although for different purposes, and both identified children as beings who could permeate that boundary to some extent.

In the contemporary context these two philosophies still carry weight in how humanity responds to the environmental consequences of the Anthropocene in regard to children. Romanticism has come to play an important role in many environmentalist movements, best exemplified by the rise of Greta Thunberg and the global youth climate strike movement that, whilst being symbolic of the agency of the child, are also caught up in ‘environmental stewardship discourses that position certain children as future saviours of nature’. The same can be said for the rationalist perspective prevailing in technocratic circles who see environmental issues as ‘merely a physical Earth problem, and not an ethical one’ and view the young as saviours of the status quo via theorised future innovations and ‘the promise of one more generation’. These forms of romanticism and rationalism are dangerous as they detach the adult world from any responsibility or agency in addressing climate concerns.

The introduction of the Anthropocene concept uproots this rationalism/romanticism dynamic. Far more than being a simple obstacle for humanity to solve, the reality of the Anthropocene has implications that have ‘the potential to challenge conventional ways of seeing those constructions of nature found at the heart of Enlightenment modernity and confront its contradictory positions’. Its very existence is proof an implicit and deep connection between humanity and the natural world that sets aside the notion that they are antitheses of one another. Indeed, it highlights how much they are the same. This realisation deromanticizes the natural and childhood worlds, unlocking them from the fairy tale, almost orientalist perspective with which they have been perceived. Free from this timelessness they can be considered more as active agents of change that have the ability to play important roles within the global network of factors that has brought about the birth of the Anthropocene. In the new “human age” where humanity has come to be seen as the integral operator in the earth’s “natural” systems, what the romanticists posed as a force opposite to that of nature has since become it. At the same time the Anthropocene undermines the empiricist perspective by showing that whilst humanity has the capability to influence the natural world, they cannot remove themselves from their relationship with it. Having made themselves more integral to the earth’s ecosystems than ever, humans are more at risk than ever when those systems change as a result of their actions. If humanity as a species was truly incontrolof the natural world, it would not have chosen to create the Anthropocene.

In other terms, if we accept the idea of Anthropocene, we must accept that the “human” identity as constructed must be one that incorporates itself into a wider view of nature and the planet as part of one earth-system. Therefore, the natural world cannot be construed as “other” through either romanticism or rationalism. This view of an ‘earth-system’ is one that is important for the history of childhood as it understands the planet as a ‘unified, complex, evolving system beyond the sum of its parts’, which is a view that presences and places importance on historical actors that have otherwise been deemed negligible.

The Becoming World

Understanding how the Anthropocene highlights environmental and ideological faults that underly contemporary and historical perceptions of child and nature will allow historians to construct revised narratives of childhood and environment alike. This means acknowledging and exploring how children act upon their environments both personally and extensionally through the ‘nature-culture hybrids’ of the societies they inhabit. Interdisciplinarity will be key to unlocking such stories as the chimera of the Anthropocene requires the expertise of geographers, biologists, earth-system scientists, amongst many others, to fully interpret. At the same time, as Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg point out in The Geology of Mankind?, such professionals are not necessarily knowledgeable in the study of human relations with the planet, ‘the composition of a rock or the pattern of a jet stream being rather different from such phenomena as world-views, property and power’. Only studies that take an interdisciplinary approach will have the capability to understand what childhood means in the Anthropocene in both environmental and humanist senses.

Adopting methodologies of new materialism has proved one of the most popular styles of exploration in this category, much of the work so far for which has come from anthropology. Away from the conceptual, the Anthropocene Epoch reminds us perhaps first and foremost of the tactile, how much the human relationship with the planet is one based fundamentally on physicality before philosophy. Where children are concerned, their physical interactions with their environments are based on specific wants that substantially differ to those of their elders, most evidently the wants of play and exploration. Children are therefore inhabitants and engineers of unique environments and relate to “adult” spaces in unconventional ways; they ‘interactively embody their surroundings through play’ as Kirsti Pederson Gurholt describes in Curious Play. This includes particular interest, born of novelty and of these divergent wants, in aspects of the natural world that adults show less toward. An attraction to death and dead animals is one common current that runs through materialist analyses of childhood, from Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s description of the bouncy-castle horse carcasses of New York’s city streets to Eduardo Kohn’s accounts of the spoils brought home from the hunts of the Quechua people that offered little interest to the adults but garnered much from the children. The presentation of unidealized accounts that genuinely examine children’s relationships with the material world, rather than those that others have conceived for them, works to undermine misleading enlightenment conceptions of childhood that would have them repulsed and disconnected from the “unnatural”. In the Anthropocene, where the objects and materials humans accumulate and throw away have come to be powerful agents of environmental transformation, we are required to challenge ‘deeply rooted cultural oppositions such as animate versus inanimate and active versus passive’ that ignore the materiality of the planet and of children’s lives.

Beyond objects and materials, the landscapes of childhood are equally important to recognise as ‘inherently pedagogical contact zone[s]’, meaning a recognition that all environments are environments of learning. Young people are often drawn to the abandoned and the secretive over the idyllic, spaces such as a den or old factory where you can “make your own fun” proving to be more intriguing propositions than deliberately constructed environments such as playgrounds or youth centres. These spaces that children choose to inhabit, which generally fall outside of the “adult world”, allow them greater freedom and a more authentic pedagogical relationship; such relationships that will go on to be instrumental in their adult attitudes towards particular environs. As Gibson and Graham write in A Feminist Project for Belonging in the Anthropocene:‘The Anthropocene calls to us to recognize that we are all participants in the ‘becoming world’, where everything is interconnected and learning happens in a stumbling, trial and error sort of way’. The “human age” asks us not only to consider what the environments of childhood can teach us about environment and childhood, but also what they can teach to each other. Indeed, it asks us to reframe and presence spaces of childhood in the historiography that have been deemed before as “abandoned” or ahistorical.

If we embrace the spatiality of children’s environments we gain appreciation of children (and the natural world) as ‘social actors who are enmeshed in richly diverse social worlds’ rather than ‘separated out, disconnected individuals understood solely through developmental needs and discourses of rights’. As a global phenomenon the Anthropocene touches all human lives to greater and lesser extents and does not do so proportionately toward those groups of people who have most influence over it, thus drawing distinction between “children’s environments” and “adult environments” as separate entities is unhelpful. If the Anthropocene does not confine itself to the adult domain and we cannot confine our studies so either. It pushes us to consider the construction of our built and landscaped environments more carefully, with greater sensitivity to how children will know, sense, touch, and exist in them. As Karen Malone concludes in Children in the Anthropocene, only with an appreciation of spatiality can we ‘acknowledge how it is to be child with a host of others and the potential differences… their ‘acting’ as an ecological collective can have on the ecosystems of the planet’.

However, the relationship between environment and child as an element of wider earth-systems extends beyond the material. All historical agents act extensionally upon their environments through how other agents act toward and around them, and this holds especially true for agents such as children and the natural world that are perceived in wider society to lack agency for themselves. Holding to enlightenment form, whether construed as ‘wayward, chaotic and disordered’ or ‘pure, innocent, and in need of protection’, there is a sense of need or even duty to act for them rather than with them. In the Anthropocene, the concept of what childhood means and has meant is changing. Childhood is seen as being under threat in a way that other human life-stages cannot be, the perceived symbiosis between child and nature being so strong that the threat of Anthropogenic climate change to the natural world is naturally a threat to childhood also through cultural severance. At the same time children are cast as the saviours of the planet and symbols of environment(alism) in a process that Peter Hopkins and Rachel Pain call ‘fetishising the margins’. The natural world is simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous, especially for children who are ‘inherently more sensitive’ to its hazards in both physical and psychological contexts. The Anthropocene invites us to consider multiplicities within childhood and environment that previously were singularities. As Alan Prout writes:

‘the singular universal and naturalised category of childhood [should] be replaced by childhoods understood as dynamically configured, diverse and entangled assemblages of natural, cultural and technological elements’

The study of childhood brings a focus to Anthropocene studies of smaller more intricate environments, where the tendency is often toward grander overarching histories of ecosystems and global networks. It asks us to consider how environment is presented to children, what narratives are taught through our stories and schooling about the natural world and how do those influence us in adulthood. The Anthropocene also asks for a reappraisal of the narratives that adults tell themselves about childhood and environment, particularly those of nostalgia that idealise or demonise certain types of youth, as these reflect ‘anxieties about social and economic change and its impact on the child, and the individual sense of identity and belonging, present in everyday life.’ The study of how children’s lives are changing in the Anthropocene era is an important undertaking, but the conceptual framework this provides can also be used to study the history of childhood, and tell new stories that presence the child and their environments on their own terms.

Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

Date of Publication: 2nd of December 2020

2020.12.02
Anthropocene Ecologies of Nutrition and Economy

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The Ethiopian drought of 1983 to 1985, that lead to a famine which left 1.2 million people dead and 2.5 million displaced, was not an act of God. This time something was different, or something was different in the way people were beginning to view what environmental disasters meant in the “modern age”. More specifically, what they meant in an age where the activities of humanity were becoming increasingly inseparable from those of the rest of the natural world. Questions were being raised as to why, as James Verdin et al. ask in Climate Science and Famine Early Warning, this drought had come so quickly off the back of several other droughts the region had endured in recent years, out of step with existing cycles of Ethiopian climate that typically saw drought once a decade? Droughts occur when high temperatures increase the rate of ‘evapotranspiration’, where water is lost from soil and the flora it supports. This also leads to wildfires, such as those seen in Australia in 1966, 1993, and 2019. Changes in temperatures also affect rates of rainfall, as they influence air and ocean currents making dry areas drier and wet ones wetter, meaning plants that would traditionally grow in that region will no longer do so. As food is an integral element of culture, loss of these traditional foodstuffs then damages affected peoples on a societal as well as an economic level.

Contemporary climate scientists suspected that the Ethiopian droughts were not “natural” in origin, at least in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, they later proved that they were a consequence of a tropical rain belt that globally had been consistently pushing southwards over the course of the latter half of the 20^th century, leading to decreased rainfall all across the southern Sahara. Furthermore, the reason for this shift southwards was directly attributable to human activity. In an article for Geophysical Research Letters in 2013 Yen-Ting Hwang et al. explain how the release of sulphates into the atmosphere via the burning of coal in Europe and North America had been the ‘primary cause’ for the ‘aerosol cooling of the Northern Hemisphere’ and the subsequent change in global weather patterns.

Since 1985, an increasing number of “natural” disasters have been ascribed, at least in part, to human environmental influence and as a result historians have increasingly been looking backwards with a more critical eye toward connections that could be drawn between what previously has been viewed as the separate disciplines of “natural history” and “human history”. Amongst this discussion, one term has come to embody this newly perceived relationship, Anthropocene; the age where, as Paul Crutzen remarked on the turn of the millennium, ‘the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable’. In this new state of affairs the human had taken position as an integral element of the planet’s climatic, aquatic, and other earth systems. But how has the “human age” degraded nutritional and economic ecologies? And why did humans create the system of global, industrial, capitalistic agriculture that is primarily responsible for it?

Ecosystems of Ideology

Understanding ideology, poverty, and famine as biocultural aspects of the same system is essential in the Anthropocene. When pressure is applied to one part of the system, the others will be affected, be those pressures economic, psychological, or nutritional. In 1993 India saw flooding that killed 530 people and destroyed 1.2 million acres of crops and other flora. To understand this, an approach is required that highlights three main factors of environment: the biotic, the abiotic, and the cultural. The biotic factors are those that include the biology and health of humans, but also those of the other life forms that occupy the same environment. Abiotic factors involve the geography and climate of the environment, and cultural factors are manufactured anthropogenic elements that include ‘such phenomena as world-views, property and power’. Understanding each of these factors in any given environment requires understanding of the other two. In other words, they must all be seen as variables of the ecosystem. In this case, increasing pollution in the atmosphere was responsible for creating a more intense greenhouse effect that lead to greater oceanic evaporation and more rainfall, followed by these floods that left millions of people homeless. The flooding had also caused soil erosion that further impacted agricultural productivity during recovery and therefore increased nutritional stress. In this way the cultural (or ideological) drive of industrialisation in the market-economy acted as a force of oppression via abiotic and then biotic factors.

Often such relationships are non-obvious, such as in how the mineral content of a community’s water will be based on the composition of the rock into which they have dug wells. Those with less natural fluoride available in their water, such as the people of Huila province in Columbia, for example, will have higher rates of tooth decay and thus more nutritional complications. On the other side, those with too much fluoride can suffer ‘enamel fluorosis’, impairing tooth development when young. Such environmental inhibitors can range from the relatively insignificant, as with the fluoride content of water, to far more serious, as with life expectancies in northern china reducing by 5 ½ years compared with the south from 1950 onwards. Yuyu Chen found that because of a cooler climate, air pollution in northern China had become considerably higher than in the south, due to the burning of more coal, and this is by a large margin the deciding factor in the increased rate of cardiorespiratory deaths in the region.

However, whilst the recent Anthropocene has seen a greater prevalence of human-induced environmental change, the scientific consensus is that humans have been contributing to the warming of the planet for at least a century, and historians note that humanity has been shaping the planet’s ecosystems long before that. As Robert Goodland and Jeff Ahang explain in Livestock and Climate Change, measurements of rising undersea and atmospheric temperatures that fall far outside of what could be considered normal variability, are solid evidence of the impact that industrial agriculture and power production has had in producing global warming. This phenomenon has polarized the earth’s climatic zones, shuffling them north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere, leading there to be the most dangerous changes in areas that were already “on the edges” of these zones. These areas most affected, being those of more extreme conditions, are typically those where marginalised peoples, flora, and fauna exist who have more specialist lifestyle requirements, making these changes all the more devastating. This is why, according to the UN, 99% of deaths attributable to climate change have occurred in developing nations. As David Ciplet et al.explain in Power in a warming world, the advent of the Anthropocene has only increased the ways social inequality and poverty translates into poor health, through factors such as increases in stress hormones, exposure to dangerous toxins, and diminished access to healthcare. Those living in poverty are more likely to live near toxic sites, such as residents living alongside the oil fields of the Niger delta, 60% of which say their health is being affected by air, water, and land pollution. As fossil fuels become scarcer, methods of extracting them become more inefficient in terms of both energy use but also other resources such as water. Techniques such as hydraulic fracturing need lots of fresh water to operate, and pollute local water cycles, thus competing for the valuable resource with growing human populations.

Anthropocene Ideology

For historians, “Anthropocene” is not only the recent epoch however, but a framework of methodology, studying the history of environmental eventsin the context of Anthropocene. To this end, the material culture of civilisations is an essential source. For example we can use palaeopathological methods to look at the skeletal structure of Mayans from the 6^th to 10^th centuries, as William Haviland did in the 1960s, and note that people were growing shorter over time. Simultaneously we see fewer animal bones in the record, indicating a reduction in food availability. At the same time, however, those skeletons of the elite that were entombed did not change in size, showing us how the nutritional stress on the population had both environmental and societal influences. This historical practice of ‘medical ecology’ is still an emerging discipline and requires historians not only to appreciate which environmental factors affect a person’s health, but how those consequences then tie back into the earth-systems they inhabit. Famine and poverty exist in cycles, or spirals, that create the conditions for their own continued deterioration.

Anthropogenic climate change has contributed to the cycle of poverty by putting excess stress on individuals and communities that did not have the resources, be those economic, political, agrarian or otherwise, to cope with the change. For example, as human settlements were increasingly built, or climatically moved into, areas of the world that previously were too hot to be hospitable in the 20^th century, such as in Saudi Arabia, more and more people moved into housing that was designed explicitly with air conditioning in mind. However, problems arose for people living in poverty who could not afford this “convenience” and had their economic and physical health threatened as a result of what is called ‘cooling poverty’. To use Nancy Romero-Daza’s term for describing the relationship between violence, drug abuse, prostitution, and HIV/AIDS, the relationship between ideology, poverty, famine, and environment is syndemic. They are ‘not simply concurrent problems, but rather constitute a set of mutually reinforcing interconnected epidemics’. For example, when in 1998 the Nipah virus broke out in Malaysia, all those who suffered it were not Malaysian but Chinese. This was not because the Chinese were biologically vulnerable compared to the rest of the population, but because they were the people who provided cheap labour on the pig farms where the disease originated. Given this context, an even more appropriate term to describe the relationship between poverty, famine, and ecological degradation in the Anthropocene would be ecosyndemic, an idea that places emphasis on environmental factors in the creation of poverty and famine in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Experiences of poverty and famine are ideological, in that they exist within a set of power relationships between those experiencing them, and those not. As Ann McElroy and Patricia Townend describe in Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective: ‘Sicknessis a social category – the sick role in a particular society, the way a person who is ill is expected to behave’. Looking at poverty and famine in the Anthropocene, these relationships are more complex. If the whole world is “sick” in the Anthropocene, who plays the doctor? With the 1983 Ethiopian drought, it was the nations that had caused the disaster to begin with, inadvertently or otherwise, who acted as healers by providing financial support through the “live aid” event. In these western nations, mid-20^th century optimism, particularly in America, was typified by an ideological belief that technological advances in nuclear energy, antibiotics, and agriculture with the “green revolution” would be able to create a world without poverty, disease, or hunger. Such ideas were strongly rationalistic, based on presumptions of humans being able to control their environment through technology; but the famines, epidemics, and other “natural” disasters of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries speak otherwise. The environmental consequences of Anthropocene ideologies have served to undermine them and have brought forward new arguments that suggest that poverty and famine can only be addressed when working within the frameworks of the natural world rather than over them.

Looking back into our history, the Anthropocene conceptual framework pushes us to question where human decision in relation to the environment played a role in causing poverty and famine. Peoples who chose to transition from hunter-gatherer into settled agricultural societies, for example, created an environment of living that caused new types of disease to evolve from closer contact with animals. Clearing land made new breeding places for mosquitoes and digging irrigation ditches more homes for the tiny parasitic worms that cause bilharzia and therefore anaemia. As Mark Cohen and Gillian Crane-Kramer write in Ancient Health, skeletal records of early agricultural societies show ‘increased nutritional stress’ compared to their hunter-gatherer contemporaries who had a more varied and flexible diet and were thus less susceptible to famine. Foragers, having diets of higher energy and greater variety, were also far more unlikely to develop weaknesses in their nutrition, unlike settled agricultural peoples. With the emergence of the city environment in the historical record, Cohen and Crane Kramer also note how cultural differences between peoples begin to play more important roles in their lifestyles. Indeed, the general trend identified in societies from the advent of agriculture to the modern day has been an increase in social stratification related to changing economic conditions based on environmental factors. Cases of poverty and famine in the Anthropocene follow this trend, being most acutely felt by specific groups of people on lower levels of social strata. Such experiences in a society become less universal and more variable based on a person’s specific place in the nature-culture order.

The great Chinese famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as Dali Yang notes, is one example of famine that is considered to be predominantly of “man-made” causes, as in being the result of ideological policy decisions that caused falls in food production. In this example the connection is clear between human decision and human suffering, but because in the Anthropocene poverty and famine are often more abstracted from their ideological causes via environment, it is harder to conceive of and draw lines of causation. Indeed, the Anthropocene leaves little room for policy makers to blame “natural disasters” for crises, as the Chinese establishment did. What makes this more difficult is that the decisions behind anthropogenic climate change which have contributed to famine and poverty in modern history were generally made in countries different from those which were harmed. As René Dubos wrote in Science and Man’s Nature, often the most widespread impacts of ecological stresses are not the events themselves, but the social organisation and behavioural traits of the societies that surround them.

Minority Ecologies of the Anthropocene

Whilst peoples who live outside, or even tangential to, globalised consumerist economies make up a fraction of the earth’s human population, they are responsible for managing c.25% of the world’s tropical forests. For these people, even if the Anthropocene does not bring full famine or poverty, it can still bring aspects of those things. Human bodies require a complex array of nutrients to operate efficiently, which are obtained in different ways with different cultures around the world. For example, because of the environment of the South American rainforests, where the tropical climate results in acidic soil and therefore the plant life being low in nutritional value, there isn’t an easy supply of animals available to provide protein for a person’s diet. Therefore in many indigenous diets where meat has been uncommon, protein was instead obtained by a mix of maize and beans, that complement each other when eaten together. In the 1960s these two staples began to be upset by consumerist economies of the Anthropocene that resulted in less healthy and nutritious diets, if not hunger. This pattern also holds true for the peoples of the Kalahari Desert where there has been a steady decrease in food obtained from hunting and foraging over time, being replaced with imported commercial products such as cornmeal and sugar. Where at the start of the 20^th century almost all of their nutrition came from wild sources, by 1980 this figure was down to 20%. This came with benefits and disadvantages, such as in seeing an increase in nutritional deficiencies but also a decrease in infant mortality due to a greater availability of milk. This is exemplary of how, in regards to food production, the Anthropocene influences not only the production of food in different environments, but also the way it distributed throughout a given economy and the way it is culturally viewed and prepared.

Hunter/gatherer societies’ food sources are not only put under threat from climate change, however. Indeed, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), habitat loss has been the primary reason behind extinctions and endangerments of mammals, birds, and amphibians around the world, and whilst climate change is a contributor to habitat loss, most of this has been the result of more physically immediate human action through the remodelling of landscapes for agricultural land. This decrease in habitat size has thus reduced the number of plants and animals from which to gather.

In contrast to foragers, people worldwide who live as subsistence farmers (approximately 75% of the world’s 1.2 billion poor) have diets that depend on one specific staple. In temperate European and Asian climates, this has been wheat. For Africa millet or sorghum, south and Southeast Asia rice, and maize for the Americas. Economies built in this style are able to produce more food than hunter/gatherers due to the use of more intensive agricultural techniques but are bound to that single staple’s limitations. Such peoples have been more vulnerable to a lack of certain vitamins or minerals, and more likely to have seasonal hunger incorporated into their farming routines before a harvest. This means that should their resources fall prey to blight, drought, or another limiter, the entire system collapses, leading to famine. This occurred in Kenya in the 1980s when economic pressures of Anthropocene markets caused an increase in poverty and malnutrition because pastoralists were not able to sell their produce at sustainable prices. In the Anthropocene, this is becoming more common, and so this style of subsistence is becoming less viable, as with hunter/gathering. Traditional cuisines around the world have been thus put under threat in the Anthropocene via ecological and also economic contributors. Local foodstuffs are highly cultural and so this represents societal damage, but they are also the ends of a process of adaptive selection over time whereby different culinary combinations have been trialled and those best suited to the environment chosen. Changing these diets without consideration to local particularities, therefore, is more likely to be a force of harm than help.

The Anthropocene has created the environmental conditions which make methods of subsistence other than that which birthed it, global industrial commercialised production, more difficult to maintain. Via the limitation of wild spaces for foraging through habitat destruction, and the increasing of “natural” disasters that decimate traditional farming techniques, those older forms of food acquisition are attacked and diminished. The reason for this is that the majority of the energy utilised in industrial agriculture does not come from human labour, only around 5% compared to its alternatives that use around 90%. Instead it draws on energy sources such as coal and oil that produce high amounts of pollution. Industrial agriculture is vulnerable to the same threats as subsistence agriculture, namely the cultivation of monocultures that are susceptible to disease, but this is remedied with the use of pesticides which in turn harm the health of the humans and ecosystems they come into contact with; for example when pesticides of the neonicotinoid group caused ‘colony collapse disorder’ in bees in Massachusetts in 2013; this in turn damaged the whole ecosystem due to the loss of pollinators, including hurting the yields of the farmers who use those chemicals. Furthermore, such crops have less nutritional content overall compared to crops grown without the use of pesticides or glyphosate herbicides. Indeed, the use of these fertilisers ultimately degrades the soil and water resources of the ecosystem to such an extent that it becomes unsustainable, especially in an environment of increased drought, and contributes to the growth of cyanobacteria via runoff into bodies of water. This bacteria flourishes in excesses of nitrogen and other chemicals that fertiliser provides and in turn harms the health of aquatic life and humans who drink the water, eat products of that water, or use it for recreation.

Anthropocene Societies

The nutritional and economic stresses of the Anthropocene are not only found in traditional agricultural and foraging environments however, although these are the most drastically affected. In America, for example, at least 15% of households suffer from nutritional stress and food insecurity despite availability of charities and government programs. It is also the case that these same households are prone to obesity, because both conditions relate to a lack of healthy food in a person’s diet, rather than a lack of food overall. Those societies most responsible for creating the Anthropocene, the same as those who have profited on it, have seen a shift toward meat as the prime source of protein in their diets, and therefore increased intakes of animal fats. Alongside this, people living on ‘supermarket diets’ see increased intakes of high-glucose and fructose foodstuffs which are associated with obesity and several chronic illnesses including diabetes, various autoimmune diseases, and kidney inflammation.

Industrial meat production chains that have used antibiotics on animals in order to keep them in closer quarters have built immunity in the pathogens they were targeting, thus making those illnesses harder to treat in human populations. Additionally, estrogenic chemicals used in the production of plastic packaging in industrial food networks, and those used on animals and crops, are suggested to promote the growth of fat cells in the body. These chemicals disrupt a human or other animal’s endocrine system, meaning various hormones that are used to regulate fat growth can be confused. It is also likely that such defections can be passed down genetically to children of parents who are exposed to these chemicals pre or postnatally. At the same time, the inspections process of fresh produce has not been able to keep up with production or global distribution, and so foodstuffs contaminated either by bacteria or pesticide have been more likely to reach cooking pots. This has made the task of tracing contaminants back to their source more difficult.

As Anna Bellisari describes the phenomenon in The Obesity Epidemic, obesity is: ‘the predictable outcome of the highly evolved human metabolic system functioning in an obesogenic environment created to fulfil the American Dream’. This highlights how the cultural aspect of an environment can fundamentally impact the biotic and abiotic. Supermarket societies of the 20^th and 21^st centuries that have seen obesity epidemics have done so primarily because their economic and political structures created a gastronomic environment wherein unhealthy foodstuffs were promoted because they were more lucrative than healthier alternatives. Additionally, the promotion of the idea that a person’s fatness is based wholly on individual choice as supposed to also being influenced by structural elements of the environments of nutrition and health that they live in, has allowed the continuation of this structure and the growth of other industries surrounding diet and fitness.

The increased yields typical of industrial agriculture also sometimes translate to less or worse nutrition for people. In central American nations, where the production of products such as beef increased dramatically during the 1960s, the consumption of beef in that area of the world has went down, ranchers themselves having to ‘pay more for less’ as the food was exported to other markets around the world. These globalised markets of industrial societies have also widened the scope of the impacts of food crises such as droughts, particularly for those living in poverty. A poor harvest in one key area of the world can have devastating impacts for the nutritional health of people the world over, such as with the millennium drought in Australia (1996 to 2010) that caused a spike in grain prices and led to deaths and protests in over 50 nations around the world.

Recent history has challenged historians to change the ways they think about phenomena such as ideology, poverty, and famine. The Anthropocene’s ecosyndemic systems of nutrition and economy can only be grappled with a holistic understanding of each existing as nodes in a network of causality that is often non-obvious and multidirectional.

Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

Date of Publication: 4th of August 2020

2020.08.04
Nature as Identity: An Environmental History of Bristol’s Civic Improvement Societies

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INTRODUCTION

When the ash had settled at the end of the second world war, Bristol emerged from it quite the different city to how it had entered at the beginning. Bombing had destroyed many buildings such as the Jacobean St Peter’s Hospital and St Peter’s church as well as over 80,000 houses and the question was now raised over what would fill that vacant space. An opportunity for significant development had been created. Over the coming years, and particularly from the mid-1960s onward, the shape of the new Bristol began to form, and as structures populated the empty lots many Bristolians found themselves taking issue with the environment they now found themselves living in. What resulted was an explosion in the creation of what might be called “civic improvement societies”, concerned citizens forming themselves into groups that sought to improve, in their own view, the environment of Bristol. In wider society too was a growing environmentalist movement with a global perspective that was influencing how people conceptualised their relationship with nature and the environment. The central questions being asked in this essay is: to what extent were the reasons behind the creation of Bristol’s civic improvement groups based in their understandings of nature and the environment? And what were those understandings?

This essay will examine four of the most prominent of these societies at their inception, the ‘Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society’, the ‘Bristol Visual and Environmental Group’, the ‘Bristol Life-Style Movement’, and ‘Bristol Friends of the Earth’. Each of these, whilst being similar in many of their aspects, held distinct ethos’ and approaches to their action and had unique understandings of and relations to nature and the environment. Some attention will also be given to two other important developments during this period, those of Windmill Hill city farm and the proposal for the Avon Gorge hotel, which demonstrate in further multitude of approaches towards the environment in Bristol during this period. Broadly this essay finds that the societies fall into two categories, those with a globalist perspective versus those with a localist, but within these categories there is still much variation. Ultimately it finds that each of these groups conceptualised of nature and the environment in different ways and, with the exception of Bristol Friends of the Earth, not in a manner that would be familiar to contemporary environmentalist movements. The drive behind their creation was more greatly influenced instead by other factors that were tied closely to the rationale of environmentalism; a desire for aesthetics in town planning, an internationalist philosophy and an individualist rejection of modernity. Overall however the most influential factor that sustained these environmental groups was a fear over the loss of community and identity within Bristol, and the natural world acted as a catalyst around which such sentiments could form.

Methodology and Historiography

The primary source base for this essay are the records of these organisations that are kept at Bristol Archives, their constitutions, the minutes of their meetings, their newsletters, correspondences, leaflets, and posters. These sources have been especially useful in giving a view of both the public and private sides of these organisations which allows for an examination of how much ideas around nature were used as promotion to the public as compared to their prevalence within the organisations themselves. As the sources are only either intended for the public or for official use they do lack personal material on the opinions and understandings of the individuals who made up these societies themselves, the picture given instead being one of the organisations’ approaches in a totality. An oral history would be useful in this area as an avenue for further exploration. Therefore, these sources are being used to examine the philosophies and approaches of these groups as collectives in regards to how they understood nature and its place within their goals for “improvement” as well as in how they utilised concepts of the environment and nature to achieve their goals.

The historiography in this very specific area has been light, the only works of note provided being incidental histories provided by the societies themselves, those that still exist today. These autobiographies were intended for general interest as supposed to academic and cannot be called impartial, nor are they attempting to be. On a national level several academic works have considered the origins of modern environmentalist movements such as David Pepper’s The Roots of Modern Environmentalism that charts the influence of romanticism, Darwinism, and socialism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries in forming environmentalist philosophy. Nick Crowson et al.’s NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-state Actors in Society and Politics Since 1945 explores this in a more modern context, explaining how the rise in environmental science bolstered and altered the arguments of these organisations during the mid to late 20^th century. Donald Worster’s The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination lay much of the foundation for works such as these in 1993 where he explicitly tied the practice of environmental history to environmentalism in the present day. However, where these texts are have focussed on the emergence of environmentalism nationally and internationally, this essay will examine the phenomenon at a local level, within the context of one city.

CHAPTER ONE

The Localists

The Clifton and Hotwells Improvement Society (CHIS) was founded in 1967 by a group of residents who wanted to, in their own words ‘keep Clifton’s character and charm intact’ in an age of ‘industry, transport, and new housing’. Reading some of their more recent literature may give the impression that concern for nature and the environment was a primary factor in the society’s foundation, but this is somewhat of a misrepresentation. In their leaflet from 2008 40 Years of CHIS they wrote that ‘the natural world is not merely an add-on to human activity, but an essential core of it’ and in regards to their history they imply the group was founded on similarly strong principles. Therein they wrote that they ‘like to see’ the people who campaigned against constructing housing over the Leigh Woods area in the early 20^th century as ‘the precursors’ of their organisation, but it was George Wills who was responsible for donating Leigh Woods to the national trust, not the CHIS. Whatever the society has become today, at its inception the CHIS was not very interested in environmental action, though that is not to say they didn’t take any interest in the natural world. Rather, the group was more invested in the aesthetic of nature, an aesthetic with which to complement the historic Georgian and Victorian architecture of the area and with which to combat modern constructions.

In their original constitution of 1967, they state their intended aim as to ‘encourage high standards in architecture and town planning’ with no allusion towards conservation or ecological concerns. As compared to the other civic improvement societies examined in this essay the CHIS took the most conservative approach in this area, with their primary interest in environmental management being as a tool towards making the place they lived in feel civilised and friendly. Their key purpose was the conservation and preservation of the existing urban townscape. Nature and the environment did hold a place in this vision however, as green spaces were intrinsic to the Georgian and Victorian architecture of the area, as such the CHIS demonstrated in their meetings and correspondences a good deal of concern over the state of residents’ gardens which they resented being turned into spaces for car-parking, calling these ‘bald front gardens’ a ‘scar’ on the area. They sent many letters congratulating or criticizing businesses and individuals on the state of the gardens such as to the South West Electricity Board complementing them on some ‘well identified planting’ around their new sub-station. However, they were happy to see greenery removed if it improved the aesthetic of an area, writing to city engineer J B Bennett that some members had been ‘distressed’ by the idea of removing trees along Buckingham Place but felt it was ‘overall good for the frontage’.

In terms of civic space they were also keen to preserve communal green spaces, having them declared as town greens to prevent them being built upon. However, the minutes of their meetings convey that their principal purpose for this was to halt the ‘threat [of] new housing’ that would not match the aesthetic of the area as supposed to valuing the land as green space in and of itself. However, the practice that was perhaps the most emblematic of their approach towards nature was what they called ‘putting an order’ on a tree, singling out individual trees to be preserved because of their pleasing positioning and appearance, such as when writing to Mrs Wilton in 1975 to ask her not to cut down the tree on her front lawn. This demonstrates the specificity of the CHIS’s environmental considerations, the focus on the minutiae. They were not contemplating nature as an ecological system in need of the same level of conservation as the buildings of the area, more as a useful array of decorations that could be tactfully applied to improve the character of Clifton and Hotwells.

The philosophy of the CHIS very much spawned from the local environment of the area, but from the urban environment as supposed to the natural. As the society developed it did begin to consider nature in a different light, seeing it not just as having aesthetic benefit, but also a recreational one, their 1977 constitution altering their aims to also include the ‘provision of facilities for recreation and other leisure time occupations… in the interest of social welfare’. Still here however, the CHIS was interested in what the local ecology could do for them rather than what they could do for it.

Bristol Visual and Environmental Group

The Bristol Visual and Environmental Group (BVEG), founded in 1967 (one year before the CHIS), took a far more radical approach as compared to the CHIS. Their remit took in the whole city as supposed to a single area and they paid particular attention to public transport as an alternative to the car. They argued that the development of large modern blocks and high-density road networks was damaging the character of the city as a whole and was impacting the environment in the sense of that for the humans who lived there. One of their most common calls was to keep the city at a ‘human scale’, writing to the council in 1970 berating ‘the old city losing all its atmosphere of a medieval walled town, the prevalence of ugly car-parks and offices, [and] the vanishing interest in gabled or curved roof lines’. They were also concerned with tall buildings breaking up the terraced nature of the city as it sat on the hill, meaning they argued that buildings higher up the hill should be able overlook those beneath them. One thing that set the BVEG apart from the CHIS was its level of political engagement, frequently writing to and criticising the city council as well as putting out argumentative leaflets and newsletters and even forming a policy in 1971 to ‘name and shame’ urban planners who damaged the integrity of the city as they saw it.

In its language the BVEG demonstrated a desire to tie itself to environmental discussion and spoke out strongly on green issues. In their public newsletters during the early 1970s they wrote that the council should ‘think hard before they develop more housing on GREEN OPEN SPACE’, recognising the inherent value of natural spaces. They were also very concerned with the environmental impact of the car on human health and the health of the city, writing that the council should instead ‘encourage the use of GREEN TRANSPORT using WATER AND RAIL’. Ultimately however the group proved more interested in the ‘visual’ portion of their name as supposed to the ‘environmental’. Their use of “green language” was more an attempt to capture the zeitgeist than to follow it. They called for the creation of conservation areas, but only across urban spaces as supposed to natural. They thought the council shouldn’t build on green spaces, but because ‘there is so much derelict land available in the city centre’ as supposed to a wish to preserve the spaces themselves. In a newsletter in 1972 they wrote that the group’s aim was ‘to preserve the historic and unique character of Bristol… these aims being consistent with conservation and the prudent use of natural resources’. The order and wording of these objectives is important as they demonstrate that the group was primarily concerned, similarly to the CHIS, with the architectural character of the area, however they recognised that these goals could be ‘consistent’ with environmentalist causes.

Where the CHIS was interested in the aesthetic of nature and the environment, the BVEG was interested in the language of environmentalism, utilising it to further the appeal of their arguments to the public. In actuality the BVEG and the CHIS had very similar agendas, but the more political approach that the BVEG took on those issues led it to be more attentive to, and able to capitalise upon, political trends. The group’s central message had always been that ‘Georgian Bristol [was] under threat’; what they recognised was that the things that threatened it: roads, cars, and tower blocks, were the same things that environmentalists were concerned with as well.

These two societies were localists, in that they were drawing influence from, and looking for change to, local causes. Their concern lay with the identity of Bristol as a city in the post-war context. In the present day this image is often tied to nature, the environment, and environmentalism however at the conception of these groups in the sixties and early seventies the natural world was not prevalent in their philosophies for civic renewal. For them the “local environment” for which they sought change was predominantly an urban one and the task at hand was one of town planning and the encouragement of architectural rigour. The natural world held a place in that schematic, but an ancillary one; it was not a driving factor for their activism. From the localist standpoint, it was the buildings of Bristol that had been destroyed in the war, and it was the building in Bristol that was destroying the city after it. Thus, they did not conceive of the environment as other societies with more international agendas might. Bristol was not a piece of the puzzle, it was the puzzle, and the natural world simply did not fit in as a key concern, indeed, the city generally is a place where it is of the least concern.

CHAPTER TWO

Bristol Life-Style Movement

What of organisations that held more internationalist attitudes? As alluded to at the close of the first chapter, this essay finds that the globalists incorporated concerns over ecology and nature more deeply into their core philosophy. However, this did not necessarily translate to stronger advocacy for environmental causes, as is the case with the Bristol Life-Style Movement (BLSM). The philosophy of the BLSM is perhaps the most interesting of those explored in this essay as it was simultaneously global and individualistic, radical and conservative. The group was a Christian organisation that stood against much of what the “modern world” had brought them in the sixties and seventies. They wrote to their members of ‘the myth of progress’, advocated for ‘freedom from the consumerist rat-race’, and were fond of quoting Gandhi: ‘there is enough in the world for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed’. They were disillusioned with capitalism and saw the environment as key casualty of it, they wanted a return to a simpler life, a life that was closer to God.

The BLSM saw their action as part of a wider struggle for ‘global justice’. They supported increases in foreign aid, the boycotting of South African goods over apartheid, and the attendance of the ‘fight world poverty mass rally’ in 1985. They framed these as environmental issues, saying in their promotional material that ‘peace means sharing of resources’ and that ‘conservation is survival’. This was a fusion of environmentalism with traditional Christian causes; destruction of the environment was a large scale issue that, they argued, required a coming together to address. In other words, the environmental threat was a single, global, unifying factor that underlay many other causes the group cared about and acted as a new reason to spread their charity and faith. The environment of Bristol was inextricably linked to that of China or Lesotho and people in the west needed to be made aware of ‘the environmental destruction on which their standard of living depends’. In these ways the group was more radical than the CHIS or the BVEG, as betrayed in them calling themselves a Life-Style ‘movement’ rather than a group or society.

However, the official documents of the BLSM reveal that practical action they advocated be took was not nearly so radical as their language and ideology in their promotional material. They stood against global ecological devastation, but they did not ask for societal or systemic change in order to combat it, instead they focussed on changes in individual lifestyle choices. Their slogan, was ‘live simply that all may simply live’ and they asked of their members that they ‘commit themselves to a moderate lifestyle as a personal contribution to the conservation of our planet’. Whilst they did conceive of nature as a transnational entity, their means of conserving it was very much local, even more so than the CHIS or the BVEG, who focussed on city-wide change as supposed to individual. They encouraged cycling and buying organic, discouraged driving and buying ‘wasteful packaging’. It was in this sense that the BLSM was globalist yet individualist, their message was that change for the planet was tied to change within yourself. The lifestyle the BLSM was encouraging, the principals of simplicity, self-sufficiency, and community held nature at their core. The natural world was God’s creation, and the ideal was to live in harmony with it as much as possible. The world of office blocks, plastic bags, and the newly built M4 motorway was the antithesis of this.

Indeed, the ecological philosophy of the group also incorporated a wider rejection of authority and intellectualism. In their 1981 newsletter, they wrote that ‘the great technological age is making us more clever, but perhaps less wise’ and that ‘we are allowing the “experts” to organise too much of our lives’. In essence they framed “getting back to nature” as an escape from modernity, both its damaging physical attributes and its societal ones, writing in 1974 that the actuality of ‘cheap fuel’ was inseparable from the ‘gluttony’ of the society surrounding it. They saw themselves as alternative thinkers who were not given space by “the powers that be”, complaining in a newsletter in 1981 that they were being ‘written off as… left-wingers or even worse, Christians!’. For the BLSM, the allure of the natural world was its freedom as well as its simplicity. The localist societies wanted to see the environment of Bristol change, but they still wanted to live in it as a modern city. The globalist anti-authority perspective of the BLSM on the other hand led the want to escape the city entirely, whilst ultimately never physically leaving it. The method to achieve this escape therefore was to make your life more “natural”, more alternative, more out of step with everyone else’s, to detach yourself from what the BLSM saw as a morally vacuous normality within a global community of people also doing so.

Bristol Friends of the Earth

Bristol Friends of The Earth (BFOTE) was different from the other societies discussed because it was a wing of the much bigger national organisation. Their agenda was very focussed on international issues just like the BLSM, but it went further in really advocating for internationalism as a philosophy. After their formation in 1972 they set up a ‘World Studies Centre’, stating that they wanted to encourage British society to be more ‘outward facing’. In their language and their actions they far more closely resembled the environmental organisations of today than the other societies thus far discussed and their goals overall were more focussed around an understanding of the natural world as something to be protected for its own sake. The CHIS, BVEG, and BLSM did all care to greater and lesser degrees about the state of the natural world, but in the context of how it could then help them with their own human existences. The health of ecosystems as a whole was not necessarily paramount if what existed was sufficient to achieve their desired ends. This is not to say that BFOTE were not concerned with themselves, it is that they saw themselves and nature to be one and the same, writing in a 1981 bulletin that ‘we cannot afford to trade off the integrity of the planet’s life support systems against short-term economic gains’. They conceptualised of the ecosystem as a whole, of which all parts were needed for the machine to operate, including humanity. Nature was not something you could choose to incorporate into your lifestyle or neighbourhood as a means of improving your quality of life, it was something you needed to conserve in order to protect all life¸ including your own.

It was on these grounds that BFOTE participated in numerous campaigns during their early years against excessive packaging, the Bristol ring road, the Severn barrage, nuclear power, whaling, non-returnable bottles, the Dartmoor tungsten mine, heavy-lorries, and the use of lead in petrol. The variety of these campaigns, on both local, national, and international matters demonstrates that the group saw the protection of the natural world as an issue that spanned all of these spheres; they were all tied to each other and to humanity. As they wrote in a 1982 bulletin, the ‘issues of environment and development are inextricably linked’. BFOTE saw the environment and nature as integral to their internationalist agenda. For them, nature was a force that transgressed national boundaries both in the sense that non-human life pays little respect to the borders of countries, but also in the international cooperation that they saw as required in order to tackle issues of environmental destruction.

The group also ran a number of campaigns to encourage cycling and advocate for the insulation of homes for the elderly. They involved local schools in ‘pollution studies classes’ where they taught both children, teachers, and parents primarily about the dangers of leaded fuel but also ‘the need for energy conservation’. They were consulted with in the building of Wick Primary School on the outskirts of Bristol, which was built to be energy efficient and utilise renewable energy. One of their largest campaigns was titled ‘spot the blot!” and asked people to ‘take notes on gross examples of air pollution, filthy rivers and beaches, noisy factories or road junctions, despoiled countryside etc.’ and report them both to their local council and BFOTE. These programs were a way of joining care for the natural world with the bringing of local communities together. This is a theme that all the groups studied in this essay adhere to. Indeed, if there is one factor that binds the ideologies and philosophies of all these groups together during this short period it is that of community and a sense of place. All of these societies, including those that didn’t conceptualise of the natural world as central to their goals as an organisation, felt that in the creation of modern Bristol something was being lost that nature could help to regain.

Windmill Hill City Farm and the Avon Gorge Hotel

Two projects during this period best exemplify this trend, the creation of the Windmill Hill city farm, and the campaign against the creation of the Avon Gorge hotel, two projects that all these societies supported. The Avon Gorge hotel was a proposed extension to the existing hotel that would be both larger than the original and would sit just beneath it in the valley. Its proposed design followed the brutalist aesthetic that was popular at the time, however it was not with the members of the CHIS, BVEG, BLSM, and BFOTE. They described it as a ‘monster hotel project’ that would ‘generate even more traffic’ and declared it would ‘destroy the existing balance between natural environment and townscape’ in an open letter they all signed in 1971 from ‘the citizens of Bristol and residents of Clifton’. The scale of the proposal was enough to bring everyone together against both its aesthetics and environmental consequences. That natural space mattered to the identity of the city.

For the founders of Windmill Hill city farm, known as “the dustbin group”, community and identity were central to their project, indeed they were the reason behind it. The project began in 1976 and was created out of an area of land that had previously been housing but had been heavily bombed during the war and had lain derelict since. In the first public document the dustbin group produced they were very clear as to the reasons behind their project:

‘local government structure plans of the 50s and 60s took little into account of the needs of inner-city communities – land was rezoned, urban motorways planned, industries relocated, houses and shops demolished, land left derelict and thus communities destroyed’

They felt left behind and overlooked, and what characterised that abandonment was rubble and motorways and crumbling buildings: urban decay. What a farm could achieve then, with trees and sheep and vegetables, was a departure from that. Nature was both a representation of, and a means of, urban renewal and the building of community and identity. The dustbin group’s main argument in favour of the farm was that it would bring jobs to the area through ‘community industry, project staff, and work experience’. It would repurpose derelict land, create jobs and a community hub, and prevent the construction of a lorry park that had been proposed to be built there. The conservation of nature or the health of their lifestyles was not on their minds, these things were simply tangential benefits of the project.

Conclusion

Why did all these societies, projects, and campaigns emerge at the same time in Bristol during the late sixties and early seventies? Threats to the environment and earth’s ecosystems were not new. Deforestation, species extinctions, poor air quality, and urban sprawl had existed for decades. What had changed was the character of Bristol itself in the wake of post-war redevelopment and the rise of the car. These changes highlighted to many people the importance of the natural world to their lives, but not in the same way for every person, hence the variety of societies created. For some it made them recognise its importance in town planning and architecture, for others in their lifestyles, and for others in the wider picture of global ecosystems and environmental forces. The natural world was and is many things to many people, and these societies, with their divergent philosophies around the relationship between human and environment, demonstrated that. The common strand that ran between them all at this time however, and the spark that ignited the explosion in the creation of these sorts of groups, was a fear that the communities and identity of Bristol were being damaged and a belief that nature could act as a force to heal them.

Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

Date of Publication: 28th of May 2020

2020.05.28
The Child Botanical: A Case For Exploring The Intersection Between Environmental History and The History of Childhood

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Childhood in Britain today, as a concept, is extremely precious to society. Children are pure, innocent, as of yet uncorrupted by the world; theirs are ‘the hands by which we take hold of heaven’. They represent the future, both very literally but also conceptually in that they are symbols of potential change, an opportunity to imagine how the world could be different. If this is true, then what is adulthood? It is the antithesis: a corruption of innocence, a loss of purity, and a symbol of the status quo. Our idea of nature, of what is “natural”, is significant to such concepts. We see the adult world as constrained, urban, and interior whereas the child’s, ideally, is unconstrained, rural, and exterior. The outdoors: forests, parks, beaches, and riverbanks are the “natural habitats” of youth, where children exist at their best, not the home, car, factory, or office. Children are lent a purity by association with these natural spaces. Simultaneously, they lend their own purity to them. Our conceptualisation of children and of nature tie them inextricably to one another.

This concept of the “child botanical”, one that does not necessarily square with the reality of the relationship between childhood and nature, took hold in Britain with the advent of industrialisation. Its origins lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s On Education (1762) which marked a departure away from the puritan belief of original sin towards the opposite, that we are born virtuous. In the 19th century romanticists such as William Wordsworth mainstreamed the idea and ‘the cult of childhood’ was born, leading to a boom in children’s literature from The Water Babies (1863)to Swallows and Amazons (1930). Such works and ideas nearly always tied children and the natural world together; becoming joint-symbols of an idealised natural purity that was being lost to the modern world of factories and smog. Today that sense of loss is still prevalent, felt at both societal and often deeply personal levels, and it now has a name, “cultural severance”.

In post-war Britain this relationship gained a new dynamic with a sharp rise in population, the car, and resultant urbanisation. This is the period which holds the most contemporary relevance because it is that of the childhoods of today’s adult population who have seen (and overseen) during their lifetimes a transformation in the way children interact with their environment. Many equate the degradation of the natural world they have seen over time to a deprivation of childhood. But are they right? Is there such thing as a “special relationship” between nature and child? Why has the concept proved so appealing? Why is it that children have found themselves at the centre of the debate around the present climate crisis? Why does the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg draw so much admiration, but also so much hate? As the effects of climate change steadily encroach further into our daily lives, issues around the relationship between childhood and the environment are only being brought into greater prominence. Climate change is being cast not only as a physical attack against children – in the form of pollution – but also a conceptual one; an attack against the “child botanical”. Greater study of that relationship, and how it has changed over past decades, is therefore both important and timely.

However, children as physical beings, as supposed to concepts, are prone to act antithetically to the ideals they are held to. What children decide to value within their environment is ultimately up to them, and their choice versus the expectation of it can prove disruptive. Sometimes a rolling pastoral landscape is boring whilst a busy industrial site is exciting; sometimes a dead animal is more intriguing than a living one. To many children nature isn’t something to protect; it is to be used, to be played with. Likewise, the natural world doesn’t always show respect for the purity of the child, indeed, children are more prone to its dangers. The point here is that the relationships between children and environments are necessarily their own. They are unique and fundamentally different from those of their elders, transgressive even, and yet in history they are paid little attention to. Despite the importance we place on “childhood” and “nature”, history seems to indicate we value these more as concepts than as realities. Such relationships can no longer be deemed ahistorical, for they offer what historians constantly seek, a new perspective.

Some works in recent years have begun to tackle such issues and the “the environmental history of childhood” more generally. All focus so far has been on America, where this concept was first toyed with in Elliott West’s Growing Up with the Country (1989). It is clear West thought this an area criminally underexplored in history, describing it as being ‘at best embryonic’ despite the subject matter being ‘of some of society’s most important, interesting, and perceptive members’. It is important to note that West did not set out to make his history of childhood environmental, this was simply the logical direction that study led him, a clear indicator towards the natural fit that these two fields have together. West found that the key difference in how children and adults related to the frontier was in their relationship to the environment. For children the flora, fauna, weather, and land were not symbols of a “frontier” at all, they were home, the only world they knew. Therefore, their relationship with said environment was fundamentally different from their parents, they held a unique ‘kinship’.

Since 1989 however, whilst the respective fields of the history of childhood and environmental history have both grown, they have had little interaction. To date there has been only one book that has explicitly sought to write an environmental history of childhood: Pamela Riney-Kehberg’s The Nature of Childhood (2014). Again, this is an American work, focussed on the mid-west from the 19th century to the present. Therein, Riney-Kehrberg does an excellent job of explaining the methods by which American society has sought to control the relationship between child and environment and charts the increasing restriction of children’s spaces over time, particularly in urban environments. Today, she argues, only the indoors is considered a “safe space” for children. The work overall lacks a degree of nuance, however. The past is always framed as a ubiquitous gold standard from which things have only ever deteriorated, specifically since Kehrberg herself was a child in the 1970s. As a result, the work at times feels as if it was written by a stereotypically miserly elder complaining about “kids these days”, bemoaning that children don’t play outside anymore because they ‘spend their leisure time at soccer matches, watching television, or looking at their computers, cell phones and video games’. Whilst the use of a declensionist narrative is understandable to an extent, the issue is not so clear-cut as to pronounce the current generation utterly deprived of environmental understanding. Could it not be equally argued that children today have a far greater awareness of the environment as a whole than those of generations prior?

Issues of control are thus also at the heart of this discussion. Because the environment and children are both seen as being malleable, easily influenceable, almost helpless, there is dialogue to be had about how society decides to try and control that relationship. Do we seek to regulate it because we see too little of the innocence that is supposed to exist there? We think of children as pure but also as naïve and unappreciative of the status they hold. They must be taught not to trample on the daisies or build dens from silver birch, to appreciate nature correctly. If they interact with nature in the “wrong way” then they must have been misguided, so we must provide them with the proper guidance to make sure they do it the right way. Similarly, we see nature as being simultaneously virtuous and dangerous. Wild spaces, be they rural or urban, are borderlands on the fringes of society where children can often demonstrate greater degrees of control and independence. The rules are less clear, and the physical space is unorderly and anarchic. At the same time these spaces can be where adults are strictest in their policing, designating pathways not to be strayed from, putting up signs telling you to “keep out for your own safety!”, or preventing entry altogether. Thus, we have the paradoxical concept of wanting to protect the environment and children from one another but also wanting them to exist together as much as possible. How did such ideas come about in Britain? What is encouraging (or discouraging) people to regulate the child botanical?

The methods we use to this end are various, through schooling, scouting, and stories of all sorts. There are a great many number of organisations dedicated to “introducing” children to the natural world, and the focus of children’s media on such themes is intense. Through charming anthropomorphisms, tales of adventure in exciting wildernesses, and escapes from the dreary adult world, we are desperate to instil a love of nature into our youth. This is another of the ideological complexities in how we understand children and nature; that we as adults know better how to treat the environment despite children supposedly being closer to it than ourselves. Humanity tends to cast itself as a warden figure, a guardian over the “defenceless” children and environment; is the high value placed upon them due to how much we value them as independent actors, or as possessions? Examining how people have sought to influence the relationship between child and environment, and how and why that influence has changed over time, can contextualise the relationship we know today and offer perspective on how it might change.

Furthermore, the idea of “children” as a cohesive category is a problematic one. Differences in class, race, and gender play just as much of a role in the lives of children as they do of adults, and yet the ideal of the child botanical has its roots in the work of white, middle-to-upper-class men. Similarly, all the current research is based on American childhoods, what differences might we find in Britain? The environment is an extremely variable factor to, from urban to rural, north to south, highland to lowland. Might it not be that children who are products of different social and societal influences will approach nature in different ways? Is our ideal of childhood the right one? The rebelliousness of children can be enlightening in these respects, their unfamiliarity with the established order making them more likely to question or transgress it, undermining what adult society says certain types of people are a “natural” fit for. Ultimately, our current understanding of how children independently think about and interact with nature is limited.

Examining how the relationship between the environment and childhood has changed over time is thus an insightful and important enterprise. This is an area of study that is both bitingly relevant to the present day, surprisingly underexplored, and delves to the heart of heart of contemporary issues around urbanism, social control, class, generational divides, safety, and of course the environment. The value society places on children means that demonstrating how environmental issues affect them can lead to greater value placed on environmental issues. Highlighting children’s points of view as an alternative to mainstream society also asks us as adults to re-examine what we value within the environment and childhood and re-assess how we present these things to each other. It asks us to incorporate children into our thinking about the spaces in which we live from their own perspective, not how we would wish them to be. It asks us to consider which “version” of childhood we are seeking to promote in society.

Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

Date of Publication: 7th of January 2020

2020.01.07
Dead River: An Environmental History of the Tyne Improvement Commission 1850-1968CE

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For men may come and men may go,

But I go on forever.

– Alfred Tennyson, ‘The Brook’.

Introduction

The Significance of River History

When searching for a location to build a home, the humans who founded the first settlements on the Tyne had several priorities in mind. First and foremost, they needed access to a sustainable source of food and water, but they were also looking for a site that was defendable, sanitary, and well connected, to facilitate fast travel and trade with the outside world; the river was the only logical place that satisfied these objectives. Soon many human settlements had clustered around the Tyne’s banks and over time the people of Tyneside built their houses, economies, and cultures around the river upon which they relied for survival and expansion. As time progressed this bond grew tighter as they discovered that the waters could be utilised for other purposes; generating power, producing chemicals, concrete, oil, and many other industrial materials, as well as in being a source of recreation. In this way they followed the global human trend of using the river as a basis for civilisation. Likewise, the Tyne itself, alongside all the other life it supported, found its fate acutely entwined with human developments.

As historical agents, rivers and the life they support have never acted as passive resources to merely be consumed; time and again they have proved to human populations that they can knock civilisations down as easily as they built them up. In c.5000BCE, the fortunes of the peoples of Mesopotamia were dashed against the banks of the Tigris-Euphrates after repeated flooding, partially blamed on their own attempts to direct the path of the river. In c.2000BCE a 200 year drought hit the Indus river and spelled equal disaster for the peoples of the Indus Valley civilisation. In c.350BCE, it is theorised that the Guadalquivir river delta rose up to completely submerge the wealthy city of Tartessos based upon it, thus creating the origin of the Atlantean myth. In contemporary times rivers have become more entwined with human societies than ever, relied on as sources of food, water, culture, trade, and recreation, however they are also facing some of their greatest threats from the same source. The quantity of pollutants being discharged into waterways such as the Nile, the Ganges, and the Yangtze, as well as the effects of landscaping and unsustainable water use, is resulting in ecosystem collapse. This has resulted in ever-increasing quantities of resources being spent in efforts to save these unique environments both for their own sake and for humanity at large. The story of the relationship between human and river is an ancient one, and in the modern day is as important as it has ever been.

Across history the story of the River Tyne is one that parallels that of the modern Nile or Ganges, and it maybe holds some lessons for them. The pertinent period to assess in regards to this began in 1850 when a body named, in retrospect perhaps ironically, as the “Tyne Improvement Commission” was appointed by parliament to increase the volume and profitability of trade on the river. This organisation’s conservatorship of the river would last until 1968, and whilst not solely accountable, it was predominantly responsible for the transformation of the river during this time from a natural estuary into, in their own words, ‘a great highway of industry’. Environmentally speaking, their century of “improvements” meant that in 1957, when the Tyne’s waters literally bubbled with noxious chemicals, the river was officially classified as ‘biologically dead’.

Methodology and Historiography

The focus of this article is therefore upon the Tyne Improvement Commission (TIC) and the unprecedented changes that they oversaw during their 118 years of authority. The primary route of analysis is through the extensive records that the organisation kept of their proceedings, documenting step-by-step how they went about their program of transformation. From an environmental perspective, these sources are used to assess the impact of the TIC’s works upon the river and its ecology and how those impacts then affected humanity in turn. Their discussions are also analysed to come to an understanding of the philosophy behind their actions. Ultimately it is a study of the relationships, both physical and intellectual, between humanity and the rest of the natural world as they developed during the TIC’s tenure and the ways in which they intersected with one another. A river is a complex, interconnected ecosystem where disturbances on the waters can ripple outward beyond foresight, therefore it only makes sense to assess it as such.

What this article also provides is a counternarrative to the traditional histories of the region. Much of Tyneside’s modern identity has been built on its industrial heritage, for which it is proud, and a significant majority of its written history has forwarded a narrative where the river’s “golden years” are the same as those which resulted in the pollution and destruction of much of its natural resources. The modern Port of Tyne describes the appointment of the TIC as the beginning of ‘the heyday of the river’, but from the perspective of the river itself this is far from the case. It would be untrue to say that environmental concerns have been omitted in entirety across the historiography, although this is sometimes the case, but it would be fair to state they have been largely disregarded. The history of the Tyne’s shipyards, mines, and factories is far from something to be ashamed of, but it is, this article argues, something to be reconsidered and taken in duality in the light of an understanding that the benefits of industry came at a significant cost.

The predominant concentration of previous histories of the river has been on the human activities that took place upon it; the history of export statistics, employment rates, and commerce. In 1880 James Guthrie’s The River Tyne: It’s History and Resources gave little attention to ecological concerns, focussing on the feats of engineering that had been so successful in remodelling the river’s form in his recent years. Throughout the 20th century this trend continued with texts that also focussed predominantly on human achievement and engineering such as Life on the Tyne, The Origins of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Maritime Heritage: Newcastle and the River Tyne. The same is true for the texts of the 21st century, such as The Story of the Tyne and River Tyne. All of these are fine publications which competently examine many aspects of Tyneside’s history, and indeed all were useful in the writing of this article, but it must also be said that they neglect environmental angles. Not all histories can or should be environmental histories, but the extent to which the natural history of the river has been buried beneath fascination at industrial achievement, even to this day, is surprising.

One text, however, has acted as an exception to this rule, and has taken an ecological approach to the river’s history, this being Leona Skelton’s Tyne after Tyne: An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection 1529-2015. Tyne after Tyne looks at the history of human environmental action and conservation on the river and therein Skelton analyses how approaches and attitudes to the Tyne have varied over time regarding conservation of its natural resources. This study has opened the field of environmental history on the Tyne and has revealed a forgotten and often ignored, yet fundamentally integral, facet of its past. Where Tyne after Tyne covers a broad time period however, this article more tightly directs its attention toward one specific stage of the Tyne’s environmental history, exploring it in greater detail and looking at the physical effects of that environmental action upon the biosphere.

The importance of the relationship between human and river is one that has always been appreciated on the Tyne, but the importance of an environmentally sustainable relationship is one that is now having to be re-remembered. Indeed, for a majority of its history before the formation of the TIC, the citizens of Tyneside managed to live in comparative harmony with their river, and not because they lacked the technology to do it harm, as the Mesopotamians prove. It is crucial therefore that we understand the pre-industrial history of the river as both comparison and context within which to assess the momentous changes it would face post-1850 which so fundamentally shifted the ecological landscape.

Chapter 1

More lasting value than californian gold

The Deep history of the tyne

The history of the River Tyne began at the same time the British Isles rose from the sea 30 million years ago. Just north of Kielder at the Scottish border the north Tyne emerged and meandered eastwards before travelling south towards Hexham. The south Tyne began in Cumbria, flowing over the limestone rocks of Cross Fell and feeding into the north river at Warden Rock. At this meeting point they then processed eastwards, sculpting a valley out of the chalk which had formed 40 to 80 million years before. The formations made during these early chapters in the Tyne’s history have proved influential on its development thereafter, the movement of glaciers and other fluvial processes being the key instruments which created the landscapes and habitats that have dictated the character of the valley ever since. The result of these processes was that the Tyne region became naturally isolated from other parts of the country, establishing an environment that was ecologically unique for the plants and animals that occupied its banks. After humans arrived, this isolation drew people closer to the river as it created a greater need for water-borne trade.

These ancient geological processes created the environments on which all life in the region has since been based, the Tyne’s mudflats, riverbanks, and tributaries encouraging the specific types of flora to grow and fauna to breed that have since become local to the region. Pink salmon, river otters, and water voles alongside rarer creatures like the kittiwake, white-clawed crayfish, and the freshwater pearl mussel all chose the Tyne for these characteristics, as did the human. Outside of wildlife, the prevalence of lead and coal on the banks of the Tyne has been extremely influential on its history ever since mining started in the 2nd century, and the abundance of gravel on its riverbed became a valuable resource in the creation of concrete in the 20th.

Preservation for Profit: The Corporation of Newcastle

The corporation of Newcastle could be described as the progenitor of the TIC, although the two organisations took considerably varying approaches to managing the river. It rose to prominence in 1319 when it was granted royal conservatorship of the Tyne between Sparrow-Hawk and Hedwin streams at the expense of rivals south of the river (in this context “conservatorship” meaning the preservation of commerce, not ecology). Soon after it acquired exclusive royal licenses to dig coal in 1330 and by 1530 it had been made illegal to load or unload goods anywhere along the river except from the city of Newcastle. Through taxes, trade, and tolls the corporation absorbed the majority of the Tyne’s profits and became efficient in preventing other townships from tapping its wealth. Alongside hundreds of minor blockages it brought major successful petitions against South Shields, Jarrow, and the Bishop of Durham to prevent them loading ships, building wharfs, and exacting tolls. In this way, the Newcastle Corporation acted as an unlikely force for ecological preservation, preventing redevelopment of the river as a means of blocking rivals’ opportunity to turn a profit.

The nature of the corporation’s trade, being predominantly in hides alongside wool, fish, and corn (although coal was profitable and growing) also acted as a force for environmental conservation. These industries, being based on natural products, were considerably more reliant on the health of the river than those, such as coal, which would dominate the Tyne in later centuries and so this gave financial incentive for the Newcastle corporation to care for it. Local flora and fauna was also what the population of Tyneside predominantly survived upon in terms of sustenance as well as economics. Additionally, even if it did not fully understand the science behind the impacts of dumping in the river, the corporation was still very aware that its relationship with the Tyne was a ‘two-way process’, that their fortunes were bound; knowing the river’s tides and currents, and knowing where it was shallow or deep, or the best spots for fishing, was integral knowledge for the corporation’s success. It knew that the status-quo was profitable, and was therefore wary of change.

The way the corporation managed this was through a “river court”, which it set up in 1613, soon followed by a conservancy commission in 1614. The river court, complete with river jurors and water bailiff, was held weekly and was used to impose fines on those who would ‘do harm’ to the water. This was meant in an economic sense, but it is clear that environmental and economic prosperity were inseparable in these cases, as they were so closely tied together. This approach was very effective, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne grew wealthy as a result of it. William Brereton, after a visit to Newcastle in 1635 remarked that it had become ‘the fairest and richest town in England’.

Figure 1. A reconstruction drawing of 16th century Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Ballast Dumping in the 18th Century

However, the impression must not be given that the river laid completely unsullied before the advent of the TIC. The Newcastle Corporation was not an environmentalist organisation and its river court was not created out of a desire to protect the natural world for its own sake. This is best shown by looking at the 18th century, in which the extent of trade on the river began to increase substantially. For many years beforehand ships had been dumping ballast into the river with less than stringent regulation; the entirety of Newcastle-Gateshead’s quayside had been created via a slow process of the filling in of old docks with silt to eventually form a platform of land. By the 1700s however, the extent of these depositions was causing the already narrow and shallow waters to grow narrower and shallower; indeed, at low tide you could wade across the river at the point where the present swing bridge stands. More importantly for traders however, the tides were pulling the ballast downstream towards the mouth of the river where it was feared the ports would become clogged to such an extent that commerce might be halted altogether.

The health of the ecosystems within in the river were also being affected, as the sediments were burying habitats, thus reducing aquatic diversity. However, ultimately the environmental impact was not highly significant because it did not fundamentally change the environs of the river as the dredging of the same material would do in later centuries. The Tyne was already a shallows environment and the ballast, whilst causing some damage, did not alter this and was composed of non-toxic natural materials such as sand, mud, and rock. The ecological records available from the time, concerning concentrations of fish in the river (important to the fisheries of Tyneside) endorse this point, suggesting that the river was not only as healthy as it had ever been but was, in fact, healthier. It was recorded that on a single day on the 12th of June in 1755 more than 2,400 salmon alone were caught from the river. In comparison, over the entire month of June in 1996, only 338 salmon were recorded in the Tyne. The 1755 numbers may have been even higher without the dumping of ballast, but levels of local life were evidently not notably adversely affected.

In principal the corporation had always been against unlicensed ballast dumping into the river, this was partly the reason behind setting up the river court. In this case, however, it did not strongly push back against this process. Predominantly this was because these build-ups of sediment were creating new land along the riverbank, valuable land which, under the law, automatically belonged to the corporation. In this case, even after it was allotted government money to clear the silt in 1765, the corporation took the opportunity to turn a profit at the environment’s expense. Given the catastrophic impact that dredging would have on the river under the TIC however, it could equally be argued the corporation unwittingly took the more environmentally conscious approach in this decision. Either way, complaints from navigators on the state of the Tyne continued well into the 19th century.

The Enlightenment and Proto-Industrialisation

Whilst humans’ physical relationship with the Tyne may not have changed substantially in the 18th century, what did change was their attitudinal relationship; a shift which laid the groundwork behind the ideology of TIC. The enlightenment was the primary movement behind this change in relations, a philosophy with humanism at its core and a belief that scientific empiricism would lead humanity towards the conquering of the natural world. For the rational, orderly ideals of the enlightenment, the mercurial, muddy, meandering Tyne was something antithetical, something to be controlled. However, after these philosophies became popular the Newcastle corporation did not immediately set off on a crusade against the Tyne as the TIC later would, for three main reasons. The first reason was, as previously explained, that the corporation had been made extremely profitable by specifically avoiding tampering with the river’s natural systems. The second was that it lacked the technological ability to landscape a waterway such as the Tyne, or at least the ability to do it in a way that would not be prohibitively expensive. Thirdly was the fact the organisation’s frameworks and regulations had been set up hundreds of years before the advent of the enlightenment and adapting to fit this new ideology would mean a reinvention of what the corporation had stood for since 1400, a reinvention which never took place. It was also the case that enlightenment ideals were not fully pervasive, and many people, especially those in nature-based industries such as fishing, were sceptical of attempts to control it. Even in 1850, on the formation of the TIC and at the height of frustration with the Tyne’s unnavigability, the Shields Gazette wrote an endorsement of the river’s natural state, saying it was ‘of more lasting value than… Californian gold’.

Figure 2.A view of Proto-Industrial Gateshead in 1830.

By the beginning of the 19th century however the physical landscape of Tyneside was beginning to match its ideological, despite the inactivity of the corporation. At Derwentcote, Winlaton, and Lemington were ironworks, and two glass manufactories. At Blaydon was a lead refinery, a flint mill, and a large pottery and at Derwenthaugh was a coke manufactory and coal tar ovens. The first Tyne tunnel was built at Wylam to transport coal under the river. The river was also home to two coal staithes and a number of lead mines, both materials having been mined on Tyneside since the Romans built its first bridge in 122AD. These were the first buildings to begin washing substantively harmful substances into the waters such as coke breeze, benzene, naphtha, ammonia, and phenol. However, without chemical testing, at this stage these industries were too new and too few for people to properly appreciate the harm they were causing to the river. An 1827 report from the topographer Eneas Mackenzie does approach this topic however, noting that levels of salmon in the river may be declining because of the ‘deleterious mixtures that are carried into the stream from the lead-mines and various manufactories on the banks of the river’. It is evident from this statement that Mackenzie was somewhat aware of the environmental damage being done to the river but what is also evident is that he does not consider the decline in river life to be an inherently bad event. The fact is only mentioned off-hand and quickly forgotten in his excitement around the wonders of industry.

In 1816 the corporation commissioned the engineer Sir John Rennie to create a report of suggested changes to the riverfront. Therein he recommended the construction of two piers at Tynemouth, embankments along the river as far up as Newcastle, and multiple quays; all of which would have to be accommodated through a program of extensive dredging and landscaping. His stated goal was to ‘direct the river in a straight, or at least a uniform course’, an idea very much in line with enlightenment ideals. The corporation however, still unwilling to instigate change, did not act to implement Rennie’s suggestions and this increased the growing frustration at the state of navigation on the river. Thus, the Tyne Navigation Act was passed in 1850, which resulted in the formation of the TIC. The organisation immediately set about its work of dramatically altering the landscape of Tyneside and by the end of the century, it had implemented all of Rennie’s suggestions and more so, creating a deep and orderly channel. This quickly resulted in the decline of Tyneside’s keelmen, whose entire trade had been built on the premise that large ships could not navigate the river’s shallows, but it also resulted in severe declines in plant and animal life, as well as the overall health of the river.

Chapter 2

A great highway of industry

Reconceptualising the river

The works of the Tyne Improvement Commission completely transformed the face of the river on a scale that had only ever been previously achieved through millions of years of geological landscaping; they also began an era that would result in the worst pollution the river has ever seen. The men, and unsurprisingly for this time they were all men, who constituted the commissioners for the TIC were a mix of local councillors and business owners who’s trade was located in the riparian zone, the majority of which were based in the coal and shipbuilding trades. Whilst this commission was officially unbiased, the more wealthy and powerful members were often able to exert their influence for their own ends. In their proceedings for 1875 for example, we can see how Lord William Armstrong was able to rush through expansion plans for his factory at Elswick without the usual scrutiny period of one month.

Together however, the commissioners were united in a common goal, to make the Tyne as profitable as possible. This was the very purpose that the TIC had been set up for and its members ‘deeply’ believed in that task, with no thought towards environmental affairs unless they were to infringe on profits. Indeed, across all their proceedings papers of over 100 years of history the TIC demonstrates no discernible changes in attitude towards the river or their own purpose upon it; their proceedings in 1894, 1902, and 1945 all specifically stating that their prerogative as “conservators” of the river was not to look after its natural state, only to keep it in a condition suitable for facilitating trade. One proceeding from 1958, as the commission was reaching the end of its lifetime and as environmental concerns towards the river were growing in popularity, best demonstrates this intransigence. When the commissioner who represented South Shields, Mr. Gompertz, inquired as to the ‘risks we are running in further pollution of the river’, in relation to allowing sewage to be discharged directly into the water, the chairman, after some debate, responded that they had ‘no powers on that matter at all’. This statement is astounding given that the TIC specifically was the body that was responsible for the approval and regulation of sewage systems at this time. Evidently, they did not feel that environmental concerns constituted a legitimate reason for regulation in 1958, just as they hadn’t in 1850. They had similar reactions when requested in 1881 to help with the building of recreational facilities such as a rowing and sailing club, denying that this was their responsibility.

This consistency of approach and unified direction of purpose is one of the astounding facets of the TIC, and perhaps one of the reasons behind its success in so categorically remodelling the river. This was not an organisation that passively and indifferently carried out its task, it actively pursued a vision and cared deeply about its planned “improvements”. The Tyne needed to be competitive in a global context, with the infrastructure capable of matching other industrialising rivers such as the Thames, Clyde, and Rhine, which could also be called inspirators for the TIC. In 1876, long before most of their works were close to completion, they had already proclaimed that the Tyne was ‘the finest port in England… and the world’, listing its safety, capacity, and possibility as reasons for this. This attitude is completely maintained 75 years later in a document the organisation published in 1951 entitled A Century of Progress. In a manner that could almost be viewed as fanatical they write that ‘commerce is our life blood’; this was a capitalistic institution in its purest sense. In this manner the TIC bares some resemblances to the former corporation of Newcastle, both being organisations that were granted conservatorship of the river and both primarily being concerned with its economics. However, where the Newcastle corporation stood to profit from preservation of the river’s natural state, the TIC’s business model meant that it was indifferent to such concerns and payed them little attention. Indeed, as it stated in 1908, it would use ‘all that science and nature can offer’ to achieve its ends.

Figure 3. Coat of Arms of the TIC above the doorway into Bewick House, Newcastle.

Dredging the river

In order for any of the infrastructural projects the TIC would undertake during its tenure to be worthwhile, such as the construction of docks, piers, and bridges, it first had to ensure that ships would be able to pass up the river far enough to access them. The solution to this was to dredge the river by removing the sand, rock, and mud that lay on the riverbed and dump them out to sea, a monumental task that had only been made recently comprehensible by the invention of the steam powered bucket dredger, the first ever of which had been employed in the neighbouring harbour in Sunderland. In 1850 the commission had access only to one steam dredger, which it had brought down from the river Tweed, but in 1853 they bought a second and by 1920 they had six all working to deepen and widen the river. These dredgers were tasked with ‘working day and night’ and so the citizens of Tyneside were forced to become used to their metallic clanks and churning coal-fired turbines.

The commission’s reports comprehensively documented these dredger’s activities, as the organisation was very interested in maximising their efficiency, but they did not monitor the environmental repercussions that came with such work. The tests they did carry out, the first of which was in 1895, were concerned with the dumping of solid waste into, rather than the dredging of it from, the river. This was not because of environmental concerns however, but because the commission saw that this would result in an inefficient dredging process, the material being removed only to be replaced again overnight. The same reports make no attempt to measure or regulate the chemical composition of the water, only the solid material. Even in the TIC’s earlier years it cannot be argued that this was because of a lack of scientific understanding as the Tyne Salmon Conservancy (TSC, the body which represented the Tyne’s fisheries) carried out its own rudimentary chemical tests as early as 1866, being understandably concerned about the unhealthy state of the river.

As the TIC was not concerned with such issues however, the dredgers continued their work and over a period of 70 years they deepened the Tyne from where it had lain previously at 1.83 meters to 9.14 meters. The commission’s own estimation for the extent of matter removed from the riverbed during this time amounts to the staggering figure of 149 million tons. This, alongside the TIC’s other infrastructural projects, had a huge impact on the capacity of Tyneside to trade on the river, with the Tyne becoming the largest repair port in the world by 1880, and the largest for the exportation of coal, producing 8,131,419 tons that year. Trade in total doubled on the river and the Tyne carried 1/9th of the total tonnage of the United Kingdom, second only to the Mersey, and built more ships than any other river aside from the Clyde. The cost of this was substantial to the TIC, over £3.5 million pounds (equivalent to £206 million pounds in today’s currency) which it managed to source from government grants, fundraising from local businesses, and its own taxation schemes. However, the cost was substantially higher for the flora and fauna of the river that soon found their habitats ripped from beneath them, a destruction which it is estimated will take hundreds of years to recover from.

Figure 4. “King’s Meadow” island being dredged from the Tyne 1885CE.

The first and most evident effect of this dredging was the replacing of the river’s natural shallow environments with much deeper, faster-running waters. The problem with this was that much of the local plant life, including reeds, lilies, pondweed, and willows, were not suited to surviving in such a habitat and so soon began to disappear from the riverbank, as well as smaller fare like phytoplankton, algae, and zooplankton. The resulting collapse of the ecosystem overall was then the result of a domino effect as each creature in the food chain found its food sources diminished. Much of the plant life had also acted as a habitat and spawning ground for many shallow-water life forms such as crabs, worms, shrimps, and fry as well as for insects like dragonflies, water boatmen, and other small invertebrates like the caddis and the mayfly. This in turn meant a decline in the predators that eat such creatures such as the mackerel, flounder, and seal alongside birds like the heron, turn, and kingfisher. In areas of significant dredging, the result was the complete removal of a shallow-water habitat and the creation of a deep-water habitat, which significantly destabilised the local biosphere.

If dredging only resulted in this alone there would have been a possibility of ecological recovery in a relatively short time frame as whilst much of the local flora was forced out, some of the hardier specimens could have survived in the new environment; plants such as the sedge, plantain, starwart, and sharp rush. Other plants better suited to the new environment would have also moved in, such as cordgrass and seagrass. However, the impact of the steam dredgers went further than habitat destruction. All dredging by necessity causes disturbance to the riverbed but this early form of bucket dredging was particularly dangerous in this regard. The scoops dug far enough down into the riverbed to reach the benthic zone, the sediment sub-surface at the lowest level of a body of water, and if they didn’t, the explosives which were also used as part of the dredging process certainly did. The reason this was dangerous was that the benthic zone of the Tyne contained many chemicals of a toxic nature such as lead, biphenyl, and tributyltin, which were not protected from being released into the water as with modern dredgers, and as such they acted as biocides which weakened or killed plant and animal life in the river. This is especially the case when considering this period of disturbance lasted as long as 70 years, the prolonged deviations from natural water turbidity also affecting the metabolism and spawning of certain creatures such as trout and the seeding of vegetation like sea grass.

Whilst unenlightened as to the chemical specifics, the TIC could still observe the very clear fall in biodiversity on the Tyne and was to some extent aware that this was a result of its own work. Indeed, when writing a promotional piece for their port in 1925 the TIC not only acknowledges this, but is very much proud of this achievement, and not wholly unjustly due to the monumental feats of engineering that it required. Therein they write that whilst the old river may have been ‘picturesque’ it was now ‘the Tyne of yesteryear’, thus positioning the TIC’s modern creation specifically as the antithesis to ‘picturesque’. Overall the commission’s language in this document is indicative of their view on their own accomplishments, that they had made the post-1850 Tyne into something that was, conceptually, a completely different body of water to the pre-1850 article. In their proceedings of 1875, they wrote that their goal was to make the Tyne ‘equal to a dock’, to remove its status as a river entirely, by 1925 they believed they had achieved this. It would not be entirely incorrect to agree with the TIC on this point, as the ultimate result of their dredging program was the effective conversion of the Tyne from a river into a very large canal from Dunston downwards, as it remains today. What previously had been merely a river was now, in their own words, a ‘great highway of industry’. ‘Highway’ is the notable word to examine here, as it distinctly encapsulates the perspective toward the river which resulted in its conversion; that being a view of the river as simply a road made of water, a transportation device. The commission valued the river just as much as the Newcastle corporation or the TSC, perhaps even more so, but the nature of their occupations meant they no longer valued it as an environmental resource, only as a logistical one.

However, the relationship between the TIC and the Tyne was not so unidimensional, and the commission soon discovered that their program of dredging would, to some extent, need to bend to fit the Tyne’s will. Erosion was their primary difficulty, as the TIC soon found swathes of riparian land collapsing into the river, much of it their own, although they were reluctant to admit in their proceedings that this was a problem of their own causing. The problem persisted throughout the TIC’s administration, and they had to deal with the erosion problems caused by dredging into the 1950s and 1960s, long after they had stopped deepening the riverbed, in places as far up the river as Haydon Bridge on the South Tyne. The reason this was occurring was because the dredging process had increased the gradient of the river, heightening its power on its new steeper course, and thus causing more aggressive deterioration of the banks. This effect was intensified because of the straightening of the river, which meant much greater force was exerted against the riverside, and this consequently created the need for weirs and embankments to be built along much of the quayside, although much of the time the commission was forced to concede and allow the river to carve at the land as far in as it required.

Further to this the dredging resulted in the forces that the tides exerted on the river becoming far stronger, making the waters more turbulent and unsafe to travel on, as well as causing further erosion and silting up the docks, ironically creating much more work for the dredgers. In 1881 tenants in North Shields complained to the TIC that the force of the river ‘shakes the building’ and the northern rowing club also complained the following year that their casting-off point had been made ‘excessively deep and dangerous’ because of this. Such problems also affected large structures such as the Scotswood bridge, the company for which wrote to the TIC in 1884 complaining that its foundations were being undermined and it was at risk of collapse. The use of unpredictable explosives for the purposes of dredging was even more dangerous, as proved when, in 1894, the dredgers came within ‘90-100 feet’ of breaking through the roof of a mine that ran under the river owned by the Montagu colliery.

Figure 5. Scotswood Suspension Bridge in 1832, Tyneside’s first industrial era bridge.

The sheer scale of the dredging operation was also causing difficulties as the TIC found it increasingly difficult to regulate the process. Whilst there were only a handful of steam dredgers, there was a considerably larger number of ships known as “hoppers”, barges which were responsible for taking the silt from the dredging ships and dumping it into the North Sea. Two problems arose from this process. The first was that a number of hoppers were dumping their cargo too close to the shore and as a result it being washed back in to the river again, a problem which was expanded by the building of the piers at North and South Shields because they increased the area the TIC was obligated to manage. To combat this the TIC set a bylaw in 1885 that the silt had to be deposited outside of a three mile radius, but they still found that they were not always obeyed. Indeed, it was in the hopper operator’s financial interests to create more work for themselves.

The second problem arose slightly later in 1900, after the program had been running for a while; what they discovered was that the sheer amount of material being dumped into the sea was beginning to threaten the passage of ships into the port because it was ‘raising the bed of the sea’. This also created problems for anglers both on the sea and the river, who found their nets and pots periodically smothered with ‘masses of refuse’, and often submitted complaints to the commission. With all of its technological might the TIC clearly thought of itself as an organisation that was above nature, that could do with the Tyne as it pleased, but the river proved time and again to be a force that could not be easily constrained and occasionally it would remind the commission that they were sometimes bound to playing on its terms.

Reconstructing the River

The dredging of the Tyne was only the preliminary stage, however, in the TIC’s plan. The removal of 149 million tons of material from the riverbed being simply the groundwork required which would allow larger ships to utilise the commission’s key infrastructure projects, these namely being the piers at north and south shields, the Albert-Edward, Northumberland, and Tyne docks, and the Tyne commission quay. A lot of resources were also spent on supporting projects to these large constructions such as the building of embankments, the swing bridge, and the destruction of rocky outcroppings.

The construction of the Northumberland Dock in 1857 and the Tyne Dock in 1859 were the first major schemes to be completed under the TIC’s oversight, and work soon followed on another that would be named “Albert-Edward” in 1884. Significant excavations and further dredging was required for these projects, including the removal of tens of thousands of cubic meters of mud, gravel, clay, and sand; fortunately for the commission they received a good amount of private assistance in the removal as much of this material from firms such as the Wallsend cement company in 1877. This was especially true in regard to the gravel and clay, some of which was then used to create the base on which the docks stood. The Tyne commission quay, opened later in 1928, was built in the same manner and also with a small hydroelectric power station, an example of how the quickened current as a result of the dredging was utilised by the TIC to their advantage. This dredging caused all the same environmental problems as it did in the rest of the river but with the additional issue that the space was then entirely filled in with solid concrete, the Albert-Edward dock alone taking over 32,000 concrete blocks to construct, meaning the riverside and seaside ecosystems had no possibility of recovery.

The single project which caused the TIC the most strife was the construction of the piers at North and South Shields. Partly due to the fact that dredging had caused dangerous tides to progress up the river, work was forced to begin ahead of plan in 1854 in order to protect ships in harbour, but the piers would not be completed until 1895 at a much higher cost than the commission intended of £1,000,094 pounds due to repeated damage from the force of the currents around the mouth of the river. After completion the saga was not over however as the north pier lasted only two years before being destroyed in a storm in 1897, and was only rebuilt by 1910 after bringing the total cost of the project up to £1,544,000. During all of this difficulty, in 1878, the TIC decided not to remove the “black middens” which were situated in front of the north pier because of their function as natural breakers which protected the coastline and, importantly, the walls of the pier, stating they were to a ‘general advantage’. These middens were infamous dangers to vessels, wrecking five ships in three days in a storm in 1864, but they were nevertheless so useful to the TIC that they were preserved. This case demonstrates that the TIC did not see itself as being on a mission against the natural world in all contexts. If a feature did not hinder, or even helped with their work, as with the black middens, they would be happy to leave it alone. By the same token however, they would not pause a second for anything which obstructed them, no matter its beauty or significance.

Figure 6. North Shields pier collapsing into the sea, 1897.

Generally, the TIC was quite happy to remove natural rock formations along the river however, if they were to get in the way of their “improvements”. As example to the fact that not everybody agreed with the prerogative of the TIC, two petitions were set up by the general public, the first in 1881 and the second in 1882, which were filed against the commission in attempts to save two popular natural beauty spots, Frenchman’s Bay and Lady’s Bay. Neither of these were successful, despite the fact they were signed by a great number of people of noteworthiness, including the mayor of Newcastle, the naturalist John Hancock, and a number of scientists with interest in the areas. Therefore the TIC carried on, removing a number of ‘protrusions’ at Felling Point, Whitehill Point, and Bill Point (amongst others) during the 1880s and significantly widening the river in one area near the mouth to create the Tyne main turning circle; both of these projects required the determined use of explosives over decades to complete. This is an example of the power of the TIC itself but also of the belief in the importance of its work, both from the organisation itself and from outside. The industrialisation of the river was an imperative, this was “progress”, unarguable and inevitable.

Chapter 3

NEITHER SALMON NOR CHILDREN

Industrialising the River

The TIC’s tentpole projects such as the docks, piers, and dredging program, whilst being the most impactful single enterprises on the environment on the river, were ultimately a drop in the water compared to the wider industrialisation that was taking place along the Tyne. The TIC was responsible for approving and regulating all new industries set up in the riparian zone, this task including the regulation of waste discharged into the river, but for the most part they took a laissez-faire approach to this duty. Their purpose as an organisation was to help, not to hinder, the growth of industry, and as environmental regulation would have hindered, they left it alone. Instead they acted as facilitators for the mass production of coal, coke, oil, timber, pottery, concrete, meat, iron, steel, glass, a vast array of chemicals, and all of their waste products. All these industries were built around the river (along with a multitude of smaller businesses) and they used it to help produce their goods, to transport them when complete, and to discharge their wastes into. Alongside these were the sewers of Tyneside, which were also approved and regulated by the TIC, and the number of which consistently grew across the TIC’s tenure until there were 270 active sewers draining into the Tyne when the TIC was replaced by the Port of Tyne Authority in 1968.

The Tyne was thus party to a vast array of industrial processes and substances that it had never encountered before after the TIC took control, and a dramatic increase in those which it had. The primary categories for these substances in terms of environmental concern break down to organic material, organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, sediments, and hot water. The effects of heat on natural ecosystems can often be overlooked but the amount of water from the Tyne which was used for coolant and then ejected back into the river still warm was enough to deal considerable environmental damage, this hot water predominantly coming from iron works, steel mills, and refineries such as Crowley’s iron works at Swalwell. The warmer a body of water is, the less oxygen is dissolved into it, whilst at the same time warmer water increases the metabolic rate of organisms within it, thus increasing their demand for oxygen. A reduction in oxygen in the Tyne therefore meant a reduction in the amount of plant and animal life that could survive there.

The main culprit however in causing the deoxygenation of the Tyne was the discharge of organic material such as sewage and drainage from slaughterhouses, tanners, and flour mills, such as the Baltic Flour Mills at Gateshead. Once discharged these organic materials begin to decompose, the decomposition process being achieved by a flourishing of aerobic bacteria which are highly ‘oxygen hungry’ life forms. In the Tyne this occurred on such a large scale that the very first oxygenation test in 1912 concluded that there was ‘almost no oxygen’ in the river, which was alone nearly enough to end all life within. Once this had occurred it meant an increase of anaerobic bacteria, which produce foul smells. Other bacteria and viruses which were harmful to local river life, such as those of the Faecal Coliform or E. Coli varieties, also bred and spread quickly on this organic material.

Organic and inorganic chemicals were likely far larger killers of river life than bacteria and viruses however and were indeed the killers of bacteria and viruses as well. Salts, acids, mercury, arsenic, benzene, naphtha, cyanide, lead, and phenolic wastes were all being ejected into the river from mines, farms, sewers, oil refineries, and coking plants such as the Derwenthaugh Coke Works which alone in 1928 pumped 1kg of cyanide into the river for every ton of coke produced. These substances were toxic to almost all river life, and toxic even at low concentrations, which they were not in the Tyne, and together were the one factor that caused the most damage to the Tyne’s ecosystems and led to it being classed as biologically dead in 1957.

The dumping of sediments into the river, such as wood pulp, coal washings, and sludge was the one area where the TIC did attempt significant regulation. This was because of their dredging program, for which they did not want to create more work, and so they would inspect the discharges of factories to make sure nothing too solid was being ejected, first hiring Hugh and James Pattinson in 1895 to conduct tests to help them with this task. One substance they also attempted to prevent entering the river was oil from plants like the Benzol Works, which was the first place in the world to produce petrol from coal, because of the damage it caused to their property. It is evident therefore that the TIC would only step towards regulation if the environmental interests of the river aligned with their own economic concerns.

Figure 7. Elswick Engineering Works, 1900.

Turning Away from the Tyne

In 1910, a street of houses in Lemington called Bell’s Close was erected along the riverfront. What distinguished this street from others that came before it, however, was that it was facing backwards, away from the Tyne. Indeed, the backs of the houses didn’t even have windows, they had turned away from the water because it had become ugly, foul smelling, and dangerous. This was exemplative of the larger trend that had been taking place all along the river, of houses and town centres moving further and further away from the river, being demolished in favour of factories and warehouses. After the first and second world wars, when industrial production on the Tyne began to decline, this resulted in the complete abandonment of much of the riverside¸ what had historically been some of the most desirable land available. A committee set up in 1969, immediately after the dissolution of the TIC, wrote that where Newcastle’s quayside had previously been one of the most overcrowded regions in the country it had now become a ‘neglected back alley’. Humanity’s environmental impacts had impacted on themselves. In 100 years the TIC had overturned what had seemed an inalienable truth for thousands, that rivers were at the centre of human civilisation. By 1940, the 1969 committee wrote, ‘neither salmon nor children could enter its polluted waters’.

As the scale of the destruction became apparent, however, pressure mounted on the TIC from both the public and other organisations to do something about it. The primary driving force behind this was the TSC, which had been advocating stricter environmental regulation all throughout the TIC’s lifetime, but to little avail. In 1921 they helped set up the Standing Committee on River Pollution Tyne Sub-Committee (SCORP) which produced a number of reports with suggestions for how to improve the water quality, including a comprehensive sewerage treatment plan in 1936, but the TIC, the second world war, and a lack of funding blocked any progress. A Newcastle university report in 1957 said that public opinion ‘requires an improvement’ of the river environment and a 1958 motion in the house of commons recommended action for tackling pollution in the Tyne, but the TIC was as equally uncooperative with these as it would be with the Tyneside Joint Sewerage Board, set up in 1966. Just as with the Newcastle Corporation before it the culture of the TIC had become engrained, it saw itself as the heroic protector of orderly, profitable trade against the dangerous, unpredictable natural world. To a growing number of people however, the TIC had become the villain, too willing to sacrifice the picturesque for the profitable.

CONCLUSION

The success of the TIC was ultimately short lived when compared with its predecessor the Corporation of Newcastle, which lasted for nearly 400 years. For an environmental historian however this is not surprising, as they can appreciate the benefit that the Newcastle Corporation found in achieving a balanced relationship with the river on which it was reliant. Conversely, what the proceedings of TIC show us is that they did not look out for the health of the river, nor did they care for it. Instead they grew wealthy on the back of ‘robber industries’, trades that ‘carry the seeds of their own decline’. It cannot be denied that their works were marvels of engineering, and for some of the human population also brought great wealth, but to celebrate the reign of the TIC as the “heyday” of the river is a perverse anthropocentric notion that ignores the vast majority of Tyneside’s inhabitants. It operated in a way that was harmful to the health of all life based around the River Tyne, including the human population, and the scars it left are costing the region in the long run in the resources spent attempting to heal them. The modern Nile, Ganges, and Yangtze, whilst being far grander waterways, might do well to pause a moment and listen to the Tyne’s story, as they will find parallels and lessons within which they may wish to act upon.

Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

Date of Publication: 24th of August 2019

2019.08.24