Play at the heart of Mayor's vision for a child-friendly London

The new London Plan, which has today been submitted to the Secretary of State for approval before final publication, aims to establish the right policy framework for creating more ‘child-friendly neighbourhoods’, a planning process where children and young people’s need for play and mobility is at the heart of spatial development.

The plan makes clear that local Development Plans should be ‘informed by a needs assessment of children and young person’s play and informal recreation facilities … (and)  include an audit of existing … opportunities’ and that the London Boroughs should ‘produce strategies on play and informal recreation facilities and opportunities, supported by Development Plan policies, to address identified needs’.

pioneering

It was the first London Plan, in 2004, that first introduced the concept of discreet but crosscutting play strategies into the policy sphere. The pioneering model of the Mayor’s guidance to the London Boroughs on preparing local play strategies (GLA, 2005) was adopted, first by the Big Lottery Fund’s Children’s Play Initiative in 2006, and the UK Government in 2008 for its national Play Strategy for England.

That model, however, although designed to also address the wider issue of children’s access to a safe and playable public realm, tended to lead to a focus on improving the quality, and increasing the number, of children’s playgrounds. The successive funding programmes (£390m in total from 2006-11) of the lottery initiative and the government strategy led to capital spending sprees on fixed equipment play areas, while work on the longer-term and more integrated vision of playable public space was brutally curtailed by the Coalition government’s austerity measures in 2010, which saw the Play Strategy abandoned along with a huge swathe of other New Labour policies.

‘independent mobility’

The revised London Plan improves on the earlier play policy by more explicitly calling on development plans to specifically address children and young people’s need for ‘independent mobility’ and to use play strategies to cut across other local plans and policies to ‘ensure the integration of play provision and child-friendly neighbourhoods into other borough strategies’.

For new developments, the London Plan retains its minimum spatial standard of ‘at least 10 square metres of playspace … per child’ emphasising that such spaces ‘can be accessed safely from the street by children and young people independently (and)  forms an integral part of the surrounding neighbourhood’. Reflecting the outcry over segregated play space in mixed developments, highlighted by the Guardian and others in 2019, the Plan specifies that new playspace should not be ‘segregated by tenure’.

child-friendly design

To further support the London Plan policy to promote a strategic approach to play, mobility and child-friendly neighbourhoods, the Mayor last year produced a design guide, Making London Child Friendly and at least one London Borough is fully embracing the vision even before it is fully adopted: Hackney has produced its own Supplementary Planning Document, a local design guide for child-friendly places which is out for public consultation until 12 January.

Adrian Voce