Dr Lucie Glasheen

Children’s play, urban spaces and the transformation of East London in text, image and film, 1930-1939.

I recently completed my PhD: Children’s play, urban spaces and the transformation of East London in text, image and film, 1930-1939. Play features in a number of contemporary debates about housing and life in the city, while there has been a recent intellectual revaluing of play, through research projects and exhibitions, as an important practice in its own right. My PhD research provides a history and context for such debates, concentrating on a period that has received less attention. My thesis focuses on East London to explore the relationship between children’s play and urban development in the thirties.

My research involved the analysis of a range of fictional and non-fictional texts about, for and by children. These included council papers and minutes, promotional material, documentary and fictional film, comics, newspapers and children’s magazines. I interpret these cultural texts, not as records of play, but as creating, shaping and responding to images and narratives of play and the city.

Building on understandings of both the thirties and children’s literature as concerned with the future, the research demonstrates that play spaces became implicated in conceptualising urban change in a number of interrelated ways. Firstly, playgrounds became increasingly important in new council housing estates and in representing and defending new development in East London, due to imaginative and material challenges to change there. My research analyses ways in which children were constructed as both passive recipients and active co-producers of play space and argues that access to play space was formulated as a right that children could claim. Secondly, it shows how, in fiction, play was imagined as enabling children to disrupt, reorder and transform urban space. At the same time, images of play allowed the politics of housing to be addressed in popular culture texts aimed at children. Thirdly, it explores the extent to which magazines co-created by children can be understood as play spaces themselves, and examines images and narratives of urban change and play created by children. It argues that the space of the magazine allowed children to play with the consequences of urban change and to envisage the dangers and opportunities that an increase in traffic, in particular, presented. The thesis reveals the significance of play to urban change in this period. In doing so, it contributes to understandings of interwar East London, develops and expands definitions of children’s literature and repositions children in histories of urban change.