Reclaim the streets: could closing off roads help children rediscover a love for playing outdoors?

There are telltale signs that we haven’t stepped into the past: the little girls don’t know how to play ‘peever’ or hopscotch and all around them, adults stand chatting while stewards in tabards patrol barriers at each end of the street to warn away cars and keep an eye out for dodgy strangers.

The children have been given a taste of freedom that people my age used to so unthinkingly enjoy 40 years ago. Residents have closed off the street in the Southside of Glasgow where I live from traffic as part of Street Play Glasgow, whose aim is for people to “reclaim their street from traffic so that children, families and adults can come together outdoors in a space they are familiar with but not used to using for play.”

The idea originally took off when neighbours Alice Ferguson and Amy Rose were frustrated that their children’s freedom to play was restricted in their Bristol city centre street. They knew you could apply to have a street party and used this procedure to apply to the local authority to close the street to traffic one day, giving over the space to children.

It was such a success that they started up Playing Out, which gained the backing of the UK Department of Health. An evaluation by Bristol University found that these sessions significantly increased children’s time spent outdoors and their physical activity levels. It attracted hundreds of enquiries from councils, professionals and parents like me, worried about their children’s lack of activity and the time they spend indoors in front of a screen. Now, ten years later, the free community scheme has come to my street.

I was pleased when neighbours in the next tenement close knocked on doors to get residents’ agreement to close off the street from traffic for four hours. We were free to organise activities to get the community together, like games, refreshments and non-commercial stalls, and the road would be closed to traffic with barriers and stewards in place. Residents would be allowed full access, driving at walking pace.

I signed up immediately, remembering happy days on my gran’s council estate in the 1970s, wandering freely and playing elastics, beds and jumping rope with other children and, even more thrilling, secret meetings in gang huts, climbing over garage roofs and being shouted at by irate neighbours. Now my 12-year-old son, Adam, could have a taste of that freedom.

He was less impressed. After reluctantly unplugging his earbuds, he turned away from his PS4 game long enough to pronounce the idea ‘boring’ and asked with typical pre-teen languor: ‘do I have to go?’

It was easy to get him outdoors when he was little but since mobile phones and games consoles appeared on the scene, it’s been harder and harder to get him out of his room. It’s a familiar concern for modern parents who worry about their child’s fitness levels and are bombarded by media horror stories about the damage games and screen time inflict on their mental health.

Despite Adam’s cynicism, I remember that I’m the parent and make the rules and insist he comes down with me to join the people gathering in our street, which has been decorated with bunting on this sunny Sunday afternoon.

Adam trails after me reluctantly. Some of the children know each other from playing in the back greens but they aren’t used to playing in the middle of the road and are initially uncertain after years of being told to watch out for lethal cars. Soon Adam has been taken in hand by our downstairs neighbour, who is showing him how to play ‘kick to the kerb’ with a football, and the younger ones are playing with the chalks, bubbles and hula hoops provided. Meanwhile, the adults get to know each other, swapping memories of their own free-range childhoods.

Ian Welsh, 68, a chartered surveyor, has lived in the neighbourhood since he was four. “We played out all the time. I remember falling into the pond at the park in the middle of winter and having to be pulled out. I was too embarrassed to run home and get changed, even though I was freezing and soaked.

“We kids all played out on our own without an adult in sight. The closes didn’t have doors so we played in them too and would run in and out of each other’s houses, which were never locked.”

Our neighbour, Tony Boyle, who works for the local authority, has brought his Golden Retriever, Paddy, out to join the fun. His own son is now at university but he is happy to see the street turned over to children.

“It’s wonderful, a chance to reclaim our streets and our childhoods, to explain to the kids what we did when we were their age. And it lets us reconnect with our neighbours. We are all friendly but we usually see each other fleetingly as we go in and out of our homes.

“It’s great to slow things down. That’s what I remember most about being a kid: time slows down when you are playing outside because you didn’t have to be anywhere. I played in the streets 90 per cent of the time – football mostly.”

Like me, Tony, 52, and his wife Maralyn, 48, who works for a charity, organised play dates for their son when he was growing up.

“You do what you can for your child, and that usually means play dates,” he adds. “It takes away from the organic nature of play. We used to chap our neighbours’ doors to get the kids out to play, usually because you needed to make up the numbers for a game of football. It was a great way to meet the children round about as we didn’t all go to the same school.”

Tony offers to show Adam some street games and sends him upstairs to get his football. My son is all smiles and is having a kick about with Tony and another neighbour, Findlay Napier, a singer-songwriter, while Paddy tries to join in.

Findlay, 39, has a five-year-old daughter, Lucy, who is busy playing hopscotch with some other children. “I think it’s fantastic,” he says. “Lucy and I are out on our bikes a lot and we have to cycle on the pavement because of the cars. The roads in this area are lethal.

“It’s great to get to know the neighbours and for the children to ride their bikes in the road and be safe. I grew up on a cul-de-sac in Grantown-on-Spey with 10 or 12 children getting together in the street to play unsupervised. Someone would shout ‘car’ and we’d jump out of the way. I’d love to see this happen more often and don’t see why we don’t shut off some residential streets all the time.”

Carlos Mendez, 40, is an academic with two children, Lucas, four, and six-weeks-old Teo. “It’s great for them to be able to come out and play on the streets without the danger of being run over, and for neighbours to meet each other. I grew up on a housing estate in Camden and there would be 30 or 40 of us kids in the street running around together. We’d be on our bikes, playing football, using our imagination and making friends without being watched over. This is a taste of that freedom for my children, but I’d love them to have more. It would be great if this could be a regular event.”

We look hopefully at our neighbour Shona Daly, who has taken the trouble to organise today’s Street Play.

“Some people we know did this in their street and I thought it was a wonderful idea,” she said. “It’s amazing to see our children having this freedom and that we have reclaimed our street from cars, which drive very fast around here,” says Shona, 36, who runs a charity and has two children, Connie, six, and Sonny, three.

“I grew up on Arran and played outside until it was dark. It’s harder for parents nowadays as we want our children to play where it’s safe and they are visible. There’s so much more traffic, and we are more aware of stranger danger than our own parents were.”

The adults, then, are enthusiastic, but is it really possible to turn back the clock to more innocent, carefree days?

Sociologist Frank Furedi, who writes about overprotective parenting, welcomes Street Play but has some reservations.

“They are well-intentioned but these initiatives are a reflection of adults’ bad consciences. We know in our hearts that what is happening to our children is not good – turning the outdoors into a no-go area for children so they end up confined to their bedrooms, having a digital childhood.

“There are clearly benefits of getting to know your neighbours, but it’s another form of supervised play and is not the same as real play. Children behave differently when they are away from adults – they stop performing for them and even their voices change. In adult company they are more restrained and self-conscious and look to adults for affirmation, following an adult script.”

His solution is a hard one: to allow children from the age of five or six to go out on their own.

“You don’t need to devise a scheme. They need to be outdoors with their mates. Once they are socialised with their peers, they can also enjoy their digital culture. Do whatever you can to let your kids explore the outside world. It’s difficult to transcend fears, but you can teach them to be aware of traffic. Children aren’t idiots.

“There’s no point harking back to a golden era of hopscotch and elastics – that’s gone. We have to create safe spaces where our children can play unsupervised. We are socialising children to become dependent and fearful. It’s the reason that we see a readiness to give up and a propensity to take offence in our young people going into the workplace,” adds Professor Furedi, the author of How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century.

Reasonable arguments and I know my own son complains about what he calls my ‘OCD protective parenting’, so I look at Government figures to assess the risks. I find that cars killed 448 pedestrians the UK in 2016, while the figure for casualties is 23,550, with 26 per cent of those children under the age of 15. Not reassuring.

What about stranger danger? We all know that children are more at risk of being harmed by someone they know, but there are still monsters out there and the names Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, Robert Black and Ian Huntley haunt our collective consciousness. These dangers are real, no matter how rare, and it’s difficult to put them to one side when it comes to our precious children.

Dr Karen Majors, an educational psychologist, says: “Children today are heavily supervised and would benefit from much more outdoor free play, which leads to self-confidence and reduces stress, but we can’t just let them roam the streets – it’s not safe. It’s a big issue and I do think Street Play is a very good idea.

“Playing with their peers, unsupervised, is where they form friendships, learn to solve problems, process difficult emotions and learn independence. You don’t do that in your bedroom playing a games console or at school. I would like to see this scheme widened out and proper safe spaces created where children can have more independence and play on their own.”

Clinical psychologist Linda Blair believes the scheme has benefits for the children and their parents. “The loneliest age group is those aged 30-40, who tend to be parents and who rely heavily on social media. But we need to connect with people in the real world to be happy. Children, meanwhile, need to play together outside for their mental and physical health, and to learn social skills. I think this scheme is utterly brilliant.”

The adults, then, have their views, but what about the children? I ask our neighbour’s daughter, Genevieve Mearns, 11, who has been haring up and down the road on her bike with the other kids and is now playing on her skateboard.

“I like it,” she tells me, beaming. “We usually play in the back garden but this is much better because I can ride my bike and my skateboard on the road. It’s also good because the dogs in the street have come out to play as well, and they are happy too.”

My own son, Adam, despite clearly having fun would never admit it. “It was okay,” he says, heading upstairs afterwards, anxious to get back to his game. “But I think it was more about adults feeling nostalgic about their own childhoods than about what we want to do.”

He may be right. But I realise it takes time for adolescents to make friends and I know my boy and that he would get used to street play if he could go out on his own to meet his friends – and that as Frank Furedi suggests, I should let him. Meanwhile, I’d be happy if we could do this more often and reclaim the streets for our children.