Outside the house, public playgrounds are the most common place for children to play and every child’s fundamental right to play is also recognized at the United Nations Conference. Despite this, the provision of the playgrounds has done very limited research discovery of inequality.
To help address this, we have analyzed around 34,000 playgrounds in England – the largest national dataset on playgrounds yet. In particular, we saw England’s largest 534 settlements with more than 15,000 population and mapped from the playgrounds of 18,077 children within them.
We got enough inequalities. For example, at two places widely comparable to population shape, one may have five times the number of children per playground.
with the exception of LondonIn England, the disadvantaged settlements are less, small and forward playgrounds-a serious social justice issue. In London, however, relationships were found to be contrasting, in which more playgrounds in close areas in underprivileged regions moved to playgrounds.
There are many different ways to measure the provision of playgrounds, but we used 21 indicators in three domains: the number of playgrounds per child, the size of the playgrounds, and where the children live, their closeness.
This ensures that our results were not very affected by the same variable, as some settlements had excellently performed in a domain, but there was a decrease in others.
Winner and losers
The graph below shows the provision of children’s playground for major settlements in England:
The locations on the left side of the graph consist of small playgrounds, while in locations at the bottom of the graph, children have to travel further in a playground. The size of the circle indicates how many playgrounds are there per child.
Here is the only graph for Boro of London, where the relationship is reversed:
These are the top settlements in each category:
And these are below:
Comparison of major settlements, Liverpool There are about five times more children than the playground than compared to Norwich (1,104 compared to 236). In London, the difference is even more: Boro Redbridge There are about eight times more children per playground Isington (1,567 V204).
In terms of the size of the playground, Lester Serves four times more to your urban area to playgrounds Leeds (0.30% v 0.07%), while Norwich provides seven times more playground than a child Birmingham (4.2 m to 0.7 m).
In London, the five -fold of the barsh playground in Isington (0.64% of the total urban area V 0.13%), and the Redbridge (2.8 m V 0.9 m) is three times more space per child than per child.
Liverpool is the lowest percentage of children within 100, 300 and 500 meters of playgrounds, with the lowest percentage of the covantry 800 meters.
In contrast, the percentage of children living close to playgrounds is the highest in Southampton, Plymouth and Reading.
In London, Redbridge and Kingston on Temes One was the lowest percentage of children living close to a playground, while Isington, Tower Hamlets and Hacani had the highest level of provisions. These distance measures will be greatly affected by population density, especially in London (Redbridge is suburban; Isington is the internal city). However, the patterns outside London appear to be more complex.
Different solutions for different places
Norwich, Isington and places like Milton Keins All three domains proceed well, while places such as Liverpool, Leeds or Stockton-on-Tees performed comparatively in all three. But most of the areas fell somewhere in the middle.
For example, places like Portsmouth Nottingham There are good scores for distance but there is poor provision in terms of size. Therefore, they will be the most benefiting from expanding existing playgrounds.
Conversely, the playgrounds in Brighton and Lincoln are large, but are far away. Some new strategically deployed playgrounds will benefit to fill such places in intervals.
With any dataset, there are obstacles. In the future, we want to include additional data on access to children with disabilities, and we believe that playgrounds are just one element in the broad spectrum of places where children play. For example, children in outer London Boro with some playgrounds may stay closer to forest or playgrounds.
We also accept that we have no data to monitor the quality of the playgrounds. Is a 100 square meter playground full of interesting and safe features? Or a single worn slide surrounded by fencing? Ultimately, the use of playground is the most important solution instead of provisions. After all, a bad playground will not active children much.
After playing in May 2025, after the launch of the first All-party parliamentary group, our work is helping to advocate campaigners for “Play Enfish Duty” (similar to Scotland and Wales) and a new national sports strategy in England.
We hope that, as people are more aware of the problem, we will see new policies and better ways for children. Already, we are working with Play England (England’s National Charity for Play) on a “digital dashboard”, who are able to support the council to plan more strategically to play in our local areas.
Paul Bindle is a senior lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Shefield. Michael Martin is a lecturer in urban design and plan at Martin Sheffield University.
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