“Back in My Day…” — What Old Playground Photos Don’t Tell Us

These photographs of Potters Park Playground in Auckland, circa 1965, capture a playground that will be instantly familiar to many New Zealanders. Tower slide, swings, seesaws, carousel, and a large expanse of asphalt and concrete. For many people, images like these immediately stir up nostalgia and the familiar comments start to follow:

“Back in my day we played on this stuff and survived,” or “Look at all that concrete — kids were tougher then.” We also regularly hear that nobody died on playgrounds back then and that everyone somehow survived just fine.

There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. Potters Park was clearly a hugely popular playground, and the fact that the park still exists today says something about its place within the Auckland community. But photographs like these also give us an opportunity to look beyond the memories and consider what the images do not tell us. They do not tell us how many children were seriously injured, how many suffered broken bones, head injuries, crushed fingers or permanent injuries, and they certainly do not tell us whether fatalities occurred on playgrounds of this era. Death is one measure of safety, but it is a very poor threshold for determining whether an avoidable playground hazard is acceptable. Serious, life-changing and preventable injury matters too.

The tower slide visible towards the rear of the main photograph is a good example. From the image, we estimate the standing platform to be approximately 2.5 metres above the ground, with concrete directly below. The guarding around the platform is very low by modern expectations, one side appears to incorporate what is effectively a banister-style slide, and the ladder access descends towards an adjacent hard-surfaced pathway. There is no question that this would have been an exciting piece of play equipment. It offered height, challenge, speed and probably enormous amounts of fun. However, none of those benefits require the consequence of a mistake to be a 2.5-metre fall onto concrete.

To put that height into context, 2.5 metres is approximately the height of the guttering on a typical single-storey house. Most adults would understand the seriousness of falling from a ladder or roof at that height, particularly onto a hard surface. A fall like that can result in significant head, spinal or skeletal injury. Children are subject to exactly the same physics, except playgrounds are deliberately environments where children climb, move quickly, lose their balance, misjudge distances, experiment and occasionally get things wrong. Mistakes are an important part of play and development. The consequence of those mistakes does not need to be catastrophic.

The carousel shown in another photograph provides an equally interesting example. A mother is sitting with two children on what appears to be a flush-mounted carousel, a traditional item of playground equipment that, in improved forms, is still widely used today. At first glance it simply looks like another wonderful piece of classic playground equipment. Look more closely, however, and there appears to be a substantial gap between the rotating platform and the surrounding concrete surface, perhaps somewhere in the region of 50 to 80 mm based on the photograph.

That opening becomes considerably more concerning once the carousel is moving. If the carousel is approximately three metres in diameter, the rotational forces involved are significant. A foot, shoe, hand or fingers entering the gap between the rotating structure and the fixed concrete perimeter could create a substantial crushing or shearing mechanism. At the lower end of the consequence scale this could result in twisting, trapping or pinch injuries. At the more serious end, it could result in severe damage to a foot, hand or fingers, including potentially amputation-type injuries.

Examples like that can sound dramatic, and this is often where conversations about playground safety start attracting accusations of overreaction, excessive standards or “health and safety gone mad”. But the important distinction is that these hazards provide no additional play value whatsoever. A crushing gap around a carousel does not make the carousel more exciting. Concrete beneath a high platform does not improve the climbing experience. These are simply foreseeable hazards capable of turning an otherwise valuable play experience into a serious injury.

That distinction between risk and hazard is fundamental to good playground design. Children benefit enormously from risk. They need height, speed, balance, movement, physical exertion, uncertainty and opportunities to test their own ability. A child deciding whether they can climb higher, judging the speed of a swing or balancing across an unstable element is experiencing meaningful risk, and that risk has developmental value. A hidden finger trap, a shear point or a severe fall onto a hard surface is different. These are hazards that can cause harm without adding anything meaningful to the play experience.

This is also where the purpose of playground standards is often misunderstood. Standards are sometimes blamed for supposedly making modern playgrounds boring, but these photographs demonstrate almost the opposite. If modern safety principles were applied to this exact playground, the overall appearance could remain remarkably similar. There could still be a tall slide, swings, seesaws, a carousel and challenging climbing equipment. There could still be height, movement, speed and excitement. What would change are the details that determine whether an inevitable mistake results in a bruise or a life-changing injury.

The elevated tower would have appropriate guarding. The consequences of a fall would be reduced through suitable impact-attenuating surfacing. Entrapment, crushing and shearing hazards associated with moving equipment would be designed out. Clearances would take into account the movement of both the equipment and the children using it. To the untrained eye, much of the playground could look largely the same, but the unnecessary injury mechanisms would no longer be present.

This is really what decades of playground safety development have achieved. We have not suddenly decided that children are incapable of taking risks, nor should we be attempting to remove all possibility of injury from play. What has changed is our understanding. We now know considerably more about fall injury, head impact, impact attenuation, entrapment, crushing and shear hazards, and we have decades of practical experience, injury data, research and engineering knowledge behind modern standards.

The playground standard continues to evolve, but much of its foundation is based on well-understood safety interventions that have been established over many years. Those interventions are not there to strip challenge from playgrounds. In many cases, they simply allow the challenge to remain while removing the mechanisms capable of producing severe and avoidable harm.

Potters Park in 1965 clearly provided children with excitement, independence, physical challenge and fun. Those are exactly the same things we should be providing children today. The difference is that we can now provide them with the benefit of everything we have learned over the intervening decades.

So when an old playground photograph generates the inevitable comment, “Back in my day we played on this and we were fine,” perhaps the more useful response is simply:

Yes — and look how much we have learned since.

By Adam Stride