‘The freedom of the place during daylight hours’: urban renewal and the fight over play streets in Newcastle upon Tyne, c.1955-1980

Newcastle upon Tyne’s 1960s planning policy included play streets as a short-term measure in neighbourhoods intended for long term urban renewal. The aim was to create safe spaces for children’s play in areas that lacked open space. Contributing to a reassessment of postwar planning and the environmental turn of the 1970s, this article examines the circumstances surrounding the implementation and adaptation of this policy, its abandonment in 1974 and continuing resident activism following this. Based on municipal and government archives and local newspapers, it critically examines the moral landscape of play streets and the planning and traffic engineering policies and practices underpinning their governance. It shows that the demise of play streets was not due to a decrease in demand for them. Instead, a dominant ‘car logic’ contributed to constituting the child as out-of-place in the street. Factors including the transfer of play streets from planning to engineering, reductions in traffic management budgets following the 1973 oil crisis and a lack of national and regional government support would ultimately limit the possibilities they afforded. The article argues that ideas about the child and street play in this period cannot be divorced from evolving postwar planning and engineering policies and practices.