The secret geography of childhood

All children have a personal geography, of places they know well and regard as their own familiar territory. There are the usual roads, streets and fields, but also special hiding-places, places for exploration and places with their own names, unknown to adults.

It is strange to visit these places as an adult and realise how small the houses are and how compact are what once seemed limitless fields and woods. But for me, the biggest difference between my childhood memories and the world I now see is not size, but the absence of children playing in the roads. I attended Haslucks Green Primary School in Shirley, a suburb of Birmingham. My family lived in Stroud Road, one of several long straight roads of semi-detached houses, each with front and back gardens. There were no garages attached to the houses because, when they were built, few people owned cars. Instead, there was an unpaved access drive leading along the rear of the properties, and some families had built small garages at the end of their back gardens.

Stroud Road and the surrounding estate in the 1950s was astonishingly free of cars. I could look down the road from my front gate, and could see no parked cars, let alone moving ones. The lack of traffic also applied to what are now busy main roads. On the way back from primary school one dinnertime, I walked along Haslucks Green Road. One boy at school was notoriously naughty (we would probably now regard him as having a ‘challenging behaviour’), and one day sat in the middle of this road. “Come back”, we shouted at him, “a car might come”. No traffic meant safe places to play, and I spent a lot of my childhood in the street outside my home, among large groups of local children. There was a craze at one time for trolleys, and my father made one for me from pram wheels and planks. It could be steered with strings attached to the movable front axle. There was of course no brake. It was possible to lie head-first on the trolley and speed down the middle of Stroud Road.

Sometimes, a small group of boys would head off on an expedition, usually visiting the long stretches of waste ground that lay between the back gardens of neighbouring roads. These could be accessed by numerous small alleys: old rights-of-way across what had once been farmland. A longer expedition was to the River Cole, which was then a brook between open fields. We would fish for sticklebacks and eels. Even further was the Aqueduct. This is a vast brick construction which carries the Stratford-upon-Avon canal over both a road and the River Cole. We could get to the top of the Aqueduct via some gravel yards, or along the tow-path. This was all amazingly dangerous. There were no guard rails or fences on the top of the Aqueduct, and the canal was at that time semi-derelict.

How has modern traffic affected children’s personal geography? In the village in which I now live, children still seem to wander around the streets and nearby fields. But it is possible that they do so less often in the Stroud Roads of today. It has become less safe for children to cross main roads, and children (and even adults) are increasingly seen as ‘vulnerable’, in need of permanent oversight. So some parents drive their children even quite short distances to school, thereby increasing the danger on the roads and the risk of child obesity. It is also possible that children may be less eager than in the past to explore their neighbourhood in each others’ company. Homes are now full of personal entertainment. Children need no longer stare out of the windows with frustration on rainy days, but can instead look at the little flashing screens of their toys. Parents may also prefer to see their children in front of a computer screen than exploring their locality or noisily playing football in the park. Parents too play with their toys. I often see parents walking with their children, not talking to them but instead giving all their attention to their mobile phone. In this new world of electronic toys, children may lose the social skills they would otherwise have learnt in play - more will be diagnosed as having an ‘autistic spectrum disorder’. Indeed, this has already happened.