WHY SERIOUS PLAY?

Wayne Hemingway and Louise Blackwell explain why they are turning Crawley into the UK’s largest open-air playground

for too long, we’ve boxed play into tiny corners of our lives. We’ve told ourselves a boring lie: children play, adults work. We build playgrounds for the kids, shopping centres for the consumers, and transit routes for the commuters, too often treating our public spaces as purely practical corridors to get from A to B. But what if we stopped treating play as an optional childhood luxury and started seeing it for what it actually is? A catalyst for radical creativity, human connection and civic joy.

Exactly 80 years after it was designated a New Town, Crawley is prepared to challenge the status quo once again. Creative Crawley and Hemingway Design are launching the National Festival of Play, a massive, boundary-pushing celebration that will shake up playgrounds that are fenced in and inject raw creativity, movement, and performance directly into our streets, parks and concrete squares.

This isn’t about setting up a few swing sets in the town centre. It’s a total reimagining of what a town can be and should be.

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The town that unfinished the future

Disrupting the ordinary is built into Crawley’s DNA. When it was designed as a New Town in 1947, the visionaries behind it weren’t just pouring concrete; they were trying to consciously shape the everyday joy of its residents. By the 1950s, Crawley became a fearless pioneer of the adventure playground movement. Instead of installing rigid, prefabricated iron roundabouts, the town gave kids raw materials: scrap wood, tools, shovels and wheelbarrows. The instructions? Figure it out.

They built, they experimented, they took risks, and they knocked things down just to start again. The magic lay in the fact that the environment was completely unfinished. It was a living, breathing lab for self-determination.

Eight decades later, we need that exact same unfinished energy.

Reclaiming space from the screen

While modern headlines obsess over youth screen time, they miss the much more pressing question: what are we actually giving them to look at when they look up? Young people don’t want to be exiled to hidden, dark corners on the edge of town. They want to be right in the thick of it, rubbing shoulders with the rest of society.

Look at skateboarding. Towns across the UK spend thousands installing hostile architecture – metal studs, chopped benches, and defensive barriers – just to keep skaters out of sight. But working alongside young people has proven that when you embrace skate culture (now a hugely popular Olympic sport), you don’t get vandalism; you get a generation that takes fierce, proud ownership of its public square.

Curiosity and imagination aren’t qualities we outgrow. Adults are suffocated by the endless expectation to be productive, purposeful, and quiet. A town that actively leaves room for play is a town that leaves room for spontaneous human connection.

A town that actively leaves room for play is a town that leaves room for spontaneous human connection

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A festival for the 100%

The National Festival of Play is taking the blueprint of major UK cultural movements and scaling it for everyone. Just like Salford celebrates our hard-earned free time with We Invented the Weekend, or Blackburn champions industrial legacy with The National Festival of Making, Crawley will use play to unlock the town’s brilliant global heritage.

Crawley’s vibrant, international communities are ready to flood the streets with games, sports, songs and street subcultures from all over the world. It’s a cross-generational playground where a massive game of catch, an improvised urban skate park, or a giant communal board game can break down barriers faster than any boardroom meeting ever could.

Civic pride isn’t built on infrastructure alone. It’s built on those electric, unscripted moments that make a place feel truly alive. The National Festival of Play is our declaration that the town belongs to the people who inhabit it. The street is our canvas. The park is our arena. The town centre is our stage.

The plan is to launch the inaugural National Festival of Play around the International Day of Play in June. All we need now is for an army of play practitioners, institutions and brands to come and help us deliver something special.

Young people don’t want to be exiled to hidden, dark corners on the edge of town

National Festival of Play

The town of Crawley is championing children’s right to play through the National Festival of Play, a multi-arts festival reimagining the town as a place where play shapes how they live, learn, work and connect. The festival will build on Crawley’s legacy as a pioneer in adventure play. Created in partnership with Creative Crawley ([creativecrawley.com](https://creativecrawley.com/)), it will expand on existing work by Hemingway Design, celebrating regional heritage and global significance: ● We Invented the Weekend (Salford): [https://www.weinventedtheweekend.com/](https://www.weinventedtheweekend.com/) ● The National Festival of Making (Blackburn): [https://festivalofmaking.co.uk/](https://festivalofmaking.co.uk/)