The Holiday Factory
Center Parcs, and the enclosed outdoors
In 2020, I joined a Facebook group called ‘1000 hours outside’. Apparently the average child spends 1000 hours a year watching a screen, and so the challenge was to spend that time outdoors instead. I took it on in a fit of lockdown denial. Outdoors was better for children anyway. We weren’t missing anything. Pandemic restrictions would make me into the parent I wanted to be: adventurous, energetic, waterproof.
Things started off well. I made a mud kitchen (immunity boosting imaginative play!). I plonked my baby in a washing up bowl in the garden (hot tub!). I spent hours in the park shaking a tree branch in his face (nature’s baby sensory!). When winter rolled around, I left tupperware containers full of food-dyed water to freeze outside (rainbow igloo bricks!). But no matter how many times I muttered ’no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing’, I was still cold. The baby, slithering through mud in a fleece-lined puddle suit, was cold too.
But my 1000 hours honeymoon ended definitively with the arrival of covid vaccines. It turned out, there was a lot of overlaps in the Venn diagram between parents who wanted to spend 1000 hours outside, parents who planned to continue to home-school once the pandemic was over, parents who thought vaccines were poison, and parents who imagined the pandemic as a trial run for the end of days.
sturdy clothing and a colouring chart: all you need for an outdoor year
I didn’t leave the Facebook group, though its politics are objectionable. There’s a coherence to its vision of childhood that, in spite of myself, I find appealing. If children have an essential nature (wild) and that nature has a natural home (outdoors) then at any moment you know what is best for your them: outdoor play. Your day’s success can be measured in the hours that you facilitate that for them. You can even download a chart to colour in to prove your success. And if you believe in the essential wildness of children and the superiority of outdoor play, other core beliefs about society can follow. Protect the wilderness! Resit authority! Let your children run wild and free!
There’s nothing new about the 1000 hours vision of childhood. It’s Jean Jaques Rousseau’s vision of children as little savages, that urges society not to ‘tame’ them too fast. Historically, the view of children as ‘savages’ has sat alongside colonial paternalism (think, colonised people as ‘childlike’). It’s also present in some worst childrearing literature I have read (Happiest Toddler on the Block I’m looking at you). But the belief in the affinity between children and nature isn’t just one held by imperialists of fundamentalist preppers. Across the last century and a half, it has inspired humanitarian sanatoriums of the 1920s, the Christian socialist nurseries of the 1930s, and the anarchic adventure play movement of the 1960s. Getting children outdoors was fundamental to both the Hitler Youth and the Leninist Young Pioneers; the Scouting movement and the Woodcraft Folk.[1]
any excuse to share adorable 1930s outdoor nursery photos from my book
When I entered the world of post-pandemic middle class toddler parenting, I found that the wild worlds of childhood had been tamed. I toured forest nurseries and went to forest playgroups that were fenced in, and where I was ensured that the indoor early years curriculum had simply been moved outside (we write letters with sticks in mud, etc). These outdoor educational options were a far cry from either the rough and ready outdoor nurseries of the interwar years, or the wilderness adventures the 1000 hours families. But enclosed outdoor worlds are becoming increasingly popular. The Forest Schools Association estimates that the number of forest nurseries have doubled in the last ten years. Since I had my eldest in 2019, four new forest playgroups have opened within 15 minutes of our house. Several of our local primary schools have new forest school areas. This enthusiasm for the outdoors is taking off at the same moment as air pollution is at its highest, the right to roam in under threat, and playgrounds are falling into disrepair. Our environmental anxieties and our growing love of the enclosed outdoors are connected. We’re trying to conserve children’s access to the outdoors privatising it.
I recently spent a weekend at Center Parcs. The first iteration of Center Parcs was opened in Holland by Catholic sports equipment retailer Piet Derksen in 1967. It was originally intended as a weekend holiday destination for his staff and customers in an era when, he feared, the Dutch were losing access to the outdoors. Postwar reconstruction and the rise of the mass motoring were replacing the countryside with concrete. Center Parcs was an attempt to preserve a rural idyll by creating a tented enclaved, immersed in nature. The model (itself based on the Catholic children’s summer camps of Derksen’s youth) took off. Derksen hired modernist architect Jaap Bakema to replace the tents with bungalows, all built below the tree line for the feeling of immersion in nature.
an early Lodge
Bakema designed Center Parcs much as he had designed mass public housing projects in Berlin and Rotterdam. The bungalows were basic, uniform, and comfortable. They created the feeling of seclusion despite being built in rows. The centre parcs ‘village’ featured quiet, car free streets, and a central square. But the fusion of modern municipalism and nature that made up Center Parcs fell short when it came to one crucial aspect of the holiday experience: swimming. Municipal pools in Holland in the 1960s were heated to around 10c. Unlike in neighbouring Nordic countries, there was no real appetite for freezing alpine dips in winter. So in 1980, Center Parcs opened what was then known as the Aqua Mundo (or, today, Sub Tropical Swimming Paradise). This would be another accessible version of the great outdoors, but this time under cover, enabling the ‘flora and fauna’ of a tropical island to exist around a pool heated by a balmy 29.5c all year round. It was a sort of model nature village within a model nature village – a Russian doll style set up where holiday makers could experience one enclosed version of the great outdoors within another.
Bakema social housing projects in Berlin
The original Dutch model was exported to Germany and France, and then arrived in Britain in 1987. It landed differently here because of the way that Britain’s intense class politics have always mapped on to how and where people holiday. In the age of mass air travel, domestic holiday resorts were seen as working class. Butlins, with its mass entertainment and accommodation that echoed the intimacy of postwar housing estates, didn’t chime with the British bourgeois fetishization of privacy. On the continent, Center Parcs had remained true to Dirksen and Bakema’s original vision of a democratic (read, affordable) mass holiday destination. But in Britain, the feeling of seclusion in nature spoke to a bourgeois desire for privacy. Its prices were raised to reflect its customer base. In 2001, Center Parcs UK and Ireland split from its Dutch parent company. Today a UK Center Parcs holiday can cost as much as three times more than its continental equivalent.
I went to Center Parcs as a child, before 2001. I don’t know if it felt different then, or if I just noticed different things. My memory of it is much more in line with the initial modernist-back-to-nature-municipalism vision of its founder than as what it is descried as today: a Boden Butlins. In the 90s, I loved the uniformity of the little houses almost as much as the wave pool. I loved the car free little streets, the village square, and what I imagined as a sort of model society where everyone had what matching, utilitarian versions of everyday items (white sheets, white plates, boxy green sofas) alongside access to extravagant shared leisure facilities. I’m embarrassed to admit that, years later when I first heard the phrase, ‘fully automated luxury communism’, it was Center Parcs that my mind lazily conjured.
an early Aqua Mundo
But as an adult at Center Parcs, I went running. I travelled through Nordic pines, and then hit a high barbed wire fence, Truman Show style. The fences are hidden but they are the most essential part of the experience. Center Parcs is really about what barbed wire keeps out: the people and cars that might disrupt this communing with ‘nature’ or overcrowd the subtropical swimming paradise. Then, there were the less visible walls around every single bookable (for a fee) ‘experience’ other than the pool. Archery lessons, toddler roller skating, pottery painting. Enclosed leisure within a leisure enclosure. (Forgive me, I want to use the Russian doll metaphor again).
I had a great time. I didn’t need a wetsuit in the pool (we spent 6 hours in water one of the days), the supermarket had tiny toddler trollies, the restaurants had soft plays. There was a playground round every corner, and I didn’t worry that my children would be hit by a car running between them. It was a relief to be in a space designed so that my children and I could have fun simultaneously. Center Parcs business model works because it gives us things we value enough to pay for, but not vote for. Or maybe because it is giving us things that we think we deserve, but we lack the political will or imagination to behave as though other people deserve them too.
I wish that the wild, outdoors childhood of the 1000 hours group was one you only had to opt out to get. That the ingredients of a joyful, adventurous childhood were simply there for the taking for those brave or intrepid enough to shun school, vaccines, and screens. But its sadly the UK Center Parcs model that feels closer to reality: a natural, wild childhood is opt in. In 2024, the conditions which make outdoor leisure truly accessible for the very young exist in curated, car free holiday parks. You have to book, pay, and then leave. We’ve enclosed the experiences we value to keep them safe, but only for those who can afford them.
We drove out of the Center Parcs forest through the sprawling factorylands of the M1. Out of our holiday factory and past miles of amazon distribution warehouses with lorries parked nose to nose, engines idling.
[1] My grandfather used to tell a story about orienteering as a teenage Scout in 1930s, meeting German teenagers in every English seaside youth hostel. He later believed German boys had been sent to gather information for an invasion. Two groups of outdoor imperialists, Baden Powell’s and Hitler’s, mapping South Downs side by side.