The rise and rise of soft play

on 90s Dads, church tig, and the right to play

On New Year’s Day, 2023, my partner lost a ring at a soft play. I undertook a kind of clown’s archaeology, excavating the ball pool. Eventually, underneath sucked lollipops and next to a long lost baby tooth, I found it. I felt heroic.

I always feel heroic when I go to a soft play. As an adult, it’s a faintly abject experience of bad coffee in cold former industrial buildings. It’s something I do for the greater good (exhausting our energiser-bunny boys on rainy days) without actually feeling that it’s especially good for any of us. But there’s only so many times we can ransack the museums in town, and so, here we are.

My dad let slip that thinks the rate at which we soft play (maybe twice per month in winter) is a little ridiculous. Soft play was something parents ‘didn’t need’ in the 1990s. Back then, homes were not filled with screens and so not somewhere you needed to take your children away from to have fun. He’s not totally wrong. In the U.K., the soft play industry was still in its infancy in 1995, which would have been around the first time I set foot inside one. The iconic play venue of my childhood was near my grandparents’ house in Newcastle, County Down. Coco’s Indoor Adventure Playground provided occasional respite from the rain lashed Northern Irish seaside. It was situated just across the road from a freezing seawater bath called, incongruously, the Tropicana.

Coco’s, Easter 2023. I took my kids (and my grown up brothers) and it was a glorious, garish 90s timecapsule

The very first soft plays opened in the United States and predated Coco’s by about 20 years. In the mid-1970s, safety concerns about the adventure playground movement (with its origins in the bomb sites of the Blitz) drove a new cadre of play professionals to design softer, safer spaces. Early soft play incorporated foam, vinyl and ball pits under canopies outdoors. Then safety concerns of a different kind that moved soft play indoors. High profile child abduction cases made parenting more supervisory. The rapid rise in car ownership made towns less safe for pedestrians, especially little ones. Leisure relocated to out of town malls. From the 1980s, it was fast food restaurants that popularised soft play: McDonalds, Whacky Warehouse, Chuck E. Cheese. These were intended to contain children while adults consumed. The soft plays I attend feel designed to do the opposite: to punish adults for having children who play.

Scholars writing about the smattering of soft plays in Britain in the 1990s were interested in why this American export was taking off. They noted some of the same patterns, on a twenty year time lapse. Cars, malls, and the spectre of abduction made the literal containment of children in a play space desirable. Containment (they wistfully noted) now seemed more important than worthy, risky outdoor play. But there was one other factor they thought was important: the new impetus placed on ‘dads’ to do childcare at the weekends. These weekend dads, they reasoned, would want to be sedentary after their hard working weeks. They might even need to work while supervising play. Cold warehouses and bad coffee could facilitate them doing whatever 90s dads did with briefcases while their children were entertained and contained. My dad confessed to me that he always ‘quite liked Cocos’ not because he could bring a briefcase, but a book.^[1]

This might explain why soft play arrived on this side of the Atlantic, but not its rise which has taken place within the last 15 years. In Sheffield, each of the 7 large soft play centres opened after 2010. According to the British Association of Soft Play, its membership has trebled over the past 15 years. This rise maps not onto the rise of screens but, you guessed it!, austerity. My New Labour childhood was a leisure centre childhood - a trip to our local pool on a Saturday afternoon cost the equivalent today of £7 for a family of five. (Our family of four pay £26.50 for an hour in a leisure centre pool now so cold I wear a wetsuit to get in.) Then, there is the housing crisis. Even young children those who do not live in poverty (as an unprecedented 4.2 million do) live in smaller houses than they did 30 years ago. Alongside leisure centres and living rooms, a whole infrastructures of indoor space have been lost in the last two decades. One third of village halls have closed. Half of youth centres. The overwhelming majority of working men’s clubs and community centres. All the places that I, in the 90s, went to charge around indoors fuelled by a panda pop and a packet of space raiders crisps.

At Bournemouth International Centre in the 90s, one adult and one child could go swimming 10 times for £13!!

There’s a parallel story here, or maybe two. One is about the loss of outdoor space, which deserves its own post. The other is about the loss of community, which I’ve written about before. Public space and public infrastructure creates communities. Communities create play. In The Science of Play, Susan Solomon writes that the best kind of play is public, ongoing, and local. It takes place in spaces that the same children come to, again and again, and therefore develops its own imaginative micro-geographies. Everybody knows that the troll lives under the slide, and that the curtains in the village hall are haunted. We’ve noticed that our children do better with predictability, not novelty, in their play environments. Their imaginations are freer to create when they’re released from the burden of mapping new spaces.

If we take children’s rights seriously (and there is every reason to believe we don’t) then play is one thing that marks them out from adult human rights. While adults have a right to leisure time, the United Nations states that children have a right to leisure itself. Play is fundamental: without it children’s minds cannot fully develop. Their psyches cannot recover from small stresses or large, life altering traumas. Adults in historically protestant societies tend to describe the importance of play by comparing it the thing we value most, work.  In Swiss psychiatrist Jean Piaget’s formulation: play is the work of childhood. Past pedagogues (Montessori, Steiner, Pestalozzi) made play a serious business, designing austere toys and imaginative schemas that children would pass through as they learned ideal citizenship. Today, carefully marketed STEM toys and the #Montessorimoms of Instagram still connect play to production and development.

Soft play is not the worthy, educational play. It’s not creative or careful; it’s manic and unhinged. Inevitably when we go to soft play, one of my puppy-dog children bites the other in a fit of overexcitement. Charging around Coco’s to trance tunes in 1995 gave me a feeling I didn’t experience again until drinking in a club. I think this kind of steam valve play has a place, and it’s not why I dislike soft play. Nor is it the bad coffee or the cold warehouses. It’s the feeling that they’re missing out on something I had while seeming (at least to my dad!) to have more. It’s the loss of everyday, affordable leisure and the communities it built.

After omicron, I found myself back in church after a decade and a half away. After my benign Anglican childhood gave way to toxic evangelical youth movements, church was one of the last places I’d expected to take my children. But I was inspired by Katherine Goldstein’s writing on The Doubleshift about her quest to find a ‘village’ to raise her sons in. She writes about Jewish rituals, institutions, and summer camps as a pathway to finding the community she craved. I then discovered that we live a short distance from one of the most progressive Anglican communities on the country. While these things got me through the door, a reason I stayed is tig. Most Sundays, my children play an uproarious chasing game between the pews and round the back of the alter with a group of kids, watched over by adults that know their names. The children are not all the same age as them, and the adults are not all the same age as me. They are learning what it means to share playspace with crawling babies, speedy pre-teens, and slower-moving elders. They do this while I sip coffee and have several generations of parents telling me, it gets easier.

a tiny blond head running through the pews

I’m absolutely not suggesting that we all go to church to find missing communities and playspaces! One of the many violences of austerity is that it has elevated the power of socially conservative Christian groups via their provision of former functions of the state (think, foodbanks). But I do think, in a country of dwindling indoor space and dwindling church buildings, there is a synergy here. The church is one of the richest landowners in Britain. As a socialist I believe these spaces should belong to all of us, not least the raucous tig players.

Just as socially conservative churches have been alive to the evangelising opportunities presented by service provision, some more progressive congregations have been willing to share their spatial wealth. They have opened soft plays or community cafes under historic, vaulted ceilings. But what I dream of are free, secular indoor spaces where my kids and I could while away the winter weekday hours of 3-5pm, or a rainy Saturday afternoon. Large heated halls with comfy chairs, close enough to home for us to see the same people again and again. My dream is of a kind of leisure space that is enriched because its accessible to everyone not because (like soft play) it functions on price-based exclusion. I dream of a politics where children’s play, and adults’ leisure, is a right.

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If you like this post, please consider a donation to Right to Play’s Gaza Appeal, towards kits including colouring books and games for children enduring unimageable horror.  

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^[1] On my most recent soft play trip, I decided to try being less millennial mum and more 90s dad, and spent my time tapping out this post on my phone.