A few weeks ago, Sheffield’s IKEA reopened its Småland, a childcare facility where 3–10-year-olds can play for 45 minutes unaccompanied by an adult. I took my kids (1 and 3) after our usual Friday playgroup. Mostly out of curiously: my mind was blown by the idea of leaving the older one with trained childcare professionals *for free* while I ate a cinnamon bun with the younger one. The novelty of using childcare to facilitate leisure, rather than work. I suspected there was a good chance that the three-year-old would rather come for the bun than stay on his own in the crèche, though he never got to make the choice. Småland was, after all, closed. But the failed trip got me wondering about crèches - and where on earth they have all gone.
(In the end, we just went to the canteen, which has this enclosed area that meant I got to eat my bun in semi-peace)
‘Crèche’, a French word, has a very particular meaning in Britain. (In the US, I read, it’s used to describe a nativity scene.) It’s not a nursery or a preschool, which a child would typically go for at least several hours on a regular basis. It’s a sort of drop-in facility, usually attached to an activity that an adult might want to do for a couple of hours without a child. Typically, leisure and shopping centres. I can’t find statistics on crèche numbers, but I have this sense of them being everywhere in my 90s childhood, and nowhere now. I wanted to know if this was right.
I started by looking up the crèches I remember from the 90s- like the Littledown Centre in Bournemouth, where my mum would leave my youngest brother so that she could take me and my middle brother swimming (I like to think she also sometimes left us all there and went swimming on her own, though I have no memory of this). It closed in 2010. Then I started googling the crèche facilities that I would use if they existed - Sheffield libraries, leisure centres, Meadowhall. All closed, somewhere between 2008-2014.
These closures were a national phenomenon. Local council crèches (in libraries and leisure centres) seem to have been some of the first victims of austerity. Edinburgh Council, for example, closed 8 crèches in between 2008 and 2010 to save a total of £120, 000. But there was more going on than just the need for savings. A group of ‘local mums’ (could we just call them parent campaigners?!) designed a series of cost-neutral proposals that would have seen rising contributions from the parents who used crèches (previously subsidised so users were paying £1 per hour) and highlighting the numbers of facilities users who would be lost if they were closed. Without crèches, leisure centres would lose much of the money they thought they would be saving. The campaign failed.
Across the UK in the from the early 2000s, local council leisure facilities were increasingly being contracted out to private companies as part of New Labour’s Private Finance Initiative (known usually as PFI.) PFI had been introduced by John Major in 1992 - a natural successor to Thatcherite neoliberal ‘internal markets’ in public services and the NHS. The principle was that for-profit businesses could deliver state services more efficiently than the state itself.[1] When for-profit entities took on the contracts for local council leisure facilities, they weren’t attempting to create ‘cost neutral’ spaces, but profitable ones. The ‘Edinburgh mums’ pointed out the shocking lack of accountability created by newly privatised leisure facilities - they could not effectively lobby local councillors for provision: it was, they said, ‘out of their hands’.
It was around 2010 that mall crèches also began to close in droves. Meadowhall in Sheffield and West Quay in Southampton both argued that the floorspace was more profitable if used for retail. Staffing costs were also too great, they claimed. Drop-in systems made it hard to gauge if and how many staff would be needed, and when. This complaint, of course, was premised on the idea that the crèche should pull in a profit itself, rather than enable people’s participation in other parts of the health, leisure, and consumer goods economy.
In all the crèche debates I’ve unearthed in local newspapers, providers talk about falling demand. Is this plausible? There is no reason that there should have been fewer children accompanying adults on leisure or shopping outings in the early 2010s: women’s employment and nursery attendance were holding steady.[2] Is it just the case, then, that parents felt less comfortable using créches? The early 2010s is when Angela McRobbie dates the rise of ‘neoliberal mothering’ – a form of attachment focused intensive motherhood that emphasises the importance of close, regular carers for the child over ad hoc arrangements. Did it just feel less OK to leave your child with a stranger in a playroom in a gym, a church hall, or mall?
My purely personal and anecdotal comparisons of church crèches, in the early 2000s and now, bear this out. As a teenager, I used to spend every 4th Sunday supervising a local church creche with my mum and, improbably, Mark Kermode. People would come in, drop off their under 4s, and then leave them til the end of the service. This year, I went to a couple of carol services with my toddlers. The crèche, while on offer, was totally full of parents. It functioned more as a quarantine zone for infants and their carers than somewhere that people seemed like they were actually leaving kids.
Churches are the only place that I have encountered crèches in the wild, but looking at where they still exist shows that the demand is there: you just have to be prepared to pay. The only leisure centre crèche in Sheffield is at the private Virgin Gym, where for the kind of membership where you can use it is around £100 a month. Crèches still seem to exist in some public gyms in wealthier parts of London and Oxfordshire, though again you pay a lot. A flurry of ‘family focused’ private members clubs are opening across London, too, which provide ad hoc weekend childcare alongside work and spa facilities.
People who can pay still want and still get childcare for leisure. The rest only get childcare for work. The contemporary childcare debate, the entire (pathetic) funding system in Britain reinforces the idea that the only legitimate reason to be away from your children - to step away from care work - is for paid work. This is only implicit, perhaps, in government-funded childcare hours for 3-and-4 year-olds being contingent on the working status of parents. It was made completely explicit in lockdown legislation, which only allowed children’s nursery attendance or informal childcare to facilitate the work or education of a parent.
The idea of crèches feels so exciting to me, I guess, because they insist on the accessibility of leisure or even just uninterrupted errands. A democratic, everyday luxury. Perhaps that’s why the last holdout seems to be IKEA, a business which has made its reputation selling the ideal of Scandinavian style social democracy to the world. I think about this essay on IKEA canteens all the time: the rarity of calorie dense, affordable meals makes IKEA a novelty for giving us something we had in the heyday of postwar welfare state. Or, in the case of crèches, something which has vanished suddenly, and almost unremarked, within the lifespan of our current government. With them, we have lost not only the access not only of children to play, but of parents (usually, women) to leisure.
[1] Major’s PFI was also a way of keeping government debt ‘off the books’ - by outsourcing it to the private companies that took on government or local council contracts.
[2] Women were then, and remain now, vastly more likely to be accompanied by women into public spaces, so it is – depressingly – women’s employment rates that are the most significant here