Playing Out (Manchester Histories)

A history of streets as a place for children to play and socialise, whether near the home or walking to school and how and why that has changed over the years. We want to explore the importance of children being able safely play and move on our streets and why it is so important to their health, happiness and development.

We want to look at what has changed to make this no longer part of everyday life for children, both from a cultural and policy perspective. And most importantly we want to explore the initiatives (such as School Streets and Play Streets) and changes that are happening to try and reverse this decline to give children back the safe spaces they need for their physical and mental wellbeing.

Join Cazz Ward from Walk Ride GM, Jane Rickwood and Alice Ferguson from Playing Out.

Register your place via Eventbrite

Venue: Manchester Central Library, The Performance Space, St Peters Square,  M2 5PD

Cazz Ward: Cazz is a passionate environmental campaigner, believing that supporting change in the places you live is as important as making changes at a policy level. As part of WalkRide GM, she has supported a number of schools to put in place School Streets – closing the school zone to traffic and encouraging walking and riding to school – proven to make children more independent, happier and healthier.

Alice Ferguson: In 2009, Alice and her neighbour Amy Rose came up with the idea of temporarily transforming their Bristol street into a safe ‘shared space’ where children could play freely outside their front door, simply by closing the road to through-traffic for a short time. They saw this as a step towards restoring children’s freedom to play out in their communities as a vital part of a happy, healthy childhood. Alice is now co-Director of Playing Out CIC, supporting the growing national parent-led play streets movement of over 1000 street communities across 100 local authority areas.

Jane Rickwood: is a project manager at Living Streets, part of the team delivering the Walk To School Outreach project, helping achieve the Government target of 55% of primary aged children walking to school by 2025. She has worked in active travel and behaviour change for just over twenty years, starting as a School Travel Plan officer. She was part of TravelWise Merseyside delivering travel plans and engagement and marketing campaigns across Liverpool City Region, and oversaw the Bikeability contract which was the largest in the UK at the time.

Jane walks, rides a bike or uses public transport for every journey she makes. Pre covid, she helped run a playstreet in her local neighbourhood for 18 months (pre covid), speaking with neighbours and finding volunteers to take over the streets and enable up to 30 children to enjoy the freedom and joy of playing out.