International Perspectives – Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the Digital Playground 

One February morning, a few years ago, I found myself with Kate Cowan entering the playground of the primary school in East London, where I had been a teacher some twenty years earlier.  Almost the first question I asked of one of the children running around was: ‘Does the Green Lady still live here?’ And, of course, she still did. And presumably still does. Most Victorian schools in London, and elsewhere, have a resident ghost and the children know a lot about them, though they could never quite agree on a description of them, beyond ‘Green’ in this case.

What were we doing and why were we there? Kate and I were there as researchers of children’s play, working with children as informants on their playground lives: clapping games, skipping games, rhyming games, imaginative and folkloric play, and more besides.  Our colleagues in Sheffield, Julia Bishop and Jackie Marsh, were doing the same thing in a parallel ethnography local school. 

Playing the Archive (2017–2019), the overarching project, was funded by the EPSRC UK research council and co-directed by Professors Andrew Burn (UCL Institute of Education) and Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield).  At its core, Playing the Archive aimed to forge a connection with the pioneering work of Iona and Peter Opie, the amateur ethnographers and folklorists who documented children’s games and playground cultures across Britain from the 1950s onwards. The Opies’ archives—now housed in the Bodleian Library—capture the multiple forms of play of generations of children in the UK. The Playing the Archive team sought not only to preserve this legacy but to bring it to life, inviting contemporary children to become researchers of their own play, as well as to explore the games of the past. Alongside child researchers, we engaged in updating some of their methods using digital media to explore rich continuities and transformations in children’s play in contemporary playgrounds.

Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the Digital Playground, is a new open access book from UCL Press* which tells the story of this project. It is edited by Andrew Burn, Kate Cowan, Julia Bishop, and myself, and offers theoretical and practical insights from a network of collaborators: folklorists, designers, educators, and technologists. Contributors include Julia Bishop and Catherine Bannister’s expertise in folklore; Alison Somerset-Ward and Helen Woolley’s research on children’s play spaces; and digital innovators from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), who developed playful interfaces like the Time Telephone—an old rotary phone reimagined as a time-travel device through which children could “call” the past. This blending of scholarship and playful uses of technology captures what made the project unique: play is both method and subject, both data and dialogue, both living archive and social science endeavour.  

In the introduction, Andrew Burn introduces the idea of the “Circuit of Play,” inspired by the Paul DuGay and Stuart Hall’s Circuit of Culture, as a way of tracing how play circulates, transforms, and endures through media, spaces, and generations. The book’s four sections: The People in the Archive, Capturing Play, Play in Space and Time, and Future Play, invite readers to follow this circuit and to reflect on how we might archive not only what children do, but how they feel, move, and imagine as they play, with a particular emphasis on how they navigate meaning-making in their play using the resources of popular media cultures.

Highlights in the book include Michael Eades’ moving reflection on his grandparents, the Opies, in ‘Hopscotching the Opies’, and our fieldwork chapters exploring play as a multisensory experience—mapped, drawn, recorded, and even heat-tracked using iPads, voice recorders, and GoPro cameras. In ‘Future Play’, we explore how children mobilised their creative instincts during the pandemic through the Play Observatoryproject, which followed a year later, showing that even in times of crisis, play remains a vital human resource.  And, of course, we go into more depth in the book about children’s imaginative and creative responses to the uncanny and phantasmagoric, as in their accounts of the Green Lady, mentioned above.

Playing the Archive is more than an academic study—it’s a celebration of children’s voice and agency in play. It challenges us to see play not as a trivial pastime, but as a profound form of cultural expression and continuity. Whether in the chalk marks of a hopscotch grid or the pixels of a virtual world, play connects us across time and digital media, showing us how popular culture is still being woven through play experiences, but also that children are still inventing and reinventing playworlds, following their own interests.  It remains a space in which aspects of children’s agency are protected characteristics, and long may it continue to be so, not least as a site of resistance to the model of childhood which sees narrowly defined, neo-liberal, performative measures as the only things worth knowing.

We hope the book inspires educators, researchers, and anyone curious about childhood to listen closely to the echoes of playgrounds past and present—and to join us in keeping those echoes alive in new and imaginative ways.

You can download a free PDF of Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the Digital Playground or order a hard copy from UCL Press.