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Mantas Kačerauskas

50 Playgrounds So Questionable, You Have To Wonder What The Designers Were Thinking

We spend a big chunk of our childhood on the playground. It’s where we race down slides, see how high we can swing, dig around in the sand and chase other kids until we’re exhausted. Ideally, those memories come with plenty of laughs and maybe a few scraped knees.

Whoever came up with the playgrounds below, though, seems to have had something slightly more nightmarish in mind. From genuinely dangerous equipment to wildly inappropriate features, they’re so wrong it’s hard not to laugh. Scroll down to see them for yourself and upvote the worst fails.

#1 All Aboard Thomas The Existential Angst Engine

#2 Noah's Ark, In Bristol, Unveiled Its New Children's 'Elephant Play Zone'

#3 The Slide For Bad Kids

We can laugh all we want at the horrors on this list, but designing a genuinely good playground is much trickier than it looks. There’s a lot more to it than installing a jungle gym next to a sandbox on a patch of grass and calling it a day.

At their best, playgrounds are legitimate works of architecture and art. They give children space to develop social and physical skills while, of course, letting their imaginations run wild. All of that can play a big role in how they grow and develop.

#4 70s Slides Thing Took A Long Climb To Get On Top, I Will Never Forget The Burn Of The Slide In Summer. Playground,1970s

#5 Kids Playground Design Fails

#6 "Play Around And Find Out" Learning In A 1970s Playground

Interestingly, a well-designed playground isn’t necessarily the one that looks the most impressive. Those brightly colored plastic spaces packed with slides and built-in games can actually be less interesting for children because everything is so obvious.

You quickly figure out where to climb and what each part is meant to do, and before long, there isn’t much left to discover. A pile of mud or a couple of sticks can sometimes keep a child busy far longer, simply because there’s no one right way to play with them.

#7 Swedish Playground

#8 Soviet Playgrounds

#9 I Have So Many Questions

People started noticing exactly that after World War II. In parts of Europe, children were playing among the remains of damaged buildings and turning bits of rubble into their own toys and games.

Strange as the setting was, it showed adults something important: children could have far more fun when they were given materials to mess around with instead of being told exactly how everything should be used.

#10 70s Plagrounds - Fun Yet Dangerous

#11 Never Split Your Legs When You Slide Down

#12 My Grade School's Playground In The 70s

That thinking eventually led to the rise of adventure playgrounds. The idea originated in Denmark, where landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen helped create the first “junk playground” in Copenhagen in 1943.

A few years later, British landscape architect Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, visited it and was so impressed that she brought the concept back to the UK, where adventure playgrounds soon began appearing.

These spaces looked very different from traditional playgrounds. Instead of neat rows of swings and slides, children were given loose materials and discarded objects they could move around and use however they liked.

#13 You're Not Having Fun Unless You Get A Concussion

#14 Not Exactly The Right Place For A Playground

#15 This Terrifying Playground For Children

By the end of the 20th century, that experimental spirit had started to fade. Concerns over safety were growing, and expensive lawsuits made legal responsibility a much bigger issue.

In Chicago, for example, a child was badly injured after falling from a tall slide in 1978 and was later awarded at least $9.5 million. All of this led to stricter rules and much more standardization in playground design.

#16 This Spiderman Children's Ride Has A Visible Panty Line

#17 Hmmm

#18 This Mickey Mouse That’s At A Local Play Park

Manufacturing was changing around the same time. Plastic playground pieces became cheaper to produce, and companies could sell the same modular designs all over.

By the late 1980s and 1990s, those brightly colored structures with connected platforms and slides had become the familiar playground look we still recognize today.

#19 Been Slowly But Surely Putting Together A Children's Park

#20 This Slide

#21 Just A Normal Russian Playground

Adventure playgrounds didn’t disappear, though their numbers declined as this more standardized approach took over.

Play spaces became easier to regulate and reproduce, while the loose materials and strange homemade structures that once encouraged children to invent their own games became much less common.

#22 A Playground In The USA In The 1970s

#23 Sometimes Accidents Can Be Anticipated?

#24 You Had One Job

More recently, some designers have started moving away from that one-size-fits-all approach again. Modern play spaces are increasingly bringing in natural elements and features that children can change or use in different ways.

Project for Public Spaces argues that the best ones keep giving kids something new to do rather than staying exactly the same every time they visit.

Maybe that’s what good playground design comes down to in the end. Children don’t need every bit of fun planned out for them. Give them something that sparks an idea, and they’re usually pretty good at taking it from there.