
Outside of the home, public playgrounds are the most common places for children to play and the fundamental right of every child to play is even recognised in a UN convention. Despite this, there has been very limited research exploring inequality in the provision of playgrounds.
To help address this, we have analysed data from almost 34,000 playgrounds in England – the largest national dataset on playgrounds yet. In particular, we looked at England’s largest 534 settlements with populations over 15,000 and mapped patterns from the 18,077 children’s playgrounds within them.