by Camille Moreno
Leisure. What does it mean to you? The semantics of the word are as cultural as they are grammatical. The interchangeability, for instance, between the words “leisure,” “recreation,” “play,” “activity,” and “sport” were examined in a 2017 survey in the Journal of Leisure Studies, 1schole-volume-30-number-1-pp-25-38.pdf (nrpa.org) and revealed that various ethnographic as well as geographic factors influenced the perception and use of these five words. I might engage in sport or some form of physical activity but be reluctant to allow myself the luxury of a leisurely stroll or a playful jaunt). One thing is certain: leisure centres are an integral part of the fabric of a city.
Hosted by New London Architecture, a membership organisation for the built environment community, seven professionals shared building and place-making projects that activate underused or dead space in the name of public health to make a tangible difference in London’s leisure landscape. Presented PechaKucha style (20 slides, 20 seconds per slide), Leisure for London looks into the past, present, and future of the capital’s recreational infrastructure.
From a prolonged life expectancy to cultivation of community and athletic/horticultural education, leisure centres in London and their programming offer an array of benefits to residents beyond just exercise; but they also carry a legacy of poor design and insufficient conservation budgets. Hundred-year-old buildings sacrifice efficiency for character as they slowly buckle under the weight of scant civic support. Pressure on the leisure sector due to rising energy costs means that despite a £63m boost from Sport England, 2https://www.sportengland.org/news/new-funding-help-keep-leisure-centres-pools-afloat one third of leisure centres across the UK are either closed or on the brink of condemnation.
Roughly half of the UK’s tennis courts are eroding, 3Jack Sallabank, Future Places Studio and countless football pitches remain flooded while pools sit empty. In addition to the structural damage and exponential decay, the degradation of facilities could also have something to do with why thirty percent of UK residents are under-exercised.
For instance, last year, London Kingston Council’s leisure centre construction was upended when the estimated building costs increased; first from £39.6m to £53m following a pretender estimate, and finally to a whopping £79.5m by March 2023 – essentially double the original quote. The borough’s former leisure centre has been closed since 2019 due to structural roof failure, leaving over 176,00 people without a space to exercise. While 4,000 residents signed a petition not to demolish it without a legally binding contract to ensure its replacement, the process of building is slow, and planning equally so (current reopening is estimated for 2027).
Kingston Council leader mentioned balancing “ambition with reality,” but when does that mean putting public health on the proverbial backburner? And what about balancing budgets with accessibility? The suspension of a leisure centre is invariably felt most by the council’s lower income households: young families, retirees, and the 22% of UK residents living below the poverty line. If you have enough resources, i.e. money and space, you could negotiate your own interim solution to a leisure centre closure – like joining a private facility or even installing a home gym. However, for a lot of people this is not an option. Even access to free, outdoor exercise presents localised disparity, with many of London’s major parks (especially the ones with lovely maintenance budgets, sufficient night-time lighting, and decent security) being located near more affluent neighbourhoods.
In 1899, Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. In the now 125-year-old text, Veblen presents the “leisure class” as a social milieu; the leisure class is wealthy, privileged, and powerful. Their status can be gauged by standards of living; conspicuous consumption, productive labour (money that makes money), and of course, leisure.
Falling neatly into the Leisure Class timeline, presenter Mark Camley of LLDC noted that maps indicating the most deprived areas of London have barely changed over the course of the past 150 years. Certain critical qualities such as land contamination, sense of place (or lack thereof), and absence of transportation infrastructure 4Mark Camley of LLDC presenting the Olympic Park were some of the defining characteristics of these areas.
Read within the context of health and leisure, Veblen’s text ironically exposes a somewhat tragic double meaning of the word “mobility,” as in not only corporeal mobility, but social mobility, which in turn effects how much sport and leisure one can access. Veblen describes the aspirational reality of those not belonging to the leisure class as a basic desire to live up to the conventional standard of decency. But who is to say what constitutes as decent? I might get my 10,000 steps in dashing through the maze that is Elephant & Castle, but does that qualify as sufficient physical activity? Is it leisure? As those in power generally determine what scheme of life the community endures, decency is up for negotiation. For architects and urban planners, the role or designer runs deeper than just composition and well into the realm of public health advocacy.
Below is a rundown of the top three presentations and their challenges, achievements, and contributions to the dissemination and availability of leisure.
One of the most interesting parallels drawn by the presenters between leisure construction, conservation, and the public was the negotiation of gendered spaces. From the availability of toilet and welfare facilities to gender inclusion, it seems as though women in particular are discouraged from participating in sports. While I wouldn’t necessarily have associated leisure capacity with toilets, the bathroom question came up again and again.
Fifty percent of UK public toilets are no longer funded, which means that women and girls do not have the private spaces they need, and often results in them not engaging in sports at all. Being physically able to take care of one’s needs as well as feeling safe in the space to do so is paramount, particularly for younger girls, teenagers, and pregnant women.
When females do engage, they often feel stigmatised. Excluded and discouraged from taking part in places like skateparks and backdrops to other male-dominated sports, the monoculture is intimidating and makes it feel like “unless you are already at a certain skill level, participation is not an option.” 5Natasha Hood Entry-level space simply does not exist or is not prioritised.
Hood added that another issue for females is enclosed spaces that lack a safe exit or backup exit. She referenced basketball courts that are completely fenced in and similar structures that lack adequate security. She referenced of a number of violent incidents that had taken place under these conditions, which speaks to the inherent privilege in having options, and of living in central neighbourhoods rich with infrastructure. Hood stressed the importance of informal play and the facilitation of spaces where the type of physical activity was less regulated and allowed for a degree of creative experimentation. By reducing barriers, particularly those in place for girls, and pushing inclusivity, a true culture of leisure inclusion can be built.
In deprived areas with high density, there exists what I like to think of as leisure deserts (stemming from the term food desert, i.e. low income areas where grocery stores are few and far between). Leisure deserts are short of parks and play spaces, but not of disused space. Deprived neighbourhoods often have disused shopping centres that make excellent spaces for informal play, offering room for meeting areas, open spaces, roof tops, and most importantly a place for youth to go that is close to home. Meeting people where they are not only enables realistic participation and safe commutes but also utilises empty or abandoned spaces, invariably integrating initiatives into the pre-existing fabric of the area as opposed injecting a foreign structure or culture.
Having worked in educational publishing and development of educational resources, Woodman stresses learning and discovery when she talks about her charity’s plans to build a community-owned park on a 5.68-hectare piece of land at East London Lea Bridge Station in Waltham Forest Council. Complete with forest school, public swimming holes, and aquatic plants that clean the water naturally, the park sounds like an oasis from a bygone era.
Plans include the development of a “mosaic of habitats,” 6Abigail Woodman including swimming spaces, cafes, agricultural areas, and kitchen & butterfly gardens. Nicknamed the “brownfield rainforest,” the East London Waterworks Park plans to attract many more animals, including frogs, birds, newts, and bats, as well as residents in a rewilding effort that facilitates the direct engagement of community through co-ownership via membership scheme.
A former industrial site referred to as the former Thames Water Depot that has been neglected for many years, the charity describes the park as a remediation zone for the community and a place to experience the health benefits of cold-water swimming in natural water without incurring the hurdles of an entrance fee (the park would be free) and polluted water (like the Thames). Woodman describes the local communities as very deprived “with few affordable options for local people to exercise.” 7https://walthamforestecho.co.uk/2024/01/29/community-owned-park-project-comes-under-threat/
The charity has already crowd-sourced half a million pounds to purchase the land, however there are other contenders vying for it as well. London Councils (representing London’s 33 local authorities) have requested planning to build children’s homes on the same parcel of land, and a 2019 application by the Department of Education to build primary and secondary schools was already refused. So, is the waterpark a better idea than these other two projects?
What’s special about the initiative is its dedication to transformation of the space into a natural and accessible version of what it already is. A quick google search of London waterparks yields an array of built spaces with long plastic slides, chlorinated water, and entrance fees. Not only are these not accessible but they’re not natural. Sure, you can go there to have a splashtastic time, but it’s a far cry from the natural world. As difficult as it is to reject the idea of a children’s home or an actual school, sometimes the best development projects are working with what’s there in a way that serves the space, not just the agenda.
This 100-year-old grassroots Rugby Football Club near High Barnett has recently started to garner more interest from females and young people in the area. Having long overlived its projected 25-year lifespan, the now sixty-year own building was falling apart. The land around it presented more challenges, including drainage issues, safety breaches, and an antiquated layout. The pitches were too few and regularly flooded in summer.
In addition to not having enough bathroom facilities, there was hardly any storage and very few spaces where women and children could get changed or have privacy. Because of the site’s original structure being outdated, the facilities discouraged a younger and more diverse crop of members. It was during lockdown that the community’s reliance on this particular outdoor space had been sparked and the BERFC began to attract more traffic from a more diverse mix of people.
After a former member passed away, the club inherited a sizable donation, presenting a unique opportunity to initiate a large-scale rebuild that could cultivate its newfound potential. The regeneration has sought to prioritise inclusivity as well as functionality. However, the contentious nature of its greenbelt location has resulted in an exceptionally difficult planning process. Because locals have routinely used the area for wandering, it has a number of well-worn desire paths that were taken into account in the conservation of the landscape. The planting of peripheral plants to establish a visual barrier instead of fencing struck me as a particularly considerate feature, and addressed the presence of antisocial behaviour without building excessive barriers.
The issue that most of the presenters neglected to elaborate on, if mention at all, was funding. How do they plan to fund the future trajectory of their projects? What does it cost to maintain these spaces, and would they have been able to do it with public funding alone? Probably not. Crowd-funding and donations are both tremendously unstable methods. They are inconsistent, unreliable, and do not impose any civic pressure to deliver continuously sufficient budgets to sustain leisure centres over the course of time.
I would have liked to have gotten a sense for reliable sources of funding into the future so that projects can not only be initiated and built, but most importantly maintained, staffed, and periodically updated. With this information, perhaps it could be easier to enact similar projects in deprived areas that have not been so lucky as to receive private donations from wealthy individuals or from organised campaigns. This means civic planning, normalisation of allocation of funds to leisure, and societal prioritisation of leisure for all. But are we there yet, or is leisure still, as Veblen said, a luxury?
