Play Attention

Pound’s Park has brought play, nature and new opportunities for people to spend time together into the heart of Sheffield city centre. But what can a well-designed play space contribute to a city beyond the play itself? In this episode, Beth Cooper is joined by Professor Helen Woolley, Head of the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, to explore the relationship betw...

Over the past year, we’ve asked every Play Attention guest the same question: if you could click your fingers and change one thing tomorrow to improve opportunities for play, what would it be? For Episode 10, we bring their answers together in a montage of ideas, hopes and provocations.  From practical changes to big ambitions, from heartfelt reflections to calls to challenge the rules, the answer...

What does it actually mean for children to have enough opportunities to play? In this episode, Beth Cooper is joined by Mike Barclay and Ben Tawil from Ludicology to explore the idea of play sufficiency - a principle that is quietly reshaping how councils, planners, schools and communities think about children's everyday lives. Rather than seeing play as something that happens only in playgro...

This week on Play Attention , Beth is joined by India-based landscape architect Parth Divekar , founder of Grade Landscape Architecture, whose work spans luxury residential developments, public landscapes and civic projects across the country. Having grown up in India, studied at Cornell University and worked on landmark projects in the United States - including the Gathering Space Playground in T...

"You can have the most beautifully designed play space, but if the adults standing around the outside are flooded with anxiety, that is going to impact the function of that space." In this episode of Play Attention , Beth Cooper is joined by Helen Dodd, Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Exeter, and Dr Sarah-Louise Hurst, Clinical Psychologist and founder of Fortitude Mum...

In this episode of Play Attention , we sit down with Scott Chalmers, Head of Green Infrastructure at Urban&Civic, to challenge the assumption that play belongs in a designated, fenced-off area. Drawing on years of experience delivering large-scale communities, Scott shares why play should never be “dropped in” to meet planning requirements, but embedded from the very first moment of design. Fr...

In this episode of Play Attention , we sit down with someone we’ve admired for many years - Ash Perrin , co-founder and CEO of the Flying Seagull Project. Timberplay and the Flying Seagulls have crossed paths time and time again through shared conversations, workshops and events, and through a deep, mutual belief in the power of play. We have enormous respect for the work Ash and his team do, brin...

In this episode of Play Attention , Beth Cooper speaks with designer, educator and author Cas Holman about her new book, Playful , and why reclaiming free play matters just as much for adults as it does for children. At the heart of the conversation is a simple design principle: name by function . Start with what something is really for - connection, risk, rowdiness, joy - before deciding what it...

In this episode of Play Attention, Beth Cooper is joined by Anamaria Castillo, Landscape Strategies Director at KALQ Studio, who argues that if landscape architects want to design for play, they need far more in-depth training to do it well. She shares why play is still often treated as a “tick-box” extra rather than core urban infrastructure, and why education in play design should be as fundamen...

Leeds is quietly doing something radical: treating play as an essential outcome in its own right. In this episode of Play Attention , host Beth Cooper is joined by Emma Bearman , Founder of Playful Anywhere , and Jenny Rutherford , Play Strategy Officer at Leeds City Council , to explore how Leeds is blazing a trail for play sufficiency , and what other towns and cities can learn from it. Together...

England is closer than it has been in years to a new national play strategy.  In this debut episode of The Play Attention Podcast, host Beth Cooper sits down with Eugene Minogue, Executive Director of Play England, to explore the long-awaited push for a play strategy in England - 17 years after the last one.  What you’ll hear about: Why embedding play in planning and design matters now more than e...