For our children’s sake, let’s rid Britain’s residential streets of traffic | The Guardian
Chris BoardmanFri 13 Nov 2020 13.42 GMT
I used to be in a gang. There were 10 of us and we hung out in the street with bikes and footballs. Most days the doorbell would go and it’d be one of our number asking, “Is Chris playing out?” I’d hurriedly pull my shoes on and run out to do what eight-year-olds do.
Hadfield Avenue is where I learned to ride a bike, where I proudly removed the stabilisers before hurtling off with the others to the next road, and then the next. The whole neighbourhood was our playground. It was a perfectly normal thing to do on a British street in the 1970s.
Today, the majority of parents must deny their children this first, simple freedom because the space outside our homes is no longer safe. Instead, we pop the kids in the car and drive them around to protect them from other people in cars. That’s how we lost our street playgrounds, without even realising what was happening.
