This important book breaks new ground, in bringing together a number of empirical research studies that focus on a wide range of settings in which children play, and address important theoretical issues in order to understand the findings. This contribution from me is slight, limited and angled towards what I myself have found through research and through reading.

My association with this great play project began, I think, because students on the University of Gloucestershire postgraduate programmes on play had been asked to read some of my written work; and subsequently I was invited to attend a conference (in January 2013), where the staff and students presented their work. This was a great experience for me, an eye-opener and the beginnings of insight into how thinking on play has moved on through the engagement of the staff and students on the course. In an age when the character of childhood is increasingly controlled by ‘education’ agendas affecting not only schooldays, but experiences outside school, I thought then – and now – that it was important to make the students’ work available to a wider audience. And now this book is seeing the light of day! So first I want to congratulate everyone concerned for the massive amount of work, including thought, study, emotional engagement, pioneering spirit, and openness to experience that is so evident in the chapters that follow. It is, in part, because the authors are, or have been, engaged practitioners, that they provide such creative insights into the material with which they engage.

The explorations in the following chapters point to a range of physical environments in which play takes place, including streets, clubs, adventure playgrounds and museums. However, a key enabling condition is the loosening of adult control over children's activities, so that children are freed up to develop their play. For as sociologists of childhood have pointed out childhood is a subordinate social group, in tension and in relations with adulthood (for example, Qvortrup, 2009). Children have to seek out environments relatively free from adult control. A dramatic example of a physical, but also emotionally laden environment hostile to play is provided by that acute observer of childhood, Charles Dickens in Great Expectations.