ABSTRACT
My field of research is not childhood as such. My books tend to be about unofficial or popular uses of the environment. I write about the links between people and their houses, and on such themes as allotments, shanty-towns and holiday camps. Inevitably this makes me a writer about the uses that children make of their environment. In the early 1970s I wrote, with Anthony Fyson, a book called Streetwork: The Exploding School, addressed to teachers. At that time, when the climate of primary and secondary education was much less constrained and far more optimistic than it is today, we were exploring the potentialities and the methods for the use of the urban environment as a resource for schools. Those were the expansive days when in several North American cities, projects like the Parkway Program in Philadelphia, Metro High School in Chicago, and Metro Education Montreal, with the support of their local education authorities, sought to use the facilities that the city itself provided, rather than a school building, as the physical equipment for secondary education (Ward and Fyson, 1973).
