SOAP Celebrates 50 Years of Adventurous Outdoor Play!
What’s your earliest memory of playing outdoors?
Perhaps it was climbing a tree in your back garden? Or kicking a ball around in your local park, using jumpers as goal posts? For many of the children in this part of the world, their earliest memories may well be of SOAP.
For over five decades, SOAP has provided a safe outdoor space for Oxford’s young people to play and to discover themselves. Over the course of this year, we are going to be celebrating 50 years of SOAP and we would love you to be part of our birthday celebrations.
One way you can get involved is by sharing your memories and photos of SOAP in the past and present, by completing this short survey.
Humble beginnings
SOAP was created in the early 1970s by a group of local parents concerned about their children playing out in the street.
They recruited volunteers to keep an eye on their children playing in and around the stream that runs along the end of Whitehouse Road opposite St Ebbe’s school. This area was part of the gas works 20 years before but had become a popular spot for local children to play in.
By the summer of 1971, the first play scheme opened and as many as 300 children were showing up each day to hang from the rope swings over the stream, build tree houses and go fishing.
Over the next few years more activities were added including tunnelling (!), assault courses, a soap cart track, theatre and puppet productions, film-making, furniture-making, punting and trips to Shotover, the ice rink, the swimming pool and even the seaside.
A newspaper article from 1976 proudly proclaims “open to all children in Oxford” and that’s how it has remained (although children from much further afield visit too!)
Play under threat
It has never been more important to protect places like SOAP as outdoor spaces are built upon and childrens’ habits change.
Alice Ferguson, of the charity Playing Out, said recently: “Compared to previous generations, children’s lives have become incredibly restricted, indoors, isolated and inactive, largely due to changes in the outdoor environment.”
A recent report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, says that the physical and mental health of children and young people has been in serious, long-term decline. They describe it as “a terrifying picture”.
A committee of MPs has launched an inquiry on how policies around the built environment could better support the health and wellbeing of the children who live in them.
Celebrate with us!
All of this underlines how lucky we are to have a space like SOAP where children are free to play outdoors in safety and challenge themselves.
While we all love SOAP, we also know it can be even better. This year we are launching a 50th Anniversary Appeal with the aim of raising the symbolic figure of £50,000 to make vital repairs and improvements to the hut and to safeguard SOAP’s future for years to come.
Please help us on our way to this ambitious target by becoming a regular giver and donating £5 a month (or whatever you can afford), or by making a one-off donation.