Commonplace | Brutalist Playgrounds

Issue Five | Brutalist Playgrounds 

By Jo Underhill 

Commonplace is a photographic magazine celebrating modernist buildings and places across Britain and Ireland.

Born from a collaboration between the modernist and Uhm! Publishing, it explores the in-between places and small sites that lie beyond the mainstream modernist canon—those commonplaces that deserve a second look.

In issue four, Jo Underhill invites us out tp play in a Brutalist way.

Concrete is the name of the game. In the playgrounds Jo Underhill photographs, form follows a clear, uncompromising logic: cylinders, cones, ramps, voids, steps, slides and platforms. Cast in-situ, board-marked and aggregate exposed, they read as works of sculpture or fragments of infrastructure. Conceived as abstract, climbable landscapes by the architects who designed the estates the playgrounds inhabit, they combine tunnels and pyramids with brick engineering, sinuous steel chutes and landscaped granite setts. The result is formidable and enduring: playable terrain shaped from the same material language as the housing that surrounds them.

These play structures are not mere relics of a time when safety standards were barely an issue but palimpsests of use and adaption: metal surfaces are burnished by countless hands; white goalposts are peremptorily painted onto deep-chocolate brick; faded chalk marks memories of played out games. Use has polished and eroded them in equal measure.

Underhill’s photographs recognise this tactility. She records edges and material junctions, weathered planes and the grain of shuttering. Light clarifies the geometry rather than dramatising it. A circular opening reads as a precise cut in a wall revealing a world beyond; the curve of a polished steel chute slides across the regimented units of deeply textured brick. Seen this way, the playgrounds are civic sculpture, the forms hold their ground against the towers and terraces, emphasising human scale within larger systems. Simon Phipps

32 pages b&w and colour

A5 Staple bound

ISSN 2978-5200

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