Let children reclaim the streets for a summer of outdoor play

Here’s an outstandingly good idea: close residential streets to traffic this summer so that children can play in them. Give them something positive by which to remember the year 2020 – that time when they could take possession of the usually forbidden ground outside their front doors. Make up for the lockdown’s constriction of space with abundance of it.

So far, children have featured in the pandemic discussion mostly in relation to the reopening of schools, a debate fuelled by family-loving columnists who suddenly find they can’t stand the extended company of their little darlings. Definitions of acceptable outdoor behaviour haven’t included children’s play, but its loss is at least as big a deprivation as that of schooling.

As yet, this idea is little more than a tweet last week by Dinah Bornat , an architect with expertise in play spaces, a topical version of a concept promoted for some time by an organisation called Playing Out . In normal times, it would require lengthy council procedures to make it happen. Perhaps, now that we know that public spaces can be rapidly transformed by collective action, we can start giving streets back to children.

Falling from grace

It’s been a bad week for Austrian literary genius Robert Musil. “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” he said. “They are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth” – a statement that is wonderfully true, until it isn’t.

The exhilarating dunking of Edward Colston in a Bristol dock has caused waves of reaction so predictable that they could have been written by artificial intelligence programs – complaints about the “erasure of history”, anxieties as to where it will all stop, lectures about the importance of remembering Bad Things coming from people usually disinclined to remember the Bad Things in British history.

Those outraged by unauthorised alterations to a listed structure should note that at least one 17th-century pope and two great baroque architects wanted to build a large church in the middle of the largest ancient monument in Europe, the Colosseum.

The best-known proposal was by Carlo Fontana, published posthumously in 1725, and it would only have added to the fascination of the place if it had been built. The idea was to celebrate the Christians who may or may not have been martyred there. Its meaning remained alive and subject to change, in other words, a millennium-and-a-half after the events in question.

Sneaky Jenrick stymied

Another week, another outbreak of ministerial cowardice. This time, the communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, sent junior minister Chris Pincher into the House of Commons to defend Jenrick’s decision to give planning permission to a huge development in the London borough of Tower Hamlets proposed by former porn magnate, property developer and Tory donor Richard Desmond. The decision contradicted planning policy in several ways and seemed timed to save Desmond millions of pounds in charges to pay for improvements to infrastructure.

Facing a legal challenge from the local council, which would have required a release of the correspondence leading up to Jenrick’s decision, his department eventually backed down and the permission was quashed, which is hardly the action of a guiltless institution. The timing is unfortunate, as last week it was also widely leaked that the communities department hopes to boost the economy by shaking up the planning system. There will be suspicions – based on past governmental form – that this shake-up will benefit large property owners at the expense of local communities. The actions of Sneaky Jenrick will do nothing to make these suspicions go away.

• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture correspondent