The History of Fields in Trust

Fields in Trust champions and supports our parks and green spaces by protecting them for people to enjoy in perpetuity. Because once lost, they are lost forever.

The National Playing Fields Association was inaugurated on 8th July 1925 in a meeting at the Royal Albert Hall in London. HRH The Duke of York, who would later become HM King George VI, hosted the meeting and would serve as our first President.

The Association was founded with the aims:

• To secure adequate playing fields for the present and future needs of all sections of the community
• To secure proper playgrounds for children
• To save the few open spaces that still exist in and around our increasingly congested cities and towns
• To save existing sports grounds, which are threatened with extinction
• To focus local opinion and provide an organisation to give it effective expression
• To cooperate with all Local Authorities and others, who are striving to secure these objects

In June 1926, then-Minister of Health and future Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, endorsed the founding of the Association:

In 2008 our Trustees took the decision to change the operating name of the National Playing Fields Association to Fields in Trust to reflect our wider remit concerning all types of recreational space.

On 1st June 1927 the Association’s first appeal – the ‘National Appeal’ – was launched by HRH The Duke of York, to seek funds and land to address the lack of playing space across the country. With The Duke en-route back to the UK from a visit to Australia, his brother, HRH The Prince of Wales (later HM King Edward VIII), delivered a wireless broadcast introducing the appeal on his behalf.

The appeal aimed to raise £1 million and received a fifth of its target through a donation from Carnegie UK Trust. This single donation led to grants for the development and lay-out of more than 900 ‘Carnegie Fields’ across the country between 1927 and 1935.

The first National Playing Fields Day was held on 17th April 1934 with the aim of highlighting the need for playing fields and collecting funds for their provision and improvement. An associated Playing Fields Ball was held on 8th May at the Dorchester Hotel with proceeds going towards the Playing Fields Day Fund. The Duke and Duchess of York were both in attendance and ticket price included a Champagne supper.

Playing Fields Day continued through the 1930s until the outbreak of World War II. The spirit of the day has recently been revived by Fields in Trust through  Have a Field Day , which now takes place annually on the first Saturday in July with similar aims of encouraging park users to champion their local parks and green spaces.

The Silver Jubilee Campaign was launched on 20th October 1948 at Mansion House by Earl Mountbatten. The aim of the appeal was for the Association to raise £500,000 by the time we reached our Silver Jubilee on 8th July 1950. These funds would go to the development of the Association’s legal and advice services, grants to sports clubs, and support of county associations. HRH The Duke of Edinburgh became an active champion of the appeal.

HRH The Duke of Edinburgh took on the Presidency of the National Playing Fields Association in October 1948 and served in the role for 64 years, retiring in April 2013. This was The Duke’s first national charity commitment and he became involved in every aspect of the organisation – regularly working in the office, attending countless opening ceremonies of protected parks and green spaces, played in many fundraising cricket matches and hosted charity galas.

His Royal Highness was ahead of his time in understanding the power of the media; making speeches, appearing on posters and in broadcasts. In 1951, The Duke starred in a short film made in Malta, directed by famed filmmaker Carol Reed and featuring Bob Hope which showed poor children whose only places to play were nearby streets. The film reportedly raised £84,000 for the Silver Jubilee Campaign.

In the same year a record was released by Frank Sinatra with introductory message from His Royal Highness. ‘If Only She’d Looked My Way’ is widely accepted as the world’s first charity single with proceeds from its sale going to the National Playing Fields Association. Sinatra and Ava Gardener were guests, along with several other celebrities and sports stars, at a Variety Club of Great Britain benefit for the Association at the Empress Club.

His efforts did not stop at fundraising, however, with His Royal Highness an active participant in the charity’s day-to-day affairs. He chaired Annual General Meetings and attended opening ceremonies at numerous parks and green spaces. In 2001 he visited Mile End Park to see the result of extensive refurbishments, having first opened the park five decades earlier in 1952.

A keen cricketer The Duke supported fundraising efforts for the charity’s ongoing work by arranging several charity cricket matches. In 1949 he led a team of celebrities against the England Test team at Bournemouth. The following year the Lord’s Taverners was formed and, on becoming its Patron and “Twelfth Man”, The Duke suggested all funds raised should be given to the Association.

For fifteen years the National Playing Fields Association were the sole beneficiaries of the Lord’s Taverners work and in 2014 a silver salver was presented to His Royal Highness to mark a total of £1 million in donations from the latter to the former.

We were deeply saddened to learn of The Duke's passing at the age of 99 in April 2021. His Royal Highness's work provided a lasting legacy of parks and green spaces protected in perpetuity to ensure people will always have places to play and be active. We are indebted to him for his decades of support.

You can  read our full tribute to His Royal Highness  as well as  personal reflections from our Chief Executive, Helen Griffiths .

Following the death of HM King George V in 1936, a committee was established to consider an appropriate memorial to the late Monarch. It was decided a philanthropic scheme which would benefit the entire country should be associated with the King’s name and in November 1936 the King George’s Fields Foundation was set up, to be Chaired by Clement Atlee until he became Prime Minister in 1945.

Established in response to the increasing urbanisation and concern that the lack of open spaces would restrict the rising generation physically, the aim of the Foundation was "to promote and assist in the establishment... of playing fields for the use and enjoyment of the people".

Grants would be provided to aid the establishment of playing fields across the UK, with each to be styled "King George's Field" and be provided a pair of heraldic panels or other such signage commemorative of His Late Majesty.

Whilst being a separate organisation, the National Playing Fields Association acted as a consultee and administrator of applications to the Foundation whilst our then Chairman, Lord Cavan, was appointed a Trustee.

Between the opening of the scheme in March 1937 and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 a total of 1,800 preliminary applications were received of which 462 were approved by the Foundation.

Many of these schemes were abandoned following the conflict but alternative locations were approved in a number of cases and by 1950 all funds had been allocated.

In 1951 an agreement was made between the Foundation and the Association for the latter to take on the ‘permanent guardianship’ of the spaces created. The Foundation continued until 1st December 1965 when, with all grants paid out, it was wound up by an order of the Charity Commission. By this time 471 spaces across the UK had been established and grants in excess of £600,000 had been distributed with total capital costs to all bodies concerned of over £4 million.

The King George’s Fields Foundation was not authorised to spend monies overseas, but despite this heraldic panels and the style “King George’s Field” was accorded to spaces in Barbados, the Falkland Islands, Malta, Nigeria and Yemen (then known as Aden).

The believed locations of at least three of these spaces are still in existence today and the distinctive lion and unicorn emblems of the Foundation can be seen atop the grand gates to King George V Recreation Grounds in Floriana, Malta.

Years later in 1958 the National Playing Fields Association supplemented our Charter, with the approval of Privy Council, to allow for funds to be raised and allocated towards projects in Commonwealth countries. This followed an approach from The Wolfson Trust in 1956, to set up a joint fund to create recreation facilities both in the UK and across the Commonwealth with a starter fund of £120,000.

The building of a sports stadium in Kenya and establishment of a sports ground in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth in South Africa joined a number of UK-based projects to result from this fund.

The work of the Association was greatly reduced during World War II, as many of our staff and trustees served in the war effort. The staff at our London office was vastly reduced to just four individuals, however there was still some important work to be done in relation to playing fields during this time.

One of the major areas of work that the Association undertook during the war was to secure and ringfence funding for village playgrounds. Many parishes made pleas for equipment with the numbers of children in these villages having doubled or trebled as a result of evacuation. By the start of 1940 a total of 62 grants had already been made to provide such playgrounds.

Advice was provided by the Association on how to best utilise playing fields for food production without causing long-term damage. As the war progressed we provided further advice to the Government on post-war rural reconstruction plans and following the cessation of conflict our Trustees joined the War Memorial Advisory Council to offer guidance on the use of playing fields and recreation grounds as memorials.

Sadly, the Deputy Secretary of the Association, Flying-Officer C. Haddon Hall was killed in action during the war.

Play was an important aspect of the National Playing Fields Association’s work from our founding in 1925, with our first Play Leadership Committee having been established as far back as 1929.

It was in the post-war years, however, that a real focus was placed on play. During the 1950s the Children’s Playground Committee ensured the Association kept up a record of helping to bring a playground into existence almost every other day for six years in a row (1952-58), by making grants in aid of their layout.

During this decade we also helped to fund the introduction of ‘Games Wardens’, dedicated play organisers to take the place of some traditional Park Keepers and in 1953 a booklet was published on the emergence of adventure playgrounds. The Association hosted the first Adventure Playground Conference in 1957.

As the 1960s dawned the Association worked with the Institute of Parks Administration to organise the ‘Play Leadership course’ to train play leaders across the country. The first such course of its kind. We also organised regional Play Leadership Conferences across the country to share and disseminate best practice. This was followed in 1969 by our announcement of a formal qualification in play leadership which involved applicants undertaking a one-year full time course.

In 1966 a survey was undertaken to assess the proliferation of play leadership across the country and compare the duties of play leaders that were operating. It was found that 166 local authorities were operating play schemes.

Campaigning continued through the 1970s and at the conclusion of a three-year ‘Fair Play campaign’ a Play Day was held on 19th June 1976. A Children’s Play Appeal in 1982 raised £330,000 with one of our Trustees, Gyles Brandreth, setting a world record for After Dinner Speaking of twelve and a half hours at one fundraising event.

By the early 1980s our Play Department had 19 employees and was the sole national organisation offering advice, support and training in play leadership and play schemes. The Association found we could no longer support the non-statutory work of our Play Department in the long-term and began lobbying the government to take responsibility for a service to support and promote children’s play.

In 1983 the Government announced that it would be funding a new service, the Association for Children’s Play and Recreation (later becoming Play England, Play Scotland, Play Wales and PlayBoard Northern Ireland). This made our own Play Department and Information Centre redundant and we began to wind down these services. This was the finish of a glorious record as innovators in the field of play.

We have long been recognised for our work producing standards for recreational spaces, in terms of quantity that should be provided, accessibility of these spaces, and the quality that they should have.

Initially the Association advocated for a standard of five acres per 1,000 population, made up of four acres for team games and a further acre for informal use, and in 1938 this was upped to six acres as part of the Association’s Open Space Standard Report. This so called “Six Acre Standard” came to be widely accepted and was officially recognised by The Ministry of Housing and Local Government in a memorandum of 1956.

Regular reviews of the standards were carried out with returns from surveyed local authorities confirming that the six acre standard was seen as a reasonable benchmark but that, in the report of 1950, in urban areas there was only an average of 1.46 acres of playing space per 1,000 population; all authorities agreed that there was still much work to be done.

In 1989 the standard was expanded to include recommendations for equipped play areas and further revisions took place in 1992. Not only did this version introduce walking times as a standard for accessibility, it also called for the provision of different types of play areas for a range of age groups. The resulting categories of ‘LAPs’, ‘LEAPs’ and ‘NEAPs’ have now been adopted by play practitioners and planning authorities across the country.

The standard was again revised in 2001, before a replacement 2008 revision renamed the document Planning and Design for Outdoor Sport and Play. The 2015 update, which became  Guidance for Outdoor Sport and Play , was the first version to bring expanded standards for different types of informal recreation space. 

Alongside this open space guidance the National Playing Fields Association has also shared its technical expertise. Our first ‘Playing Fields Conference’ was held on the 16th October 1946 at Central Hall, Westminster and brought together 700 representatives from county councils, borough, urban and district councils as well as 100 further representatives from parish councils and county PFAs. Many matters of best practice, and methods to increase the amount of playing space were discussed. The Local Authorities Conference continued on a yearly basis until 1987.

In 1950 a book detailing guidance for planning, construction and maintenance of playing fields was published by Oxford University Press, quickly becoming the authoritative textbook on the subject. Over the following decade the work of the Association’s Technical Department expanded, offering advice and revision on specific site plans across the country and making additional layout suggestions. Support was also provided to representatives of organisations from Egypt, South Africa, Malta, Australia, Switzerland, Kenya, Malaysia, Belgium, India and The Netherlands.

In 1970 we established an Information Centre for any and all to visit at our London offices, which gave out information on planning and provision of sporting facilities, play schemes and play leadership, adventure playgrounds, and materials for facilities. Particular use of the Information Centre was made by developers of new towns.

The 1990s brought further innovation with the development of the NPFA Multigames Wall, a target wall for practice of football, cricket, baseball, tennis, basket and netball. To be sited on small areas of land where space was lacking, it proved very popular with local authorities within urban areas. This was accompanied two years later by the launch of PlaySafe, a software package that could store information and provide reports on all aspects of children’s play.

It was during this decade that our attention was also drawn to the worrying loss of existing playing field land and the increased importance of protecting these spaces. Lobbying work was undertaken, particularly around the protection of state school playing fields. In 2001 the School Playing Fields Advisory panel was formed with the Association as a founding member. We still sit on the panel to this day.

Protecting recreational land is today one of the core areas of our work and has run throughout our history, albeit under different formats. During the early years our main method of protecting land was taking on ownership of spaces and by 1949 the Association was in possession of over 100 playing fields.

It was decided in this year that effective administration and management was better achieved through local ownership and focus shifted to the vesting of spaces into charitable trust. We also placed covenants on land ourselves, particularly through the King George’s Fields programme, and by 1971 over 1,000 spaces had been protected by the Association, either through acquisition or the making of covenants.

A policy of ownership returned in 1992 but this was phased out once again in 2004 following the landmark development of our  Deed of Dedication . This bespoke legal agreement protected recreational space and gave the Association a role in ensuring it remained in perpetuity, but left ownership and management in local hands.

In June 2010 HRH The Duke of Cambridge launched the Queen Elizabeth II Fields Challenge (known as the Queen Elizabeth Fields Challenge in Scotland) which aimed to protect spaces to mark HM The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, also coinciding with the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as well as the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

The Queen Elizabeth II Fields Challenge was the first charity to receive a grant from The Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry, which was set up at the end of 2009 as the main vehicle for The Princes’ charitable activities, and was supported by Asda and the Asda Foundation as principal partner.

The first Deed of Dedication to be signed under the programme protected Child Okeford Playing Field in Dorset in perpetuity and just weeks later an estimated 15,000 people saw Witton Park in Blackburn, Lancashire dedicated as part of the programme by HRH The Duke of Cambridge, who initially served as Patron of the Challenge before taking over the Presidency of Fields in Trust in 2012. He visited the park alongside the then-Catherine Middleton in their final public engagement before their wedding.

The following year Their Royal Highnesses accompanied The late Queen on a visit to Vernon Park in Nottinghamshire where Her late Majesty unveiled the space’s plaque. That year also brought the launch of Have a Field Day and the Fields in Trust Awards which continue to this day, the latter through the UK’s Best Park award.

The last dedications as part of the programme were completed in 2016 with a flurry of spaces in Scotland being dedicated as Queen Elizabeth Fields, including ten spaces in Aberdeenshire, eleven in Midlothian and 27 by Glasgow City Council.

At the close of the Challenge a total of 1,396 spaces across the UK had been protected in perpetuity with investment of £4 million delivered into these spaces. This programme alone more than doubled the number of spaces protected with Fields in Trust.

Further protection programmes followed the Queen Elizabeth II Fields Challenge, with the  Centenary Fields  programme launched in 2014. Working alongside The Royal British Legion, the programme protected parks and green spaces with links to World War I to honour the memory of the millions who lost their lives in the conflict.

War Memorial Park in Coventry was the first space protected under the programme and the Centenary Fields plaque was unveiled by HRH The Duke of Cambridge in July 2014. The Duke would later unveiled the plaque at Kensington Memorial Park in west London to mark the mid-point of the programme in November 2016.

In May 2017  Active Spaces  was launched with the purpose of protecting 50 spaces and supporting community activation. The programme was supported by the London Marathon Charitable Trust; their first UK-wide funding.

Twelve months later, in May 2018, we launched our new  Green Spaces for Good  strategy and visual identity. The strategy saw us adopt an evidence-led approach to protecting, supporting and championing parks and green spaces across the UK. As part of this we released our pioneering  Revaluing Parks and Green Spaces  research, which was followed in May 2019 by the new  Green Space Index .

As of July 2020 a total of 2,870 parks and green spaces across the UK are protected in perpetuity with Fields in Trust, covering over 12,900 hectares of land. The below animation shows how the portfolio of spaces protected has grown since our founding in 1925 and our  Fields Finder  allows you to explore protected spaces near you.

The importance of legally protecting parks and green spaces is as, if not more, urgent now than it was at our founding in 1925. You can  donate to support our work  protecting, supporting and championing green spaces for good.