A guided walk through 230 years of childhood: what children actually did with their hours before the tablet, what changed, what was genuinely lost, and what quietly never went away.
Before screens, children played. Not in some vague, sentimental sense, but in a remarkably consistent repertoire that historians and archaeologists can trace across thousands of years: they ran, chased, hid and sought; they played with dolls, balls, spinning tops, marbles and knucklebones; they played board games and made up street games with rules enforced by other children; they invented worlds out of sticks, kitchen tables and whatever the adult world left lying around. The materials changed with the centuries. The play barely changed at all.
We have an unusual vantage point on this question. Jaques of London has been making children's games since 1795, before the railway, before the postage stamp, before most of the nations on the modern map. A company catalogue running unbroken across 230 years is a kind of fossil record of play, and what it records is striking: the games children loved in 1826 are, with very few exceptions, games children still love in 2026. What changed was not the child. It was the world around the child, and above all the hours the child was given to play in.
Dig almost anywhere humans have lived and you find toys. Egyptian tombs hold dolls with movable arms and balls of stitched leather. The board game senet was played along the Nile five thousand years ago; the Royal Game of Ur, older still, was played in Mesopotamia before most of humanity could write. Roman children played with hoops, marbles and knucklebones, and Roman writers complained about children gambling at nuts in the street in tones any modern parent would recognise. Spinning tops turn up in ancient Greece, ancient China and pre-Columbian America, invented independently, because a child anywhere will eventually discover that a thing that spins is wonderful.
This matters because it settles a question parents quietly worry about: whether traditional play is just nostalgia, one generation's preferences dressed up as wisdom. It is not. Dolls, balls, tops and board games are not Victorian inventions or marketing categories. They are deep constants of the species, older than the alphabet, and they recur in every culture that has left us anything to dig up. Play is not what children did before screens existed. Play is what children are.
What the nineteenth century added was not play itself but the family game: the idea that a household would own games, keep them in a cupboard, and sit down together to play them. Rising literacy, gas light, the parlour and a growing middle class created the conditions; an explosion of games manufacturing met them. Parlour games, card games, table games and lawn games swept through Victorian family life in a few decades.
Our own catalogue tells the story in miniature. In 1849 Jaques produced the Staunton chess set, the design that standardised chess pieces worldwide and is still the tournament standard today. In 1851 we introduced croquet, which proceeded to conquer the lawns of the 1850s and 1860s so completely that it became the first outdoor game respectable young men and women could play together. Later in the century we turned two ancient Indian games into the commercial classics British families know: ludo, from the much older game of pachisi, and snakes and ladders, from Moksha Patam, a moral teaching game in which the ladders were virtues and the snakes were vices. That detail is worth pausing on. The game your child plays on a wet Sunday afternoon began life centuries ago as a lesson about how a life goes right or wrong. Children's games carry far more history than their boxes suggest.
Explore the traditional games families have played for generations →For most of the twentieth century, the defining fact of childhood was unsupervised time. Children left the house after breakfast or after school and entered a parallel society run almost entirely by other children: skipping rhymes passed from older girls to younger ones, marbles played for keeps, hopscotch grids chalked on pavements, jumpers for goalposts, conkers, British Bulldog, and elaborate games of pretend whose rules were argued over with the seriousness of a high court. Adults were nearby but not present. The street, the green, the bomb site and the rec were the child's territory.
We know this world in extraordinary detail because two researchers wrote it down. Iona and Peter Opie spent decades collecting the games, rhymes, jokes, superstitions and laws of British schoolchildren, publishing landmark studies of a culture adults had never bothered to document. What they found was a genuine oral tradition: rhymes and games transmitted child to child for generations, some traceable back centuries, maintained without a single adult instructing anyone. It was self-organising, mixed-age, rule-governed and astonishingly rich.
Key citation
Opie, I. & Opie, P. (1959). The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren · Opie, I. & Opie, P. (1969). Children's Games in Street and Playground. Oxford University Press. The definitive record of Britain's self-governing street childhood.
Honesty requires the other half of the picture. This was not a golden age. The same decades held child labour within living memory, real poverty, polio, harsh schooling and streets that injured children at rates we would now find unthinkable. Children had freedom partly because adults were busy, housing was crowded and nobody had invented the alternative. The point is not that the past was better. The point is that one specific ingredient of it, the long unsupervised hour among other children, turned out to matter more than anyone realised, and it is the ingredient that vanished.
The street childhood did not end in a single year. It was dismantled by a series of reasonable-seeming decisions. Traffic grew until the road outside the front door became genuinely dangerous, and the place children had played for a century became a place they were forbidden. High-profile abduction cases, amplified by saturation news coverage, persuaded parents that strangers were a constant threat, although the statistical risk had barely moved. Families got smaller, so the older-sibling chain that had inducted five-year-olds into street culture thinned out. Gardens replaced greens; play dates, booked and supervised, replaced the knock on the door.
Into the newly indoor childhood, screens arrived room by room. First the television in the lounge, rationed by the schedule itself: children's programmes ended and the screen offered them nothing more. Then the console in the bedroom, which ended the rationing. Then, from about 2010, the phone in the pocket, which ended the room. Each step was small. Together they completed a historic reversal: for the first time, the default location of British childhood was indoors, and the default activity was watching or operating a screen.
Key citation
Gray, P. (2011). The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents. American Journal of Play. Gray documents a continuous decline in children's free play since the mid-twentieth century and links it to rising anxiety and falling sense of control among the young.
Be precise about the loss, because precision is what makes it fixable. Children today are safer from accidents, better fed, more listened to and less likely to be hit at school than any generation in history. What collapsed, in roughly two generations, was one specific thing: self-directed, mixed-age, unsupervised play. The kind where children make the rules, settle the disputes, take the small risks and own the outcome. Researchers such as Peter Gray argue this is precisely the kind of play that builds independence, resilience and the deep conviction that you can handle things, which is why its disappearance shows up in the mental-health statistics rather than the accident statistics.
And what was not lost? The child. Hand a child a spinning top, a skipping rope, a box of dominoes or a set of skittles in 2026 and you will watch, within seconds, exactly what a parent in 1826 watched. The grip, the concentration, the delight, the demand to go again: none of it has changed, because none of it was ever cultural. The appetite for real play never left. Only the opportunity did. That distinction is the most hopeful fact in this whole history, and it is the foundation of the case for real play: appetites that survived five thousand years do not need to be artificially revived, only given room.
See wooden toys made the way they were two centuries ago →Every era of this story has believed childhood was being ruined by something: penny dreadfuls, the music hall, the wireless, comics, television. Most of those panics now look quaint. What makes the present moment genuinely different is not that children have a new amusement, but that the new amusement is engineered, with considerable skill and budget, to be difficult to put down, and that it arrived just as the old territory of childhood, the street and the unsupervised hour, was being closed. The child is squeezed from both sides.
But the long view is consoling. Two hundred and thirty years of making games teaches a simple lesson: children outlast trends. Chess survived the printing press, croquet survived the motor car, ludo survived television, and the spinning top has survived everything since the pharaohs. The games that fill our catalogue are not heritage pieces preserved out of sentiment. They are still made because they still work, on the same hands and the same minds they have always worked on. History's verdict on play is already in. The only open question is how much room each family decides to give it.
Honestly: nobody can fully know, because happiness was not measured then as it is now, and the past held hardships no modern child faces. What can be measured is that markers of independent play, free time and childhood freedom of movement have fallen steeply since the mid-twentieth century, and researchers such as Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt link that decline to rising anxiety in the young. The fair summary is not that the past was happier, but that it contained protective ingredients we have since removed and could choose to restore.
Balls, dolls, spinning tops and dice games appear in the earliest archaeology and have never gone away. Among formal games, senet and the Royal Game of Ur are around five thousand years old, chess is roughly fifteen hundred years old in recognisable form, and snakes and ladders descends from the centuries-old Indian game Moksha Patam. Skipping, marbles, hopscotch and hide and seek are so old and so universal that no one can date their beginnings at all.
Gradually, between roughly 1970 and 2010, with the steepest fall from the 1990s onward. Rising traffic, fear of strangers, smaller families and the loss of shared outdoor space pushed children indoors, and screens then filled the indoor hours. Studies of childhood roaming consistently find that the distance children are allowed to travel alone shrank dramatically within two generations, often from miles to the garden gate.
Not the 1950s street, and you do not need it. What the research points to is restoring the ingredients rather than the scenery: regular unstructured time with nothing scheduled, other children of mixed ages, outdoor space where you can manage it, and real things to play with rather than performances to watch. A garden games afternoon, a standing family games night and a slightly braver attitude to small risks recreate most of what mattered. Children supply the rest, exactly as they always have.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.