Building on our work around Play in Museums over the past 6 years, we’re delighted to announce a new initiative for museums and cultural organisations – a network called PLAYFUL PLACES.

Developed from the Happy Museum’s More Playful Museum projects and from Continuing Professional Development programmes focused on Play, this group has been set up in response to the needs of sector professionals and their desire for more training on play, and for a community of support – to address how to create the conditions for playfulness to develop within their settings.

The network currently has around 50 informal members and over 20 organisations (including English Heritage, the National Trust, Eureka!, Seven Stories and Leeds Museums), all signed up to receive updates and attend workshops. To date, we’ve held 2 workshops for the group, with 3 more planned for 2019. We also hope to develop a conference around play in 2020.

You can find out more about our upcoming events and our future aspirations on the PLAYFUL PLACES blog.

At the moment we are working on developing a small steering group to develop clear aims and help make a stronger and more responsive group that will really work. We’ll also be presenting at Museum Next in Sydney in April 2019. (You’ll be able to check out our presentation here very soon). In the meantime, if you have a question or want to get signed up, please email Charlotte at weareplayful@playfulplaces.co.uk and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

And if you’d like to know more about the past projects, follow these links or drop us a line:

The Rules for a Playful Museum book project, 2015 and

The More Playful Museums programme at Manchester Museum, 2014-2016