This summer over 5500 family visitors joined us for our summer PLAYTIME programme.

Every year, throughout August, we invite families to explore the art of play with us, with free activities all around the gallery and park for families of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to enjoy. The idea… to get children and their grown ups playing together. We take play very seriously at the Whitworth. We know play is increasingly at risk, with children spending less and less time playing outdoors and more time on screens.

This summer we invited our PLAYTIME visitors to play with us and explore ways of ‘doing things differently’ inspired by the exhibition Economics the Blockbuster: It’s Not Business as Usual.

We created areas around the gallery that encouraged free play. No rules, no ‘teaching’ just beautiful pockets of invitations to play both indoors and out.

Outdoors, visitors were encouraged to gather natural materials from around the Art Garden and Park to ‘make’ and ‘trade’ with their friends and family in a PLAY Market role-play area. There were beautiful mud kitchens provided by our friends at Pentagon Play to start up the ‘business model’. We had icecream factories, shops, cafes, kitchens…. Visitors were encouraged to take their ‘product’ and ‘trade it’ with others in the brilliant role play shops (again donated to us by Pentagon Play) inside the Garden Studio.

No money was transferred, instead creativity and imagination was applied to disrupt conventional ideas of value. We had mud pies exchanged for pebbles, magic potions for conkers, mud cookies and mud icecreams in exchange for leaves. Products and currency exchanged hands through the hatches, negotiations took place and deals were made.

As children played they explored notions of re-imagining the economy, collaborating, negotiating, problem solving and learning as they went. Often not realising the serious learning that was going on, it was economics in action.

Elsewhere, inside the gallery we had a baby area set up in the School of Creativity for our very youngest visitors to spend time with their grown ups. It is still possible to begin to introduce notions of economics to babies. Our baby spaces are always carefully thought through. No object is there by accident, each resource is placed there with intent on developing skills, ideas and concepts for both baby and adult. See our blog post Economics Baby for more examples.

We also had sketching stations set up in areas all over the gallery for children and adults to enjoy drawing. Again no guidance, simply open ended invitations to draw and be creative.

Lastly, one of our most popular activities, Whitworth Minecraft was available for visitors to play. We have two retro arcade machines for visitors to access Minecraft for free in our School of Creativity. As one of the biggest, most popular games on the planet, it has an entire generation of children hooked with its open-world gameplay, charming, warm retro graphics and cunning in-game crafting mechanics. Playing Minecraft draws on disciplines linked to maths, science, computing and art, providing an immersive, digital and creative way to shape, create and manipulate the gallery spaces and surrounding environments.

And then on top of all that! We also had incredible play workers from our friends at Ty Pawb facilitating Den Building workshops every Thursday in their pop up in the Economics the Blockbuster exhibition space.

We would really like to take the opportunity to thank our friends at Pentagon Play for kindly donating the equipment in our PLAY Market area. Into its fourth year, this Pentagon Play x Whitworth partnership emphasizes the power of collective action and mutual support, reducing the dependence on traditional monetary transactions. Instead, it promotes alternative forms of exchange and champions a more inclusive and sustainable economy.