Play - we all remember doing it as children, but will our children remember doing it when they are adults?

Sport Waitaki, with the help of Waitaki Neighbourhood Support is trying to resurrect the concept of play, as part of a Sport New Zealand initiative, and held the first Play Street event in Ōamaru at the weekend.

While tourists poured into the Victorian precinct for Heritage Celebrations on Sunday (November 19), Dacre Street residents were playing with frisbees, vortexes, balls, bubbles, bike ramps, stilts and other games.

Sport Waitaki regional coordinator Pip Sutton said the concept came out of the United Kingdom, where there is a lot of intensive housing.

“You know, there were houses on top of houses, and you didn’t have play areas, and if you did they were quite small.”

Pip was sceptical about the idea at the beginning, because compared with UK towns, Ōamaru has plenty of green space, but she decided to run the idea past the Waitaki District Council, and it was keen to get on board.

“They turned out to be open to the idea, but with very strict guidelines.”

The street has to be a low-usage street, and there were concerns that children need to know the difference between when they can play on the street and not play on the street.

“So we are using it as an educational piece . . . they do play a little bit on the street there and they don't look, you know. They feel like they're invincible when they're young.”

The idea is to encourage movement and imagination. There are no guidelines or rules around how the play equipment should be used.

“Because kids are doing less and less of that, and not even kids but also adults, you know, we kind of get to a point where we don't use our imagination."

Neighbourhood Support decided to join in on the fun, after Waitaki co-ordinator Christine Dorsey saw it as a way of bringing neighbours together.

“It brings grandparents, it brings whoever's on the street, old or young, out to kind of form those connections in a very unstructured, fun kind of way, I guess. That's the plan, that's the vibe,” Pip said.

Sunday’s event was the first in Otago, and now Sport New Zealand are trying to work with Neighbourhood Support nationally. 

“So even that relationship has kind of come from this, which is really cool.”

The event ran for two hours, from 2-4pm, and Pip said other streets who are interested can apply online through application forms that will be set up on the Sport Waitaki and WDC websites from next year.

Holding the event was a “big learning curve” and there is a “huge element of safety”, but now that the first one was out of the way, the process would get easier, she said. 

Neighbours at play. PHOTO: Supplied