The gymnasium has easy access to the Nursery, playground, and to the garden. In the Centre activities were neither directed nor organised, for health must emerge spontaneously. The gymnasium contained a variety of equipment, such as climbing ropes, climbing frames and other equipment for use.

"A boy of 11 leaps through the air from a swinging rope and lands on the ribstalls; three boys are sitting contently on the top rungs of the rope ladders, five girls are playing a game on the 'window frame', while three girls and two boys have a large light ball and dodge among their fellows as they play; two groups of boys are wrestling on the mats; one boy is using the punch ball and five small boys leap from horse to swinging rope and back again."

"The gym was conventionally equipped, with ropes and rope ladders, suspended from a ceiling two storeys high, wall bars along two walls, a 'window frame' reaching almost to the ceiling and covering one end wall. There were booms, vaulting bucks, balancing forms, parallel bars, a punch ball, coconut matting and so on and an ingeniously sprung cork-covered floor. For the sake of the floor and to enable the children to use their toes for balancing and gripping and to become sure-footed, a barefoot rule was rigorously enforced."

Few adults wanted to use it, but for the children it was a great playground. Although a young physical education teacher was appointed shortly after the Centre opened to teach gymnastics classes, only a few turned up for them and then not very eagerly. She therefore introduced a game called 'Shipwrecks', placing all the equipment so that it was possible to move around the gym without touching the floor. She quickly dropped the idea of having a 'catcher' as the children did not like being out. They played this day after day and when the teacher left in the autumn of 1936, no-one replaced her. "It was found unnecessary to have anyone minding the children as they played. At times they played shipwrecks, trying out new movements - monkey-like leaps and swings- as they played, but mostly they worked individually at devising new skills and actions, being 'Tarzan' or 'Jane'. They practised these acrobatic skills hour after hour and day after day, placing the movable equipment to suit their needs.

Some of the equipment was used in a way for which it was not intended and which horrified conventional teachers of gymnastics; knots were tied at the ends of the climbing ropes, for example, which after a time, could never be untied. "

(Excerpts from 'Being Me and Also Us' by Alison Stalibrass and 'The Peckham Experiment' by Innes Pearse and Lucy Crocker)

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