The Places We Inhabit: What Makes a Place Somewhere We Belong?

Exploring children's relationships with place, adult assumptions and the environments we create

Every day, children arrive at St Luke’s and inhabit a building that has stood at Stone for more than 125 years. Light falls through its stained glass into the rooms where they play, while outside its flint walls form part of the landscape of their gardens. They know St Luke’s not first as a Grade II-listed former chapel, but as their nursery: a place where friends gather, discoveries are made, disagreements happen, favourite spaces emerge and a significant part of early childhood is lived.

As part of KatieB Kids’ six-month enquiry into belonging, we have been exploring existing literature and research around what it means for a young child to feel that they belong. Place emerged as an important strand of that reading. Children experience relationships, play and learning somewhere: in rooms, gardens and other spaces that adults have largely designed, organised and made decisions about. Yet children do not simply occupy those environments. Through their relationships, experiences, play and everyday use of space, they can come to know, use and give meaning to places in ways adults may not anticipate.

This raises questions that extend beyond the physical qualities of an environment. What makes a particular place significant to a child? Are the places adults design and value necessarily the places children experience as important? And what might we notice differently if, rather than beginning with what we think an environment provides, we begin with children's own perspectives on the places they inhabit?

What an inherited environment can reveal

St Luke’s was built between 1898 and 1901 as the chapel for the City of London Lunatic Asylum at Stone. More than a century later, much of its historic fabric remains, while the people inhabiting the building and the purpose for which it is used have changed almost beyond recognition.

We are not looking to this history for answers about children's experiences of belonging today. Instead, St Luke’s gives us an unusually visible example of something relevant to contemporary Early Years practice: environments are created within particular social and cultural contexts, and decisions about their design can reflect assumptions about the people expected to inhabit them.

Some of those assumptions remain visible in the building itself. St Luke’s was designed with separate entrances for male and female patients, reflecting the institutional organisation of the time. More than a century later, those decisions remain physically embedded within its architecture. They offer a particularly tangible example of something that can be much harder to see in the present: environments are not neutral. Decisions about access, movement and use can reflect ideas about the people expected to inhabit them.

Its foundation stone offers a different kind of record. It names some of the men involved in the creation of St Luke’s, but tells us almost nothing about the many other people who subsequently experienced the building as part of their everyday lives. This raises a question that has stayed with us as we have explored its history: Whose relationship with a place becomes part of its recorded history and whose is left unrecorded?

We cannot recover from the building itself what belonging meant to the people who once inhabited it, and we should not attempt to infer it. But the contrast between the decisions preserved in its architecture and the experiences largely absent from its record raises an important contemporary question for our own enquiry: whose perspective do we privilege when we try to understand what a place means?

Belonging to a place

Belonging is often understood through relationships: being known, accepted and connected to other people. For young children, those relationships are also lived somewhere. Friendships develop in particular corners, routines become associated with particular rooms, familiar routes are travelled each day, and certain spaces become places to gather, retreat, play or observe.

Research into children's experiences of place suggests that children do not simply occupy environments but develop relationships with them through play, interactions and everyday use of space. Kyrönlampi, Uitto and Puroila (2021), exploring children's perspectives on ‘place-belonging’ in a Finnish pre-primary setting, found belonging to be intertwined with peers, play, material aspects of the environment and institutional practices. Using children's photographs alongside conversations, their study also drew attention to children's own perspectives on the places that mattered to them.

This distinction is important. A child may attend the same nursery every day, know its routines, recognise its rooms and move confidently through its spaces, but familiarity does not necessarily tell us whether that child experiences the place as somewhere they belong. Nor can significance alone provide that answer. A place a child repeatedly returns to may matter to them, but repetition is not in itself evidence of belonging. What children show us gives us something to explore; it does not allow us to assume what that experience means to them.

Children's relationships with place develop within environments that adults have already shaped. As educators, we make decisions about environments every day. We determine what rooms are for, where furniture belongs, which materials are accessible, where children can move independently, where they can be noisy, where they might retreat and how much of the environment they can alter for themselves. Many of these decisions are thoughtful and intentional. Yet our exploration of belonging has encouraged us to ask what assumptions may also become embedded in environments simply because particular ways of organising childhood have come to seem normal.

Our professional learning from Reggio Emilia has reinforced the importance of considering the environment as an active part of educational experience rather than a neutral backdrop. The organisation of space, relationships between people and materials, and the possibilities an environment affords can invite particular ways of participating. We use this as a pedagogical lens rather than as evidence of what children themselves experience: understanding that still requires us to listen to children.

The places that matter most to children may not, of course, be those that adults have intentionally designed to be significant. A particular corner, route through the garden or somewhere adults barely notice may acquire significance through what happens there. If adults decide in advance which environments matter, we risk finding evidence only in the places we have already chosen to look.

Perhaps, then, the question is not simply whether the environments we create support belonging, but how children themselves experience those environments, which places acquire significance for them, and whether the meanings adults attribute to a place are necessarily the meanings children give it.

Whose perspective defines a place?

This is where our exploration of place moves from literature and professional reflection into enquiry. Rather than beginning with what adults believe children value about St Luke’s, we want to create opportunities for children to direct our attention towards the places, relationships and experiences that hold significance for them.

This matters because adult perspectives are not neutral either. Educators know the setting intimately and may notice patterns across children's days; families know children across places, relationships and experiences beyond the nursery. Each perspective can contribute something, but none can stand in for the child's own.

Our questions therefore concern not only where children spend their time, but what significance they give to particular places. We are interested in where they return, gather, retreat or make something their own; how places become connected with particular people, play, routines or experiences; and whether the places adults consider important are the same places children show us matter to them. These are questions for enquiry, not categories into which children's experiences need to fit.

These are not questions that can necessarily be answered simply by asking children directly. Our wider enquiry therefore draws on observation alongside photography, drawing, mapping, walking and conversation, offering children different ways to direct our attention towards what is significant to them. This is particularly important in early childhood, where verbal fluency should not determine whose experience is easiest to hear.

Using multiple approaches does not remove the problem of adult interpretation. A photograph, drawing, repeated choice or observed behaviour does not carry a single meaning waiting for an adult to identify. Our responsibility is first to record what children show, say and do as carefully as we can, and to remain cautious about the meanings we attach to it.

The perspectives of families and educators can add further context. A place that appears insignificant within nursery may connect with a relationship, routine or experience elsewhere in a child's life; equally, something adults believe to be important may hold little significance for the child. Differences between these perspectives are therefore not necessarily problems to resolve. They may themselves give us something to think about.

At this stage, we do not know what children will show us, and retaining that uncertainty is important to the integrity of the enquiry. Place may prove highly significant to children's experiences of belonging; it may become difficult to separate from relationships, identity or agency; or children may direct our attention towards something our original reading did not prepare us to see. If the evidence complicates our original questions rather than answering them neatly, that too will be significant.

The children at KatieB Kids are now part of St Luke’s continuing history. Their friendships, games, routines, discoveries and relationships with this place may never be carved into stone, but their experiences are worth noticing and recording precisely because they are theirs.

Neither history, environmental design nor adult observation can tell us, by themselves, what makes a child experience somewhere as a place they belong. They can give us questions worth asking.

The next part requires us to listen: to what children show and tell us, to what families and educators notice from their different perspectives, and to the places where those perspectives converge, contradict or leave something unexplained.

Perhaps understanding belonging begins not with deciding what a place should mean to a child, but with becoming more willing to discover what it means to them.