Swing time: playgrounds at their most artful – in pictures

“Play and art have a lot more in common than we might think,” writes Emmy Watts, author of a new book highlighting more than 80 brilliantly imaginative play areas around the world, some of them designed by notable artists including Niki de Saint Phalle and Yayoi Kusama. Too often, playgrounds are orderly, enclosed spaces with identikit slides, swings and climbing frames. In The Art of Play, Watts celebrates examples – rocks on wheels in Melbourne, a sprawling multi-level hammoc