Inside-out: Connecting Indoor and Outdoor Spaces of Informal Education through the Extraordinary Geographies of The Boys’ Brigade Camp

Abstract

Scholarly interest in informal education stretches back several decades. Historians were the first to frame this field through studies that described the emergence of organised youth work in the Victorian era (Eager, 1953; Wilkinson, 1969; Dawes, 1975; Springhall, 1977) and charted the trajectory of youth organisations, including The Boys’ Brigade (Springhall et al., 1983), Church and Jewish Lads’ and Girls’ Brigades (Kadish, 1995), Scouts (Warren, 1986; Proctor, 2009) and Woodcraft Folk (Davis, 2000). Only relatively recently have academic geographers begun to write geographies of informal education that explore the spatialities of specific youth organisations, such as The Boys’ Brigade (Kyle, 2006) and Scouts (Mills, 2013). Yet, despite increased attention on the geographical accomplishment (Philo and Parr, 2000) of informal education, to date there has been a tendency to examine indoor and outdoor spaces of informal education in relative isolation, with little consideration of their interconnection (although see Mills, Chapter 5, this volume). This chapter challenges this approach and offers an alternative theorisation of the interrelationship between indoor and outdoor educational environments. It does so through an empirical examination of the practices, purposes, histories and geographies of camping in The Boys’ Brigade (BB), a volunteer-led Christian uniformed youth organisation.