When a section of Old Shoreham Road was closed for several months earlier this year for the construction of cycle lanes, it turned into a traffic-free playground for children.

Boys and girls zoomed about on skateboards and practised their wheelies on bikes in complete freedom from the fear of four-wheeled monsters.With the work now completed, it is back to normal – the children have run off the road as traffic once again takes precedence.

But it gave a glimpse of how cities should be: a proper balance between the need of children to play and the need for traffic to flow. One Brighton grandparent, Clive William, brought my attention to the city of Bristol, where a group of mothers has activated a scheme called Playing Out.

Three years ago, they persuaded Bristol City Council to issue Temporary Play Street Orders, whereby residents were granted permission to close their street to traffic for three hours, thus enabling their children to play out.

Alice Ferguson, one of the original mothers behind the scheme, explained in an interview in The Guardian: “In the short term, I wanted [my children] to be outside letting off steam, playing with who they wanted. I worried about their lives being so indoors and sedentary.

“I wanted them to grow up with a sense of citizenship and belonging, able to interact with people of different ages and be part of a community.”

Oh, let’s do it in Brighton and Hove, and everywhere else! I long for my children to have the freedom I had as a child, spending hours cycling up and down the road visiting friends, tying a skipping rope to a lamppost with someone holding the other end whilst standing in the road, and playing football from pavement to pavement.

“I cannot see why residential roads should not be closed for several hours on Saturdays and Sundays, particularly on Sundays, the quietest day of the week, and in the summer months, from 7pm to 9pm.

Not only would it fit in with the ideals of the council’s ruling Green Party, but it is also the ideal solution to the problem many parents have: tiny city gardens too small for children to play in.

Historically, small gardens used not to be an issue for parents, because they could send their children to play outside on (mostly) traffic-free roads where they could be assured that older children would take care of them.

But today’s parents are faced with some very particular problems when it comes to their children’s play, and it causes a lot of family stress. In a city, traffic is all around you and its dangers ever present. So a mother with young children and a tiny garden cannot let them out to play in the street.

Instead, they must take them to a park at least once a day for at least an hour, taking at least a couple of hours out of a day when you factor in getting to and from the park, packing all the gear you need, and the time it takes to get young children into their shoes and coats.

This alone is stressful, and especially so in winter or when it's raining, which makes sitting in a park an unpleasant experience for mothers. When it becomes a daily necessity, it renders it a chore, and then at weekends many parents feel obliged to take their children to a specific activity, such as an open farm, which, lovely though they are, cost money.

For parents with no money and no car, the choices are far more limited. While there may be a nearby park, they are often confined to a small area close to home, and if home is a flat in a high-rise tower block with no garden at all, or a neighbourhood blighted in some way, the number of choices shrinks dramatically.

A limited childhood can evolve into a limited life. The Argus recently reported that many children in city estates have never visited the seafront less than half a mile away. But it’s no wonder: if parents who live in Whitehawk have limited means, they cannot afford to take them to the seafront, which is like going on holiday because it has the fairground rides, the ice creams, the seafront shops, the pier.

Deprived families are, by definition, deprived of many things, including amenities. For example, there are six skate parks at Edward Street, The Level, Hollingdean, Woodingdean, Hove Lagoon and Saltdean Oval. But there is not one at Whitehawk and there is not one at Moulsecoomb, two of the most deprived parts of Brighton.

The Black Rock lido swimming pool near Whitehawk was demolished in 1979 to make way for Brighton Marina and no equivalent amenity replaced it. The children of Whitehawk even lost their school when COMART was closed down in 2005.

Citizenship and belonging is something the Bristol mother was hoping to achieve with the Playing Out scheme, a poignant hope because they are things that have gone missing, particularly among children.

They are isolated from other children because playing out has been replaced by playing computer games. Reclaiming the streets of Brighton and Hove for the children would go a long way to repairing that.

Would you support the Temporary Play Street Orders idea in Brighton and Hove?