The paper engages with visual artefacts of ‘walking places’ in children’s everyday lives and in their imaginations. It draws on collaborative and multimodal ethnographic fieldwork in three cities from a study that explored the relationship between childhood and public life. The city loomed large in children’s photo-stories and in their discussions with us, as well as in ethnographic walks we took with them across their neighbourhoods, and in the maps of important places they drew for us. Playgrounds, cities, vacation spots, their homes, all came up as references of place. Most of these maps attempt to reproduce a familiar to the children everyday (e.g., my route to school, my route to the park, or my neighbourhood) but not all are literal. One map made by Georgina (see figure 5), is a complex story of ‘A mermaid in London’ that includes references to Santa’s Grotto and Georgina’s memories of walking barefoot on the beach in Jamaica. Using Georgina’s map of places that mattered in her life, the paper builds the argument for seeing children’s visual inscriptions as a ‘jamming’ of the real and the imaginary. I then proceed to use that ‘jamming’ to further interrogate the collaborative and experimental aspects of the multimodal ethnography. In particular, I create a composite case study of a playground by ‘stitching together’ (Walsh, 2024) three unrelated children’s photo-stories (Nolas, Varvantakis, and Aruldoss, 2023; Varvantakis, Nolas, and Aruldoss, 2018) of playgrounds past, present and future, and I analyse the figure of the playground not for children’s right to play or for healthy lifestyles, popular discourses when it comes to childhood, playgrounds, and play (though these things are important too), but as the very place in which imaginations and encounters with otherness and difference can be fully cultivated and allowed to roam free.