The Time Telephone offers a glimpse into the archive of songs, games and rhymes built up by Peter and Iona Opie

Time machines to rival Doctor Who’s Tardis are landing across the country this spring. Children who enter a series of specially adapted red telephone boxes can dial up the past and learn the playground games that once entertained their grandparents.

From rhymes like Ring a Ring o’ Roses and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush to active games like hopscotch and French skipping, the renowned research into oral traditions carried out by Peter and Iona Opie from the 1950s to the 1980s is being made available to children more used to video-gaming.

Placed inside museums, including the V&A Museum of Childhood, the Time Telephones, set up by Sheffield University and University College London’s Institute of Education, play each caller a series of archival recordings made by the Opies between 1969 and 1983, and a selection of archived essays read by primary schoolchildren from London, Sheffield, Cardiff and Aberdeen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Time Telephone at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, London. Photograph: Andrew Burn

“The Time Telephone is a way to bring the Opie archive to life,” said UCL’s Andrew Burn, professor of English and Media. “Our research shows that children are fascinated by this, partly because so many of the games are similar to their own today, partly because some are different.”

“The phone and the box themselves are nostalgic reminders of the technology of yesteryear – and we’re finding that children always use telephones as playthings, as much to speak to their imaginary friends as to converse with the past.”

The Opies’ first book, I Saw Esau, was published in 1947 and the couple compiled many more anthologies of traditional songs, folklore and games, describing themselves as anthropologists of “the greatest of savage tribes – the worldwide fraternity of children”Peter Opie died in 1982 and their collection was donated to the Bodleian Library in 1988. Iona Opie died two years ago.

The Time Telephone, constructed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the Bartlett Faculty, is part of the cataloguing of the Opie archive in Oxford, aimed at making it available online for scholars and for the general public to view.