Young children use pretence in their interactions with their peers. This article focuses on their use of pretence to establish, define and formulate places within their peer interaction. A talk-in-interaction approach is used to analyse video-recorded and transcribed interactions of children aged 4-6 years in the block area of an early childhood classroom in Australia. The complex and collaborative interactive work of the children produced shared understandings of pretence, which they used as a device to manage their use of classroom physical and social spaces. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)