Park taking kids back to nature...
NEW £500,000 PROJECT WILL HAVE TREE-TOP NESTS AND A STREAM
A NEW wooden adventure playground is coming to Heaton Park.
The concept of the Wild Woodland Play Space is to reconnect children with nature through play and the area will feature everything from bridges and tunnels to a treetop nest.
There’ll also be living willow pods and even a woodland stream.
Award-winning landscape architects Davies White were appointed by Manchester council to design the new £500,000 space, with advice from Tim Gill, an independent expert on risk in play, who has previously worked on the Olympic Park in London.
Their RHS Gold Medal Winning Wild Garden from the Hampton Court Flower Show has been the inspiration behind the design, which featured a magnificent tree top nest to incorporate climbing into the tree tops as part of the play experience.
The new play area will be located in the south of the park, close to the boating lake and existing attractions and facilities including the Lakeside Café, rowing boat hire, the park’s tram route and seasonal fairground space.
While incorporating features of a traditional playground, such as swings and slides, the new area will take a more natural, wild approach, using bespoke timber rather than metal, and including playful planting and grassy mounds. It comes two years after the refurbishment of the park’s northern play area, which is based around a giant tower slide, with a UFO-theme.
Not everyone was happy with the £250,000 makeover though,, with some parents slamming the revamp ‘a waste of money’ and questioning why the equipment was metal, as opposed to more child-friendly wood.
Adam White, director of Davies White, said: “I am delighted to be back in my native north west working on such an exciting project.
“Andrèe and I design each play space to create a sense of place, unique to anywhere else and we make sure they offer reasonable risk allowing children to explore their own imagination and reconnect with nature and wildlife. Forget metal equipment and multicoloured rubber surfaces, our approach rejects preconceived notions of a playground in favour of a more natural approach to play.”
The council says the play area, expected to open in spring 2019, will include the top five activities chosen by parents and children in a survey last summer - exploring and finding, sliding, swinging, jumping and splashing. Clean City funding has been secured for the project.