I’ve mentioned Leyton’s ‘Jubilee Park’ once or twice on this blog before. The first time was back in May, when Mushroom and I met the recycled kite maker (we’ve not seen him again since! Glad I took photos or I may have wondered whether he was real!). I mentioned him again more recently in an earlier Nature in the City post about picking blackberries.
This park used to simply be a large green space, with a tiny ‘typical’ children’s park in the corner. You know, swings, a slide etc… This year, along with several of the parks across the borough of Waltham Forest, it has been redesigned to encourage children to interact more with their natural surroundings. So, as well as a large area that remains as it was for the children to run around in, there are also ‘fallen’ trees to negotiate, wooden trampolines to jump on, ropes to help them swing across crocodile infested waters (well they are in our imagination!), rope snakes to ride on and hills of varying sizes to roll down (It’s possible that I like this even more than Mushroom does!)
Here are a few pictures of Mushroom making the most of this manmade ‘nature.’
I like this park and the others that are beginning to follow. It may be manmade, but Mushroom has always been quite cautious and before this was here, he needed a lot of encouragement to climb a tree, or roll down a big hill. The little trees and small hills here allowed him to build his confidence and he now does both without hesitation. His new found climbing confidence means I need to watch him a lot more closely these days!
What do you think? Is it a good idea to create more parks like this or should the council simply have left the space as it was before and let the children use their imaginations..? Please comment below, I’d love to hear your views, especially if you have similar parks in your area!
I’m linking up with Coombe Mill‘s Country Kids blog linky with this series. To find out more and/or add your own, click on the image above.
I think the park is the best of both – great play equipment as well as natural play equipment in the form of the fallen trees etc… A child’s natural imagination will always create some great play whatever resources there are! Thanks for linking up and sharing with Country Kids.
it looks lovely! We don’t have ones like this near to us as far as I know (im in west london, so do tell me if you know of one!!) but might check this out if we are over in the east at any point, it seems like a good idea!
I don’t know West London very well but if I hear of any I will let you know! It is lovely, especially in the summer months. It wasn’t there last winter so we’ll see how busy it gets this year…
What a great space to play! The play parks round here are pretty standard with not much to fire the imagination. Something like that would be great. Looks like mushroom is having a great time 🙂
We both were! Thanks for stopping by
Wow love the look of this park !!
It’s great, isn’t it?
I love the look of the park. I think it combines the best of both worlds. Children will always be able to turn things into whatever their imaginations wish, but it’s nice to have a few hints to help them along the way.
Love this post and it looks like you’ve had so much fun!
Maria
We did, thank you!