Play Scape

The innovative architects putting adventure back into the playground.

- Nick Compton

So predictable and formulaic is the contemporary playground – certainly in Europe and the US – that we have forgotten there may be alternative arrangements. The standard-issue assortment of swings, seesaws, slides and sandpits – multi-stakeholder-sanctioned, mostly siloed behind gates and fences – is an urban constant. Strange that spaces charged with firing the imagination should be so unimaginative.

There are other ways of doing things, of course – radical new playscapes or smart reworkings of the established order. Muf Architecture/Art has just completed a redesign of an under-fives’ playground at the Golden Lane Estate in London’s Clerkenwell. Golden Lane is what the architecture practice Chamberlin, Powell & Bon did before it got around to the neighbouring Barbican Estate. It is, then, a protected treasure and the playground commission, the reactivation of a neglected sunken pit with broken equipment, left limited room for manoeuvre. Muf, though, has made the most of the physical and creative space available.

There is a slide and a beautifully proportioned climbing frame. But also a ring of natural stone and reclaimed timber. It’s neo-Neolithic, accenting rather than apologising for the unapologetic brutalism of the original space. What the new design also offers is positive ambiguity, a space that children can imagine and reimagine as outer space or magic kingdom. It offers challenge, physicality, hard surfaces and sharp edges (though Muf ’s Liza Fior explains that those sharp edges are actually carefully calculated radii, worked out with playground design consultant Rob Wheway). It is, radii and all, a space to experiment with and negotiate risk, a fundamental requirement of meaningful play and development.