Victoria Park (known colloquially as Vicky Park or the People’s Park)[1][2] is 86.18 hectares of open space [3] that opened in 1845. It stretches out across part of the East End of London, bordering parts of Bethnal Green, Hackney, and Bow, such as along Old Ford Road, London E3 and Victoria Park Road E9. The park is entirely within the…
A project to create a shared communal, playable space – a ‘village green’ – in a housing estate. Once again, we try to evoke through our designs a ‘culture of permission’ and invitation – creating the context for non-planned, informal, social interaction. This finds symbolic and practical expression in the pathway with seating running through the playable, communal space. …
A hugely important and archaeologically sensitive public green space requiring Schedule Monument Consent for any development. PLAYLINK, in collaboration with the client and various specialists, navigated our scheme through the SMC process. The new playable area sits between the dramatic ruins of the medieval abbey and the River Lark. The intermingling of culture and nature provide the context for scheme dramatically…
This was not so much a work project, as entry into a realm of enchantment. PLAYLINK had been recommended to the school’s headteacher, Ben Hasan. Ben wanted to enhance an already lovely outdoors and we found ourselves with a client whose values and interests pretty much mirrored our own. So, technical issues aside – we all wanted as big a…
In this commission we had to work within the confines of a pre-existing playground. The pictures show the new features: sand, water, land mounding, bespoke climbing/walkway structure, climbing nets, ropes. We had hoped to either take down the fence, or at least move the fencing to take in two rather wonderful trees. This would have provided shade, the possibility of tree…
Harry Gosling School is in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest areas, certainly in London. The borough suffers from a dearth of open, green space – most children at this school would not have as a matter of ordinary experience access to anything resembling a ‘natural’ environment. The school playground that confronted us was the usual…
Thornbury Park was an underused park offering few facilities apart from flat grass land used for football games, and a conventional fenced, fixed equipment playground. LB Hounslow secured funding for a wheel park and ball court. Initially local and client thinking was to place both facilities at the perimeter of the park, ‘out of the way’. Our view was different.…
Children are now outside playing and learning in their newly developed school grounds at Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre. This was a complex commission for a number of reasons that included: the outdoors was wrapped around three sides of the school building; two of the sides were allocated to a specific age range; one side was the Children’s Centre…
The pictures speak for themselves: they show the transformation of a bleak, unloved, uncared for, flat tarmac area within council housing into a pleasant ‘village green’. The significance here is the values and commitments that inform every stage of this project.Those values and commitments include creating places where people can be ‘in sight of one another’ – reading the context for…
The project was to bring a piece of underused and essentially purposeless piece of land into fruitful use. The patch of land was outside the Health Centre which served the local area including a nearby residential estate.The commission, formally with Croydon Council, was in practice a three way partnership between the Health Centre, Council and PLAYLINK. We were able to use…