A playground is seeking £400,000 to replace its crumbling exterior fence and “save the playground”.
Dubbed the “PlayFence”, the proposal has been designed by the staff and children of Shakespeare Walk Adventure Playground (SWAPA) and would also serve as a playable structure for the children.
“We work with a lot of special needs children and then within an hour of being here they are already starting to come out of their shell… that’s why these places are worth it,” said Nitasha Kapoor, chair of SWAPA’s board of trustees.
In 2021, SWAPA celebrated 45 years as an adventure playground at the heart of Stoke Newington. In Christmas of the same year, the first signs of the wear and tear damage to the fence came when an inspection by senior playworker Sarah Wilson required a large section to be replaced. It subsequently became clear that the entire fence would need replacing for the playground to remain viable in the long-term, “That was a real moment of truth,” Nitasha explained, “because if we don’t have a fence, we don’t have a playground.” This forced the board of trustees into “save the playground mode”.
SWAPA was initially quoted £100,000 for a like-for-like replacement of the fence, something well outside the budget of the site which, according to Nitasha, has been operating “hand to mouth” in recent years as “there’s certainly no scope that support from the Council is going up”. As a result, the trustees decided to pursue private sector funding: “we’re only getting about half of our running costs from Hackney Council so we’re already having to do so much work to just maintain the running costs.”
“The problem is play is not a statutory right so it’s going to get cut before education and we all know what’s happening in the education sector, so you can only imagine the trickle down.
“In other European countries there’s far more public funding… that isn’t the model that we have here. However, this country has a rich tradition of guilds supporting education, so I don’t think we need to shy away from business being involved.”
Discussing why they are seeking quadruple the value that was quoted for the repairs, Nitasha said “It’s more doable than the £100,000 because the story sells itself”, she argued, adding that she believes the playground is a “magnet”: “it straddles one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Hackney but also one of the most deprived neighbourhoods and all those kids come to this playground. It ticks so many boxes in terms of social work, outreach, disadvantaged families, health and wellbeing, heritage.
“We have a certain confidence, cockiness, hopefulness? The Hackney Mayor’s Office is behind us… there’s a really great buzz.”
“It’s not the kind of thing where we’ll go to B&Q and just buy all the things that we need”, Nitasha quipped. If funding is secured, the “PlayFence” proposal will be tendered out to an adventure playground architect to finalise and send the design onto builders.
