Industry | 2010.08.13
Letters: Climbing, swinging – and cutting
One of my prized possessions is a photo from the Guardian showing Ed Balls and Andy Burnham sharing a rotating double swing in an adventure playground when the Labour government announced a £235m fund to build 3,500 play facilities. This picture is in my park folder, because I and the other Friends of Chapeltown Park in Sheffield have been working with the council in planning and fundraising for a new playground for some years. The £100,000 Playbuilder money we had been promised was going towards a wonderful new natural playground. We had raised the remaining £70,000 needed and expected completion to be in the spring 2011. At the end of the summer term we visited local primary schools and, in good faith, promised the children that the new playground would be built this winter.
Now our new government is "mothballing" the scheme ( Plans for hundreds of new playgrounds shelved , 12 August) and we are left with a sad playground, with only three pieces of 50-year old equipment standing on tarmac and only suitable for very small children.
Surely the children in our area deserve the chance to climb, swing, jump and run in safety, and to enjoy playing outside. I would love to be able to tell Messrs Cameron and Clegg (a Sheffield MP!) how many hours of work we have put in to get to the stage we have with the new playground. Do they realise volunteers also use many of their own resources to enable their projects to be realised?
Our children are our future; many of the children in our area already understand that the "Con-Dems" do not have the wellbeing of children in their sights. They may also be learning, at an early age, to be suspicious of policians bearing gifts!
Gloria King
Sheffield
• In Waltham Forest, one of the Olympic boroughs, a well-established play area is to be taken out of use from September 2011 to December 2012. The ODA – the very organisation pledged to promote sports – is to lease Drapers Field, on the edge of the Olympic Park, for use as a VIP car park. This popular area is used by many youngsters, including a play group and a local school. The ODA has already ploughed up football pitches used by the Sunday League on Hackney Marshes. Can anybody stop it taking Drapers Field?
Pamela Cowan
London
• George Monbiot\'s excellent article ( Comment , 10 August) highlights the impact of trees and green spaces close to people\'s homes on improving health, safety, feelings of belonging and neighbourliness, especially when designed to be free of cars and easily accessible. He calls for this to be demanded as more new homes are built – but what of the vast number of existing council and social housing estates?
Many of these estates are surrounded by large areas of bleak open space, all too often dominated by cars. By redesigning these spaces, planting them with trees and flowers, providing allotments, minimising the impact of vehicles, and integrating opportunities for play, they can indeed be transformed. I recently worked on such an estate and when the re-landscaping was completed an elderly resident said: "It\'s like a cork bursting out of a bottle. I had no idea there were so many children cooped up in these flats."
Liz Kessler
Winchester
• George Monbiot has identified a major challenge for the government: how to ensure the physical reality of the places where people live and children grow matches the rhetoric of the "big society". Taking a lead from the previous London mayor, who introduced minimum standards for children\'s play space in all new housing developments, the last government launched a 10-year play strategy to work with planners, social landlords and the housing industry to create more child-friendly communities. Its proposed revision of planning policy for open space put children (and trees) at the heart of a new vision for "healthy, natural environments" where people live. All this is now subject to review, and while recent stories have focused on cuts to the playground building programme, the greater risk is the loss of the longer-term momentum towards a culture where shared green space populated by playing children is the norm wherever families live.
Adrian Voce
Director, Play England
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/14/climbing-swinging-and-cutting
