Greenway Adventure Playground

Wester Hailes Growing Communities are to receive a grant from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund to build an adventure playground in the Greenway between Murrayburn and Hailesland, see photo gallery to see which space we mean.  The funding has been a long time in coming, we started working towards this goal in 2019 (see below), it’s incredibly exciting but it’s only the beginning of the challenge!

Update December 25

Since we last reported the funding in August, we’ve come some way in working out how the playground will operate. We have also had an extension to allow us to continue construct the playground up to September 2026, this is great news as it will increase the potential to involve local children and adults in the build over the summer months.

We have been meeting with council officers to work out how we can maximise the play value and the freedom of the types of activities that can happen in the adventure playground, and to keep the costs and responsibilities of Wester Hailes Growers at a manageable level. We think we have arrived at a solution which has the best of both worlds :-

• Approximately two thirds for the space will be managed by Edinburgh Council, we will develop this area as a ‘playable landscape’ (with trees bushes, mounds, logs, boulders and sculptures),
• A third of the space will be leased by Wester Hailes Growers to manage as a ‘free play area’. As we will take responsibility for the free play area, we will be able to run outdoor play activities and build structures which wouldn’t be allowed in a Council run playground.  The free play area will have a low fence.

We have brought in a play designer Tassy Thompson who is an expert in outdoor play and innovative playgrounds. Tassy has been working with our sessional development worker Ellie Burroughs, and local residents Esther, Kevin and Allan to engage with children and parents to further develop the design.

If you want to find out more about the project email: Ellie Burroughs 

Project Background

In 2019-20, Wester Hailes Growing Communities commissioned City of Play architects to work with local residents to prepare a masterplan for the improvement of the greenspace and facilities around the Greenway between Murrayburn & Hailesland.  The plan recognised the lack of play opportunities and community facilities in Dumbryden, Murrayburn and Hailesland, and recommended the development of an adventure playground.  Since then we have been working towards this goal.

Our inspiration for the adventure playground was the ‘Venchie’ playgrounds build in Wester Hailes and other parts of Edinburgh by local organisations and parents.

City of Play prepared designs for play structures which we still have and may yet make use of, but City of Play have since stopped doing this kind of work.  After this, we worked with Adventure Play Engineers, a London based organisation that community self builds amazing adventure playgrounds, unfortunately, they went bust during Covid.  We asked Timber Play Scotland, to prepare a concept design for an adventure playground, but their approach had too little opportunity for resident involvement in design and particularly in construction, and were on the high end price wise as to what we were looking for.