Priory Park

The designers of The Princess Diana Memorial Playground, Land Use Consultants, were also commissioned to design the play area for this flagship park in Reigate.

Adrian Wikeley of Land Use Consultants comments “The Diana playground is often held up as a great example of what can be done with play spaces, but the cynics always talk about the big budget and say it couldn´t be replicated in a “normal” play area. So that´s what we wanted to do here — create a play space with a similar play value and atmosphere as Diana but with a budget more suitable for a local authority park.”

The play area contains a lot of sand and water play plus a good selection of more challenging equipment aimed at slightly older children than Diana was targeted at.

The focal point of the play area, like Diana, is a ship in a big sand area. We have worked with Land Use Consultants on several occasions before and on this occasion apart from some general advice on suitability and location of equipment; our main role was helping to find the right ship for the budget.

The ship is 9 metres long and whilst it is not difficult to build a play ship of that size for the budget available, the problem comes from trying to build a ship of that size and complexity within the budget. The curved timbers that make the structure more ship- like are very expensive to produce. However, we sat down with endless examples of ship designs to get a clear idea of what was required and one of Richter´s bespoke equipment designers came up with the eventual design.