Two temporary play and dwell interventions – A Child’s Eye View and Portable Play Time – were established over seven months with potential for permanence. Collaborating with local schools, five active travel characters, 60 visual prompts and a playful routes map were co-created to encourage street interaction. Portable Play Time transformed a 64 sq m underused high street area into an engaging space, promoting active travel and community engagement.

 

 

Who is on the project?

 

People and Place Activation Specialist - Civic and Social

Associate Director - Timberplay Ltd

Climate Action Now Programme Manager - SMBC

Climate Action Now Lead - Services To Place - SMBC

 

Describe the context of this project and its neighbourhood and people. 

 

On The Way Play SK is a pioneering pilot project that co-designs child-friendly spaces, promotes active travel and improves dwell time on the high street in the Edgeley area of Stockport. Edgeley is a neighbourhood situated in close proximity to the town centre of Stockport. It has a strong sense of community embedded within it, but also has very high pockets of deprivation. Recent placemaking priorities for the area have centred around its historic high street, Castle Street, and the linking up of the area with the nearby town centre through a regeneration scheme bringing 1200 new homes to the community and exemplar new transport interchange and park We installed a series of temporary and small-scale play and dwell interventions with the option to remain permanent, active travel characters and prompt trails over a period of 7 months, with the aim of promoting and encouraging children and their families in the neighbourhood to walk and cycle more, whilst highlightling the joy to experience in everyday journeys to work, the local shops and school. On the Way Play involvement of the community’s young people throughout the entire project cycle meant that children’s voices are embedded in the placemaking interventions, however, this project delivered a multi-generational placemaking approach, making the case for future and sustained investment in play-based interventions in our district centres and navigating the implementation methods to make it possible in a short time frame from idea to delivery.

 

Tell us what you did and how it created a child-friendly place. For example, how does it support the rights of the child to rest, relax, play and to take part in cultural and creative activities in a safe and clean environment?

 

The project was divided into two strands/sets of interventions; A Child’s Eye View - Active Travel Trails/Portable Play Time pilot. A Child’s Eye View involved children from 2 schools in designing 3 ‘on the way play’ routes around Edgeley and co-creating 5 active travel characters, 60 visual prompts, a playful routes map to interact with the streets. This gave a colourful, bold voice to children and helped adults understand the play value of everyday surroundings, transforming Boring B’s bins, boxes, bollards and bus stops into playful, interactive waymarking positioned at a child’s eye level. Portable Play Time transformed an underused area of high street (692 sqft) with negative perceptions of safety/poor footfall into a play space with natural structures/informal seating co-designed with Timberplay. Over 7 months, the space was used to build engagement and activation through co-design/community events focused on play, active travel and climate action, elevating local voices and emboldening ownership with a culmination in the installation of the play equipment and activation events. The low cost, quick turnaround interventions created child-friendly spaces through the lens of local children, new community engagement techniques, using local artists to support children and push parameters of what is considered safe - ‘the norm’ on adopted highways/street furniture/highstreets.By cutting the red tape/adopting a bold approach to repositioning where play equipment and playful messaging can be placed and involving children to re-imagine the space, it strengthened connections, improved place exploration/purpose, empowered local children to lead on their everyday places to/ from the shops/schools and home.

 

How did the project make a positive social and environmental contribution in the context of child health childhood and wellbeing

 

We are developing a toolkit. Working with Stockport’s Climate Action Now team to co-develop a process so we could navigate the interdepartment ‘knobbly bits’ of local authority bureaucracy to move quickly, support the highways department to trial a new approach to road safety assessments, installation and review processes relating to play equipment on an adopted highways. We have been visited by place developers, Sustrans London Team and GM Leaders Alumni to showcase what we’ve done and ‘how we’ve done it’ and we will soon be publishing a case study with Stockport Council in 2025. Our collaborative community approach has had a lasting impact on SMBC’s community engagement/street design approach with ‘A Child’s Eye View’ walking audits being tested with senior officials and council officers as part of ‘Joyful Journeys’ exploration at the CAN Summit and as part of future regeneration schemes. Monitoring, evaluation, foot counts revealed increased footfall on activation days (56%+) and improved dwell time, an increase in feelings of children being a welcome, with support for more child friendly interventions. Most importantly, we asked the school communities involved in the co-design how they felt about being involved and the positivity and pride was overwhelmingly clear and we captured and celebrated their involvement and the installation with a high street dance, a giant conga at the new transport interchange and icecreams and stickers of the active travel characters as a keepsake. A local memory that will last with local children as part of the legacy of civic pride.