Kids rule the roost at this N16 venue, and they’ve just helped design the new play features here. Adventure playgrounds started in the Danish city of Emdrup during WWII, when landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen was inspired by children playing on bomb sites to create a junkyard- type area equipped with wood, bricks, tyres and old furniture. The UK followed suit in 1948 on the site of a bombed Camberwell church.
These spaces are staffed by play workers, which makes them more expensive to run than conventional playgrounds, and they are on the decline in London. Shakespeare Walk bucks the trend and provides youngsters aged five to 15 with props that they can use to create their own world by building dens, gardening, digging, scaling huge wooden structures or dangling on Tarzan-like rope swings, and even cooking over open fires.