AT HOME
CALVERLEY ADVENTURE GROUNDS
T
alk me through your
design brief?
It was unusual in the fact
that I am local resident
of Tunbridge Wells. I
was approached by Friends of Calverley
Grounds, who had conducted a residents’
survey to find the top five things people
wanted to see change in the local open
space, and a children’s playground was the
number one choice.
The group had spent two years trying
to work out how to get a playground
design built on site, and they hadn’t really
made any headway with the council.
They approached a number of play
manufacturers to come up with designs,
but none of them really offered what they
wanted to achieve in terms of the project.
A friend of mine said she knew that I
designed playgrounds and asked the group
to approach me. Initially as a local resident
and not as the director of LUC, I offered to
do a quick sketch plan pro bono just to get
the idea off the ground, so they could then
start to consult with the public, fundraise
and start to persuade the local authority.
Through that process I then became a
fully on-board member of that working
team to develop the whole scheme and
take it through to fruition. It terms of
my professional involvement, once the
public consultation was completed, LUC
was appointed to produce the contract
drawings and oversee the tender and
construction on site. It’s a very unusual
example, because you don’t often do
things for pro bono, but it was because I
was a local resident and I was keen to see
something happen on site.
Tell me a bit about your career?
I studied landscape architecture at
Greenwich University, some 20-odd years
back. I joined LUC in the early 1990s and
at that point the heritage lottery was just
starting to fund historic public parks. So
I wrote one of the first applications for
funding of a public park and I went on to
work on over 40 plus HSL-funded park
schemes.
I have always been incredibly interested
in children and how they interact with
landscape - when I was at college I wrote
my dissertation on it. Early on my career,
LUC won the commission to design the
Diana, Princess of Wales playground in
April 2018 | Landscape Insight
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