| Topic: | Roof top play space? | |
| Posted by: | Nicholas Evans | |
| Date/Time: | 22/11/12 10:24:00 |
| I went for a walk around Putney Hospital today with my brand new (well she's 18 months old) grand daughter. She enjoyed jumping in the puddles in her bright yellow wellies. While we walked I looked up at the derelict hospital becoming more obvious as the leaves fall from the autumnal trees. While I did so I couldn't help thinking about the ridiculousness and sheer wrong-headedness of the proposed roof top playground. Later I dug out the plans of what the Council has suggested and thought about what the Council's planners want to build. I dug out some facts. An 8-year-old is about 1.2m high - around 4ft when I was growing up. The wall enclosing the roof playspace will be 3.7m, or 12 feet for obvious health and safety grounds. So the suggestion by Councillor Mike Ryder at the Planning Application Committee that he supported this idea because the children would enjoy looking out over the common is the nonsense I thought it was at the time. And the area surrounded by wall is not very big. The largest play space open to the sky is 1,606 sq metres, or the equivalent of one small five-a-side pitch. There are some other smaller open areas and "covered areas", but this is the main play area for the whole school of 420 pupils. Enough said. But, I hear them saying, there are other schools in the city with roof playgrounds. They have even included photographs of the one at Surrey Square Primary School in Southwark as a prime example in the design specification for the new school. But if you go to that excellent school's website - www.surreysquare.co.uk - and click on the lovely "Take a tour of the school" video introduced by some of the kids, you'll see that the roof playgound is actually a grassed area which gently slopes down to a traditional playgound. The roof itself which makes up the slope has a slide to play on. It is positioned over the curved roof structure of a modern school hall below, which is shaped rather like a slice of melon placed on its side. Not a square quad with high walls - no comparison at all. I hope my grandaughter and her school friends will not end up in a school with such restricted open space, and that in a couple of years time we can walk round the site and say together "That was where those idiots from the Council were going to build a rooftop playground! Good thing they were stopped." Nick |