Camden Active Spaces: Preventative healthcare pilot project transforming school playgrounds into engaging active spaces

Root and Erect led the Camden Active Spaces initiative, a pioneering public health project designed to increase physical activity among schoolchildren through innovative playground design. Focused on schools in Camden, the project aimed to reduce sedentary behaviour while fostering social interaction and wellbeing. Working closely with pupils, teachers, and parents, Root and Erect crafted site-specific active landscapes tailored to engage even the most inactive or hesitant children. By weaving imaginative narratives - such as the Earthling Kingdom’s overgrown ruins at Torriano Juniors or the Cloud Kingdom’s playful trampoline clouds at Torriano Infants - the designs invited children to explore, climb, and role-play within immersive environments. This strategic approach broke down barriers between user groups, promoting inclusion and collaboration. The project’s impact was rigorously monitored by University College London sports scientists, whose findings showed significant increases in physical activity and social wellbeing, with results published in medical journals.

Each school’s playground responded to unique community needs, resulting in diverse spatial strategies that extended beyond physical activity to support holistic wellbeing. At Torriano Juniors, a Victorian shelter was transformed into a cooking space adjacent to a food-growing area, integrating healthy eating education into the curriculum. Acland Burghley Secondary School’s picnic lawn subverted traditional playground elements, offering an enlarged, stacked, and distorted picnic bench to create a parkour and climbing landscape that encouraged dynamic movement. Meanwhile, Carlton Primary’s design tackled spatial constraints by fitting a complex, overlapping community of dwellings into a compact site formerly used for parking. Through this multifaceted approach, Root and Erect demonstrated how thoughtful design can activate school environments to foster health, community engagement, and playful learning.