Kilburn Grange Adventure Playground: An Imaginative Reclaimed and Recycled Playspace
The Kilburn Grange Playground builds upon the adjacent play centre’s woodland narrative, offering an immersive landscape of varied terrain, scale and intensity. Topographies, climbing structures, loose parts and quiet nooks are designed to encourage imagination, independence and collaborative exploration. Site-specific structures respond directly to the material character of nearby trees - rough bark textures, dense undergrowth, filtered light and shifting soundscapes. A collection of salvaged doors reintroduces domestic material culture into the wild play setting - creating changeable boundaries, surprise thresholds and ever-evolving pathways. Play here is unpredictable and layered, with no singular narrative. From secluded dens to elevated perches, the spatial strategy creates a rich patchwork of experience - secrecy contrasted with visibility, stillness with velocity, containment with openness.
Adventure playgrounds are not static environments - they are living systems. Inspired by the post-war origins of adventure play in rubble and junkyards, Kilburn Grange Playground encourages children to take ownership of their environment, to build, dismantle, risk and repair. A collaborative design process was central to the project’s success. We partnered with Parkour Generations and the Building Exploratory to conduct community engagement workshops throughout design and construction.
Children were not only consulted but actively involved in shaping and understanding the playground as a space for ongoing self-authorship. These sessions aimed to embed knowledge and confidence in local users to evolve and adapt the playground over time - ensuring that the environment remains dynamic, relevant and inclusive long after its formal completion.
“A wonderful community facility that has ripped up the rule-book for outdoor play space.”
Tim Gill, rethinkingchildhood.com
“The whimsical play centre is a timber structure, which in many ways resembles a big piece of playground furniture. This imaginative thinking has produced a visually, physically and educationally stimulating series of play structures that are characterised by their extensive use of reclaimed and recycled materials.”
Camden Design Awards Jury
Kilburn Grange Adventure Playground is part of a wider project which includes Kilburn Grange Play Centre, which you can read more about here.