End of the adventure: council funding cuts imperil Leicester’s playgrounds

All nine of Leicester’s remaining adventure playgrounds are to lose all their council funding and are beginning the process of shutting down.

Three are already handing out redundancy notices and setting dates for closure in September with playworkers at another warning they are “just a few months behind”.

The popular sites are filled with hundreds of children who come from some of the poorest corners of the city for free holiday play schemes.

But Leicester city council says it has been left with no choice but to end the £1m budget after “a decade of government cuts”.

Campaigners say the closures will cost the council in the long run as vulnerable children will be left with nowhere safe to play or get a hot meal.

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Sarah Russell, a councillor, said: “After more than a decade of government cuts [and] with an estimated shortfall of at least £60m in our 2025-26 budget … everything is on the table in terms of cuts unless it’s a service we are legally required to provide.”

But playworkers say the closures could have been avoided if the council handed over control of the land to the charities which run the playgrounds.

Senior playworker Kevin Sherriff is an integral part of Highfields adventure playground. He remembers planting the now-mature trees among which children now play hide and seek.

“To see city children playing in dappled sunlight is something special,” he said. “These kids don’t have gardens, their families don’t have much money. If they weren’t here they would be stuck indoors.”

Highfields adventure playground opened in 1971 with money raised by students at Leicester University, part of the “junk play” movement that sprung up in the UK after the second world war.

More than half a century later, 140 children come here each day over the summer to swing on tyres, run across wooden walkways and build dens among the wildflowers.

But instead of planning games and outings for them, Sherriff has been in his office drawing up redundancy notices.

“It doesn’t feel real,” he said. ‘We fought for so long and we have so much support in the city but we are working out what day the money will finally run out and the gates have to close. The kids are here though, so we have to be positive.”

Children come to Highfields from across Leicester South – one of the most deprived constituencies in the UK. The council currently provides more than £1m in funding each year to the city’s nine adventure playgrounds. Annual attendance varies from 7,600 visits made to What Cabin, to 20,400 visits made to Goldhill adventure playground.

While the financial crisis the council faces is indisputable, Sherriff says the council and mayor have made survival harder by failing to hand over secure tenure for the land.

“We are on a rolling one-year lease here,” he said. “All big long-term funders want a 20-year lease at least. We have asked for a lease of that length or a community asset transfer but all we have heard so far is a suggestion of a five-year lease.

“We have been 54 years in this city and we have a team of experienced fundraisers offering their time for free. All we want is the best possible chance to make that work.”

He says the community at the playground is based on a relationship of trust. “What is special about adventure playgrounds is the relationships we build with families. I’ve had to let my staff go – even if we manage to get the doors open again in the future, those relationships will be gone.”

Joanne Alexander was 11 when she first walked through the gates at Highfield and her own four children have grown up on the playground. “I thought it was amazing when I came here first,” she says. “I saw all the pulleys and things you could climb, and there were birds and lizards. I built up so many friendships.

“My two older girls went all the way up through it like I did and now my youngest is 11, he will be there all summer. He is a boy who likes his PlayStation but the playground gets him out of the house. He plays football, table tennis, does climbing, they have water fights. The staff are just amazing.”

She is concerned about the likely impact of the loss of such well-used spaces: “It will have a knock-on effect won’t it. There will be young people at home all summer.”

Sherriff is already thinking of the children who will have nowhere to go when the gates close. “The reality is they will end up stuck at home or out on the streets but unsafe. And we are more than a playground, we are feeding children as well.”

He is working with four other playgrounds as a consortium to put in joint bids and he hopes that, despite the gates closing in September, they may open again one day. Woodgate and New Parks adventure playground have also handed out redundancy notices.

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At New Parks, the manager Jo Johnson said: “We had to allow for winding down costs so we close on 27 September. While we do have plans to set up a nursery here, that is mainly about staying on this land because if we leave the site, we won’t ever get the playground open again.”

She is very worried about the children in her community. “Our children have asked – what will happen to us? They are going to be very vulnerable when we aren’t here, there are ‘county lines’ gangs in this area.”

At St Andrews play association, the project manager Steve Ashley says the playground is “just a few months behind the playgrounds making redundancies now”.

“We are inner-city here,” Ashley said. “We have taught so many countless children to ride bikes who had nowhere else safe to ride them.”

Russell, who is Leicester’s deputy city mayor for social care, said: “The decision to end funding to the play associations next year was only taken after all other options were explored.

“We have been encouraging them for several years to find alternative sources of funding. Some have already been successful in [doing so].”

One playground – Goldhill – has found an innovative way to survive by setting up a school for children who can’t cope in mainstream education. They are planning to use this work to support a couple of other smaller playgrounds.

Like Sherriff at Highfields, Dee Dixon has been a playworker here for 40 years.

She said: “Yes we are going to survive doing our school work, we have been an alternative education provider for a while now.

“But we won’t be able to open the playground as often, or feed all of the hundreds children we feed on winter nights; the council grant is what kept the lights on.”