Surrey City Hall Playscape

The Surrey City Hall playscape is located on the second level terrace of the new Surrey City Hall building, and overlooks the City Hall plaza. The play space is used by children attending City Hall childcare during the day, and available to the public during evenings and weekends. Space2place was responsible for the design of the playscape contained within the glass fence. 

In recent years, the design of play spaces has often involved selecting prefabricated equipment from a catalogue and placing it in an expanse of safety surfacing. While these playgrounds may be fun initially, they rarely sustain a child’s creative interests for long. Our society’s obsession over minimizing risk to children is the primary cause for the standardized design of most of today’s play environments.

The design for the Surrey City Hall playscape works within these challenges to design a place that provides a well rounded play experience that has a unique identity. When watching children engaged in play, one will observe that they interact with their surroundings in very inventive ways - creating imaginary worlds, testing their abilities and exploring and manipulating the materials around them to create changes in their environment. The designers recognized the potential to create a more engaging place for children that focused on the creation of an undulating terrain that creates places for social activity, active play, and interactive water play.

Early on, the consultant team identified a distinction between hazard and risk. The play environment was designed to allow children to experience risks and test their boundaries without exposure to hazard. The result is a dynamic place that provides open-ended play experiences that encourage imagination and creative play while meeting the emotional, cognitive and physical needs of children.