The best playground in the world

Posted on Wednesday 10 October 2007 | 10 Comments

This post is now at: http://beefaerie.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/the-best-playground-in-the-world/.

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10 Responses to The best playground in the world

  1. dragonwright | Sunday 27 April 2008 at 8:43 am |

    That sounds like a great playground. I wish I could go there.

  2. David | Friday 5 December 2008 at 8:55 am |

    I am about to begin training as a primary teacher in the UK, and was doing a google image search for “imaginative playgrounds”. This place stands out from the crowd of brightly coloured runways and meaningless structures we see in every playground here. It is truly exciting after so many years to see a playground which fires the imagination like this. It reminds me of a great hulk of a warship (probably the actual size of a large rowing boat!) which lay magnificently beached in the middle of my infant school playground, and of an abandoned cricket pavilion which became a war zone in my junior school. When I take my children to many playgrounds today, it seems impossible to do anything except go round and round the treadmill – with the best imagination in the world they amount to no more than brightly coloured playground scaffolding with a few swings and slides.

    Thank you for sharing this beautiful playground with the world!

  3. Amanda | Sunday 14 June 2009 at 4:19 pm |

    I remember always going here when I was growing up – on trips between New Plymouth and Wellington …
    It is one of the best playgrounds in the world :)

  4. Laura | Sunday 5 July 2009 at 7:55 am |

    I grew up at this park, in fact I spent almost all of my childhood there and my fiancée proposed there even though I’ve lived overseas for almost 10 years. Kowhai Park is an amazingly unique place.

  5. Becca | Wednesday 8 July 2009 at 8:21 pm |

    As a playground designer from the UK, I just stumbled across this page and was really impressed by the imaginative play equipment.

    I agree with David that too many playgrounds just have brightly coloured steel structures.

    I’d be grateful if you would like to give us any feedback on our themed play equipment or if any playground enthusiasts out there would like to suggest equipment ideas they think would be brilliant fun!

  6. Daleaway | Thursday 9 July 2009 at 9:42 am |

    I’m recalling a playground I was in about 35 years ago, in a campsite in small-town Finland. Finns make imaginative and beautiful use of wood, and in this case, they had provided a pile of notched smallish beams and planks which children could slot together in various ways, something like differently shaped Lego. (Boys made forts and bridges, and girls made houses and shops with it, of course. Even the gypsy children. )

    It seemed to work very well and when one group chose to abandon their structure to go off and play on other equipment, a second group would move in, and deconstruct the first group’s building to make their own creation.

    I suppose today it would be considered risky to have planks and beams lying round with which children could attack each other. Or which adults could steal or adolescents set fire to. It seemed to work in Finland, however.

  7. nina | Monday 17 May 2010 at 3:30 am |

    this stuff is awsome . im doing a play ground project and i might do some stuff just like the octopus!

  8. dana | Thursday 2 September 2010 at 5:38 am |

    omg where is this place i wanna go

  9. mimbles | Tuesday 2 November 2010 at 9:10 pm |

    Oh wow. Yes, if we were to head in this direction we would definitely have to visit here!

  10. Bradleys | Sunday 2 January 2011 at 7:04 pm |

    Visited this playground today (Jan 2011) and still as fantastic as the pictures, spent all day there and my kids had a great time, so much to do and see, a Must do!