Adding nature and greenery to an urban playground.

Aim

The school playgrounds are concrete. We want to depave and plant trees to clean the air, improve drainage, provide shade & bring back nature

Creating a green space to play and a green hedgerow to protect children from air pollution, improve drainage & provide shade.

The concrete playgrounds at Rosendale primary school get very hot in summer months and have very little shade for the children to rest and cool down in.  The concrete also means there is little natural drainage. 

The older children’s playground where they play sports is surrounded by busy roads carrying over 7,000 cars/ day. As a result the air that the children are breathing in in the playgrounds regularly exceeds the daily recommended levels set by the World Health Organisation.

How your money will be spent

1. We will depave an area of the playground to create a natural play space and sustainable drainage. 

We have started to create a natural green playground space for the children to access. We will use your donations to bring shrubs and trees into  this space by de-paving some of the concrete & fake-grass  area, introducing soil & planting greenery that can take root.

Improving health & well-being: This will allow the children to enjoy all the benefits that green spaces bring. Research shows that children’s play reflects the spaces around them. Natural spaces produce a softer environment for them to enjoy and explore and has shown to improve mental health, particularly for those children with special educational needs like autism and ADHD.

Providing shade: the shrubs and trees will also provide much needed shade as our summers get hotter.

Providing sustainable drainage - The de-paving work will also enable the site to provide sustainable drainage for water run off,  thereby improving the playground surfaces when it rains & helping with flooding risk.  

2. We will depave a strip of concrete in the older children’s sports area and start to plant a  “natural hedgerow”.

We want to start to build a natural hedgerow of bamboo on this side of the playground. We hope that this new hedgerow will act as a green screen, protecting these pupils  from air pollutants from the adjacent road as they compete in sports & enjoy their playground. We are also hopeful it will provide a new natural habitat for urban wildlife and greatly add to the school community enjoyment of the space.

How far we’ve come ..

We started depaving some of the outdoor playground space earlier this year .. and we’ve made great progress - but much further to go!

Our team
We are a mixture of parents, teachers and staff in the school community who are passionate about making the school greener and healthier for the benefit of the pupils now and all the future pupils to come.  We all volunteer our time to help improve and maintain the school grounds.. and our kids help too!

This project successfully funded on 14th August 2023