Covent Garden Playground is one of the oldest and most innovative play spaces in the UK. 

The 2022-2027 project began with an Instagram handle and conversations with local residents and families, grew through the award of a Greening Westminster Grant in 2023, and is now engaged in fundraising to replace perished play surfaces and flawed play equipment by 1 May 2027, the 150th anniversary of the Playground opening on 1 May 1877.

The Playground is a garden of three rooms accessed through a series of gateways on an East-West axis from Drury Lane to Crown Court. The Drury Lane gates lead to a seating plaza used daily by local office, theatre, hotel and council workers and visitors to Covent Garden.

From the seating plaza families reach the playspace, currently severely limited by its unsafe play surface and plastic play equipment stipulating it is only to be used by 3-7 year olds.

From the playspace one reaches the football and basketball court – with its gravelly surface and confusing three line colours – around the fence of which we are rehabilitating a nature trail.

Around the existing pair of large scale Gingko trees we are planting a forest garden, to help cool the Playground’s Urban Heat Island effect, create new habitats and offer local children an experience of woodland.

In 2024 the Playground’s few surviving plants will be kept and enriched by plants grown in sand by renowned plantsman Peter Korn. Their resilience and diversity will bring new habitats, character, insect and wildlife which have been missing from the space for decades.

Fruit trees donated by The Conservation Volunteers were planted in March 2024 to create a Community Orchard bringing food production to a space used by generations of Covent Garden Market workers. 

The Playground is a community resource and becoming a welcoming, inclusive and more equitable space again, committed to maximising nature recovery and involving young people in the process.