Our Design Manifesto for Adventure Parks

There's a play structure we built about six years ago that I won't say where because the family it belongs to are private and I'd rather not embarrass anyone. Specifically I'd rather not embarrass me.

It's a good piece of work. Lovely platform. Two ways up, rope bridge across to a smaller deck in the next tree. The grandfather had wanted somewhere the grandchildren could go that felt like an adventure, and we'd given him that. At the handover he stood underneath it for a long time looking up and not saying anything. Usually a good sign.

I went back about a year later for unrelated reasons.

The children were not on the treehouse.

They were about twenty feet away from it, in a hollow under a beech tree, building something complicated out of sticks they'd dragged from a coppice we'd left untouched on the south side. The structure had a roof made of an old picnic blanket. There was a sign on it. The sign said SHOP. Inside the shop, a child of about seven was selling, as far as I could work out, leaves.

The treehouse was visible from where they were playing. Nobody was looking at it.

I'm telling this against myself because the obvious lesson is that we should be building the stick-shop and not the treehouse. That's not right. The treehouse gets used. They came back to it later that afternoon when the leaf shop wound up.

The point isn't that one is better than the other. The point is that I had built one of them and they had built the other, and at the moment I was watching, the one they had built was where they wanted to be.

I think about this when people ring us about adventure parks. The request usually comes with photographs of bigger structures elsewhere - fortresses, themed climbing frames in primary colours - and a question about whether we can do something like that but more bespoke. We can. We do. But the question I find myself wanting to ask back is whether the children at those parks are climbing on the fortress, or sitting at the edge of the woods making something out of bark. I haven't worked out a polite way to ask it yet.

There's an article doing the rounds about the experience economy and operators competing on memorability. It's sensible enough and I don't disagree. But the assumption underneath catches me — that the operator is the one creating the memory. I'm not sure that's how it works.

The operator creates the conditions. What happens next is, mostly, not the operator's call.

What I find we're really building, when the work is working, is a kind of permission. Permission for the children to make off with the loose sticks and stay out longer than anyone planned. Permission, importantly, for the grandfather to stop watching for forty minutes because the safety is engineered into the bones of the thing and he can read his book.

Anyway. The leaves were not for sale to me. I was told this politely but firmly. I had not been there long enough to be a regular customer.z