The Addy

Year | 2021

Location | Knottingley, West Yorkshire, UK

Clients | The Old Quarry Adventure Playground

The Addy Live Project team has worked for 6 weeks with The Old Quarry Adventure Playground based in Knottingley’s Warwick Estate, a deprived and isolated ex-mining community in West Yorkshire. Known as “the Addy”, the charity was set up in 1972 and has always provided a place where children can go to feel safe and to learn through play. Their main project has always been to provide free, open-access adventure play for children and young people. In the last 10 years, they have expanded their services to the wider local community in order to compensate for the closure of other community venues.

The brief focused on future-proofing the Addy by creating financial sustainability and visions for improvements to the building and playground. Over the six weeks, we continually visited the Addy to engage with all the different age groups that use the space. Each time we returned, it was an opportunity to talk to and test out new ways of co-designing with children and adults. We experimented with both direct and indirect engagement, through suggestion boxes and posters, discussions groups, drawing workshops, modelling workshops, and even 1to1 scale building with the children. These workshops informed our architectural thinking and designs but more importantly empowered the children to articulate their ideas which they often struggle to express.

The success of our process led to us dividing our goals into four sections, two short-term and two long-term. Short-term interventions included a new protective shelter and ‘Play’ interventions outside. While long-term interventions included renovations to the existing building and the acquisition of new funding sources.

As travel expenses took up a lot of the budget, we decided to cover our own costs. The longer we worked with the Addy, the more we wanted to give back to the wonderful people we met. Through a series of bake sales, we have managed to raise £681.80.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theaddy_liveproject/

Credits

Student Team: 

Jennifer Chan, Greg Cockburn, Katie Cottle, Liyao Dai, Susannah Fairbank Angus, John Gray, Vincent Las Marias, Jennie Lua, Shruti Satish, Glenn Strachan, Hao Wen, Sirui Wang, Jie Yu

Mentor:

Lettice Drake