Cavendish Community Primary School, Manchester

A Wetpour touch-up and a brand new Play Tower

When Cavendish Community Primary School called us, they were concerned about a section of wetpour in their playground.  Ideally they were looking to install a new play tower into it, but its age had caused some inevitable shrinking that had left a gap all around the edge.  It was proving to be a trip hazard, so something had to be done.

However, once we’d had a look at the space and tested the integrity of the rubber, we found that there was no need to replace the whole section (which would have been costly).  Instead we cut the shrunken edges into straight lines and filled the gap around the area with a contrasting blue wetpour, thereby repairing and beautifying the existing surface.

With the first issue taken care of, now we were onto the really fun stuff.  Cavendish wanted a play tower with a natural look to suit their playground.  And to keep us on our toes, we needed to design it to fit the existing square wetpour space.  Having discussed the desires of the staff, we spoke to the children to get an idea of what they would like on the play tower, and in the end we decided to build a modified version of our Wildwood Jumbo Tower.  We switched out the standard fireman’s pole for a rope ladder and added a climbing net, and to finish the tower we opted for a dark green rotomould slide in-keeping with the natural look the school were aiming for.  Typically the Wildwood Jumbo Play Tower is built in a long line, but for the space at Cavendish we reoriented it to suit a square space.

With the tower in place, we patched the surface up with the same blue wetpour that we’d used around the edge, and we were done.  A little revitalisation and an impressive yet unobtrusive play tower for the kids at Cavendish.