Triangle Adventure Playground

Only a mile from Westminster, the Triangle Adventure Playground serves an area of inner-city deprivation familiar in many parts of many British cities. Its ‘wasteland’ characteristic is inherent in its odd shape and its entirely haphazard juxtaposition with its neighbours. It has the dull backside of a secondary school on one boundary, an ordinary 1950’s primary school on another but then the back gardens of an attractive terrace of two-storey early Victorian town houses on its third. Beyond, however, sprawls the urban context that both physically and socially proscribes the lives of the children it serves. Within a few hundred yards lies a dense mix of red-brick galleried pre and post-war council blocks and an estate of mixed terraces and high rise towers from the nineteen-sixties. The busy transport nexus of Vauxhall lies one way, the stews of Brixton another. Threaded through all are occasional roads of elegant Victorian and earlier terraces. The Oval cricket ground with its famous gas-holders and the railway viaduct to Waterloo are close by.