Play at the Heart of Place

The recently opened Stockton Waterfront urban park is a transformational public space in Stockton-on-Tees, bringing residents, visitors, businesses and communities together to meet, celebrate and make memories

This summer, a brand-new play space has opened at Stockton Waterfront Urban Park, transforming the riverside into a vibrant destination for families and communities across the North East.

A collaborative, landscape-led approach to creating meaningful play in the public realm

At Stockton Waterfront Urban Park, play is not an addition, it’s the catalyst. Delivered as part of a bold regeneration programme, this new public space reconnects the town with the River Tees and places children, families and community life firmly at its centre. Working alongside Ryder Architecture, Timberplay has shaped a destination where play, landscape and community come together.

Listening first to create inclusive play

Through engagement with the Stockton Parent Carer Forum, Timberplay’s design team gained valuable insight into the lived experience of families navigating play spaces. This shaped decisions across the scheme, from access routes and spatial flow, to how play experiences are shared. The result is a place where children don’t simply play alongside one another, but together. Wheelchair users can access key features, sensory experiences are woven throughout the landscape, and choice and independence have been considered from the very beginning.

Delivering depth of play

Rather than a series of isolated elements, Timberplay, in partnership with Ryder Architecture has created an interconnected play landscape that invites collaborative play, risk taking, and creates a forum for imagination. The design was carefully created to provide multiple ways to engage with each feature, test themselves and develop new skills over time.

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of this Urban Park isn’t confined to the playground alone - play now spills across the wider park. Families wander between destinations, children discover climbing boulders and embankment slides as they explore, and playful moments happen naturally as people move through the landscape.

Large-scale towers rising up to 12 metres anchor the space, offering climbing, lookout points and multi-level exploration. Around them, a network of elements unfolds: traversing routes, nets, slides and social spaces that encourage both individual challenge and shared experience.

This is complemented by features that bring a different layer of play; sand and water play for collaboration and creativity, swings and movement for sensory feedback, and quieter spaces for those all important pauses.

Supporting community life through playful public space

What makes this Urban Park distinctive is how play integrates into the wider public realm. It is a space where teenagers gather, families spend time together, and the wider community reconnects with the town centre and riverside.

Water play, embankment slides, climbing boulders and ‘play-on-the-way’ elements stitch play into movement across the site, which encourages exploration beyond a single destination.

As with many Timberplay projects, the landscape itself becomes part of the play offer, supporting informal play, social interaction and everyday encounters that extend beyond traditional playground boundaries.

Now open, the success of Stockton Waterfront is already visible in how people are using it, the park has already had thousands of visitors with community groups utilising the space in a variety of ways.

One local running group shared a video of them running up the steps and then whizzing down the 15-meter slide to finish their training session - a true example of how a well-designed space can provide playful moments across the generations.

For play professionals, it offers a clear message: when play is embedded in placemaking, when collaboration is genuine, and when inclusion is rooted in real experience, the result is not just a playground, but a place that belongs to everyone.

Stockton Waterfront already belongs to its community

At Timberplay, success isn’t measured by drawings or specifications, but by how a space is used and the life it takes on after it finished.

Watching Stockton Waterfront fill with people has been a reminder that when play is treated as an integral part of placemaking, rather than an afterthought, it creates places that people of every age genuinely want to spend time in. For us, that’s what this project will always be about.

[https://www.timberplay.com](https://www.timberplay.com/)