Town Toolkit | Reinvigorate your town centre park: Catherine Street,…
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Reinvigorate your town centre park: Catherine Street, Dumfries

playpark
courtesy of Include Us, Dumfries

Being able to play is something that all children and young people should be able to enjoy, regardless of ability – and creating that opportunity in a town centre makes it accessible to more people, as well as helping make the town centre more attractive to families. This was the driving motivation of Dumfries community organisation IncludeUs in creating the Catherine Street play park and community garden.

Catherine Street Inclusive Play Park & Community Garden has been created on the edge of the town centre, transforming an underused green space into a park that is inclusive and accessible to all. After local community consultation, this community-led project raised money, employed specialist designers and secured a 20 year lease through Community Asset Transfer.

The park is now up and running. It includes the only inclusive, adapted outdoor play platform house in the world, enabling adults to enter and support youngsters with disabilities or indeed adults in wheelchairs to join in with their children. You can read more about how the park was set up and what it contains here.

One of the great things about the Catherine Street play park is that it’s right opposite The Usual Place – a fully accessible community café and social enterprise which provides training, education and employability skills for young people with additional support needs. The combination of accessible and sociable indoor and outdoor meeting places is a great asset to the town centre.

More information about the Catherine Street play park:

For more information on Dumfries town centre, check out the Inspiration section.

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