During the 1970s community groups across Manchester set up adventure playgrounds as a response to the need for children's play and leisure provision in new estates like Hulme and Beswick and older areas such as Moss Side and Cheetham Hill. Parents, children and staff built the playgrounds and despite their basic facilities and minimal funding they offered children a friendly and supportive environment and a year round programme of supervised play provision. In 1973 these groups came together to set up Manchester Adventure Play, an association for the support and development of adventure play in the City.

In recent years all our four playgrounds –The Addy , Moss Side, North Hulme and Ardwick have been redeveloped and now have modern purpose built centres and new adventure play areas. The playgrounds are no longer self built but an integral part of the design process has been consultation and design work with children and young people and the final designs replicate many structures from the self-build playgrounds. In the summer of 2005 our playground in Wythenshawe moved to a new centre which now offers a range of play, sport and youth work provision to children and young people from 0 to 19 years of age

The physical changes do not alter the main purpose of the adventure playgrounds, the provision of free open access play facilities throughout the year – after school, during school holidays and at weekends. All four adventure playgrounds operate in areas with high levels of poverty and social exclusion and are the only facilities of this nature in their areas. They provide opportunities for supervised and unsupervised play in informal and more structured settings and offer varied and stimulating programmes of indoor and outdoor activities. Programmes include activities that offer children opportunities to explore, through play, issues which affect their everyday lives, such as racism, health and bullying. Off site activities such as day trips and camps are part of the programme.

The adventure playground still offers a friendly and supportive environment and one that is acceptable to children and young people who would not use more formal provision. Our centres have been successful in developing wider provision to meet the specific needs of children and young people in their local communities and in other parts of the City. Current projects now include

• work with local secondary schools in providing complementary education for non attenders and supporting their return to school
• a purpose built youth fitness centre
• provision of daytime and evening youth work facilities for young people
• work with young people to reduce involvement in crime
• outreach sport and street play provision in areas with no other facilities

Our 12 projects and centres worked with 2597 children and young people last year – 22% of the 0 to 16 year olds in the 5 wards in which our work is focused (Moss Side, Ardwick, Hulme, Wythenshawe and Lightbowne)