PART of Tavistock?s Meadows could be in line for a £300,000 face-lift ? in the form of a brand new flag-ship children?s park. The town?s works superintendent Wayne Southall is currently commissioning designs for a completely new play park, which could be situated in the Meadows using roughly the same footprint as the original. Mr Southall said such a park would include a large central feature, such as a mega-tower with slides, and many modern play pieces, the type of equipment that can be seen at large children?s entertainment centres like Woodlands, near Dartmouth. There would also be play pieces suitable for disabled children, including equipment for youngsters with hearing and visibility problems. ?Somewhere like the Meadows is really a prime location, and there?s nowhere really in the surrounding area that you could say is a play park of this kind of stature,? said Mr Southall. ?Yelverton has a nice little play park but it?s fairly similar to our own small ones in Tavistock. ?The bits of kit I am looking at would really be state of the art ? but of course they must be in keeping. ?For example, the stuff in Plymouth?s central park is very colourful. You have to look at whether something like that would fit in the vista of the Meadows. It?s going to be about getting the right balance.? Mr Southall said a flagship play park scheme was still only a proposal at present. ?We?ve developed most of our other play parks now and the Meadows is probably overdue for a bit of TLC,? said Mr Southall. ?Realistically, there are certain bits of equipment which need replacing in the next couple of years. In some cases replacement alone you can be talking £40,000, so you?ve got to be thinking, do we bite the bullet and do the whole park. ?Something has to be done in the near future, put it that way.? Chairman of the town council?s properties committee and one of the borough council?s youth champions, Cllr Mandy Govier, said nowadays children wanted something more challenging than swings and slides. The Meadows should be a park that all ages could use, not just toddlers. ?I think it would be a really great idea but it does come at a cost,? she said. ?The advantage of the climbing equipment is that lots of children can use it at once whereas only one person can use a swing. ?People love coming to The Meadows and we are so lucky in Tavistock to have the land to be able to do something like this.? She said with lots of new development in the pipeline around Tavistock there could potentially be some money available through planning gain or sports funding to encourage healthy activities. She said: ?As parents we all want to get our children away from computers and play outside and there are funds around at the moment which encourage this.? But town clerk Roger Howard was less optimistic about funding opportunities: ?Grants are very difficult to get these days because a lot of the money that would be available through the lottery is going to the Olympics,? he said. He said it was unlikely that the taxpayers would want to pay for a scheme like this as there were more people over 60 in Tavistock than under 21.
