Hockerhill Adventure Playbarn

Hockerhill Adventure Playbarn is an indoor/outdoor play centre in Brewood Staffordshire.

When you walk through the front doors and into the welcome area, you are faced with the portcullis to keep marauders both in and out. As you enter through this, the scale of the play opens up in front of you.

The adventure play is built around the Royal Oak at its centre. It grows out of the ground and reaches up, complete with its Broad Oak leaves into the roof space. Underneath conceals a hidden play area and a climbing route to the giant slide that brings you back to ground level.

With masses of high climbing routes that links the Tudor Village to the castles, there's loads to explore for kids and families of all ages. There's also a specially designed toddler play area that's been created to challenge the smaller visitors, to allow them to slowly graduate to the more challenging play elements.

Weaving in and around some of the play structures is a go-cart track that takes you through doors to the outside and a long twisty track. Here you can race against friends and any adults who believe they still have Senna or Hamilton in their legs.

This all leads into the large outside area with zip wires for older and younger kids and loads of additional play structures, sand play and a further pagoda covered seating area to explore. This sits alongside a pop-up food and beverage outlet for drinks and snacks on the warmer days.

There's a sensory den for when some breakaway time is needed. For many families with children with additional needs, this can be the difference between a great day out and a genuine ordeal. There are other inclusive elements added within the play structures and accessibility was considered and designed in throughout.

Hockerhill Adventure Playbarn opened on 11th March 2024 and is open every day of the week for play, adventure with great coffee and food. You can see it here and book your tickets.

And, here are some images of the finished build.

Background

Chillington Hall, in Codsall Wood, Staffordshire, has been home to the Giffard family for over 800 years. The Hall and wider estate is rich with history and has close historic links to Boscobel House. This is where King Charles II was taken by the Giffard Family to be hidden inside an oak tree by their tenants, when he was escaping his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

The house and estate today is home to Charlie and Tessa Giffard who are the 30th generation of Giffards to make Chillington Hall their home. Working with the family and their advisors, our brief was to create a new day visitor attraction at Hockerhill farm on the edge of the Estate, within the village of Brewood.

Working within the newly built barn, we mined the history of the estate, the area and the family history to create a unique and completely bespoke indoor/outdoor adventure playbarn. The aim is to enable year-round adventure play, as well as deliver a great food and beverage offer for families.

The theming

Our creative team identified three key themes to work with for the adventure play.

- The traditional English landscape with the castles and fortified structures of Chillington Hall.
- The Royal Oak Tree that hid King Charles II along the Monarchs Way of the Staffordshire hills.
- The distinctive Tudor architecture of the bustling towns and traditional Staffordshire towns and villages.

You can see how this began to come to life within the barn and the outside area that is interconnected via the go-cart track and the opening doors to the outside space.

Looking at the side profile of the build within the barn space shows how carefully fitted it has been to the space.

With the design agreed and the massing all planned to ensure everything worked, we created CGI images of the finished play. When you see these alongside the finished build images, it clear, quite how close to reality they are.

The Build

You can see the build underway here. For the indoor work, a workshop was created for all of the timber work to be completed and also double up as dry storage for fixings and tools. Some of the structural elements had been built in the workshop, so progress was quick and began to take shape within a few days.

The team working on the outside were not so lucky and had to contend with some of the worst and wettest periods of weather we've ever known (including a lot of builds in the wilds of Scotland). Once a new land drainage system had been installed, things did get easier, and completion was on time, despite the setbacks.