‘Life-changing’: parents welcome £10m UK play centre for disabled children

Gympanzees near Bristol will be the first UK site of its type, catering for children unable to use regular playgrounds

It has been over a decade since Stephanie Wheen set out to create the UK’s first play and leisure centre specifically designed for disabled children.

Over the past 10 years, she and her team have raised millions of pounds, meticulously researched how to make the centre as inclusive as possible and spent years trialling sessions with disabled children. And soon, the doors to Gympanzees will open for the first time.

“It’s been so long in the making – I try picturing it and it’s just a lot of smiley people. I expect families are going to be quite awestruck because it’s been made for them when they’re so used to there being nothing,” said Wheen.

The idea was born in 2016 out of Wheen’s work as a children’s physiotherapist in Bristol. With her sessions constantly fully booked, she tried to get the disabled children she worked with to do more physical activity in the community so they would not need to rely so heavily on her service.

But it did not work. “Poor access, attitude, equipment that was the wrong size – children’s needs were just not being met in lots of different ways,” Wheen said. “It was completely heartbreaking because these children need exercise more than anyone.”

Research by the charity Scope has found that half of UK playgrounds are not accessible for disabled children, and children with disabilities are twice as likely to be obese than non-disabled children.

Wheen felt a purpose-built activity centre was the only way to address the gap. With a team of volunteers, she began booking Send schools during the holidays to run “pop-up” play and exercise sessions, bringing in three lorries loaded with specialist equipment.

They saw children’s physical and mental health improve instantly. Some walked, held themselves upright or rolled over independently for the first time; others laughed in a way they never had before. Some families travelled up to eight hours to attend the sessions.

“We had a thousand visitors over the first four weeks that we were open,” said Wheen. “Families thought it was amazing, but it was still a pop-up in a school – it wasn’t enough.”

Having proved the idea worked and there was high demand, they started to look for a permanent home – no easy task as a small charity. After years of hunting, they bought a 60-year-old former service station by the Severn Bridge, north-west of Bristol.

They used a loan of £2.2m to buy the 4,000 square metre (43,000 sq ft) site, and have raised over £10m to finish the project. They have £400,000 left to find.

The centre, which took three years to design, will have 10 spaces including a music room, gym, trampoline and climbing area, and dark and light sensory rooms, as well as a fully accessible outdoor play park.

“Playgrounds are notoriously not inclusive,” said Fran Garland, chief operating officer. “You see people sat in wheelchairs watching their siblings or their friends playing on everything, waiting for them to come back.

“So when we went to the designers we said we wanted a playground that was ‘What can I go on first?’ rather than just ‘What can I go on?’”

The two-storey soft play area with a slide is the first of its kind – it has two hoist systems making it fully accessible for wheelchair users.

There will be a party room with DJ equipment that can be controlled by eye-gaze technology. “We’ve got 10- and 12-year-olds who’ve never had a party before because they can’t find something that caters for them so this was really important,” said Garland.

There will be a cafe and a shop selling nappies and feeding tubes, as well as a lending library so parents can try out equipment at home that their child has enjoyed.

Families will be able to book different sessions depending on their child’s needs. Butterfly sessions are for children with complex medical needs, leopard sessions are for those with sensory needs and gorilla sessions are for those who find it challenging to socialise.

Parents with disabled children said the centre would be life-changing. Bethan Campbell-Watkins, whose five-year-old daughter, Malaya, has autism and learning difficulties, said she struggled to take her to play areas and parks.

“Malaya is really active so we would try lots of different groups and just get judged everywhere we go,” she said. “People stare when she’s dysregulated and she’s really upset, saying things like ‘Why can’t you control your child?’ She also has no safety awareness and places often aren’t secure.

“So I’m not exaggerating when I say Gympanzees is life-changing for families like us. I just can’t even imagine pulling up to a place where Malaya can just run in and be safe and we can feel comfortable.”

Kelly Cotter’s son, Adam, 15, is non-verbal and uses a wheelchair. She was able to take him to play areas when he was younger and she could manoeuvre him, but as he grew older, she could no longer manage it.

“We’ve always just tried to give him the best life chances,” she said. “We wanted him to have what every child should have, so we’d try to be creative about where we’d go but our choices became very narrow, and then they didn’t exist.

“So the size of this is just mind-boggling – these kids will finally be able to have a choice about what they want to do. I don’t think I can quite conceive it yet.”

Once it opens in spring, Wheen is expecting the centre to receive up to 200,000 visitors a year.

She wants to open 12 more across the country: “We want every child to be within an hour of Gympanzees. It is unacceptable, really, that this is the situation – what other child has to travel so far just to play?”