Family leisure destinations live or die on one simple test: can they keep every member of the family entertained at once? At K2 Crawley, Everyone Active set out to answer that question with a single, purpose-built play frame. A play frame that gives toddlers their own safe, dedicated space while giving older children a genuinely adventurous, multi-level playground right alongside it. We at The Play Company were brought in to design and install exactly that for Everyone Active.
Everyone Active is one of the UK’s longest-established leisure operators, running leisure and cultural centres in partnership with local councils across the country. Its centres combine swimming pools, gyms, sports halls and studios with family and community activities, and K2 Crawley is one of its flagship sites.
A busy, multi-purpose leisure destination serving families across the local area. As with any Everyone Active site, the brief was to add a facility that would broaden the centre’s appeal, extend visit times, and give families with children of different ages a genuine reason to choose K2 Crawley over anywhere else.
Play areas inside busy leisure centres must work hard for the space they occupy, whilst also serving everyone who walks through the door.
K2 Crawley’s visiting families span the full age range, from babies taking their first steps to confident older children looking for a proper challenge, and a single, one-size-fits-all play frame was never going to serve both. Cram too much toddler-friendly equipment in, and older children lose interest quickly; build purely for bigger kids and the centre risks shutting out its youngest, and often most frequent, visitors.
So, Everyone Active needed a frame that could do both convincingly, within one footprint, without either age group feeling like an afterthought.
We worked with Everyone Active and designed a two-tier play frame split deliberately by age. Around 90% of the structure is given over to an ambitious over-3s play zone spanning multiple levels, while a dedicated under-3s section sits on the ground floor. Self-contained, low-level, and built specifically around the way toddlers play.
The over-3s zone includes:
The under-3s zone includes:
Keeping the under-3s area self-contained and at ground level meant parents could relax, knowing their toddler wasn’t sharing space with older children moving at speed through the frame above, whilst still being close enough that the whole family could arrive, play and leave together.
K2 Crawley now has a single-play-area installation that genuinely serves the whole family, rather than compromising one age group over another. Now, older children get a frame with real scale and a challenge with multiple slides, climbing routes, and an interactive sports pitch that gives them reasons to keep coming back. And toddlers, well, they get a space that’s entirely their own, built around how they play rather than a scaled-down version of the big kids’ equipment.
For Everyone Active, that means a facility that appeals across the broadest possible range of visitors, encourages longer visits, and gives families with children of different ages no reason to go anywhere else.
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