Kew Gardens Playground: 4 Areas to Experience

Kew Garden’s Playground or just simply “Children’s Garden” is a fantastic place for kids to have a good time while learning a thing or two about nature. The play area has all the things you would expect from a tip-top playground including trampolines, slides, splash pool, climbing structures, water pumps and sandpits.

It’s All About Nature

Kew Gardens playground (aka Children’s Garden) in South West London is ambitiously trying to capture the four key elements of life: Earth, Air, Sun and Water.

Different play areas are matched with each theme, so in the Air Garden you can jump on trampolines and climb up in the treetops, in the Water Garden kids can play with water pumps and enjoy the splash pool and so on. We love the concept and the level of ambition, but we also have to be honest and admit that we didn’t really have time to reflect and explain for our kids what the different areas represented.

For our kids, it’s all about having as much fun as possible when going to a playground and I wouldn’t expect them to sit down and thoughtfully comment on how the elements of life are reflected in the different play elements. I suspect it’s the same with other kids :-)

An expensive day out

Overall our kids really enjoyed Kew Gardens Playground. The facilities and play elements are top-notch, they felt safe and are well kept as you would expect considering the recent refurbishment. At the same time, a family ticket to Kew Gardens will cost you £40 for a family of four. Which means you should also expect a lot more than a nice free public playground like Diana Memorial Playground or Greenwich Park Playground.

If you’re mainly planning on visiting the playground, paying the full ticket price might not be of great value. At the end of the day, kids don’t really care about playground design – it’s all about the thrill of swooshing down the slides and climbing to the top of the climbing frames. But if you manage to find the energy and inspire your kids to see the rest of Kew Gardens you’ll get a lot more out of your visit.

The two-hour window is really short

You don’t really know when your time-slot will be until you are at the gate. This makes it hard to plan your day, especially when it comes to younger children depending on their nap time as well as how to organise lunch. Worst case, you get to spend the majority of your two-hour time slot with a sleeping toddler and sitting in the shade somewhere having lunch. Our best advice is to plan your visit having a few alternatives plans for how to spend the day, depending on the availability of the time-slots. We chose a time-slot slightly later than what we were initially offered so we could sort out the lunch and nap-time beforehand. Which again lead to a couple of hours of relaxing in the sun next to the park and getting home a lot later than planned.

Younger and older children mixing up

The divisions of the play areas have been made based on the themes (earth, air, sun, water), and not so much based on the ability or age of children. From one point of view, this is really nice since families can stay together without splitting up. On the other side, we did experience our two-year-old being trampled over by older children quite a few times. This is not a deal-breaker as such, it just means you need to be prepared to keep an eye on your smallest ones at all times.

The garden is divided up in many elements

We appreciate the efforts to educate children around the four basic elements. At the same time, the many divisions of the park in different play-areas with different themes make it hard for parents to keep an eye on their children and let them play and explore on their own. This is in contrast to other nature-themed adventure playgrounds such as Peckham Rye Playground where the landscape is completely open. We are strong believers in children being able to explore and play on their own without parents interference.

Summarizing Kew Gardens Playground

Based on the quality of the play areas and facilities we would say Kew Gardens has one of London’s best playgrounds if not the best. Our kids truly enjoyed the day, which was our main goal with the visit. At the same time, we as parents felt more on edge than in many other playgrounds we have been to. This due to the time-pressure of the two-hour window, risk of older kids tramping on our toddler and the limited view because of all the divisions into multiple separate gardens.

Don’t forget to check the rest of the London playgrounds we have rated as well as our favourite city farms!