It was the hottest day of the year. That kind of oppressive heat, thick heat, heat that sticks to the skin. Light poured over everything, into everything. Even the concrete looked like it needed a sit down.
Mercifully Queens gardens could cope with the heat, like it can cope with the four lanes of traffic, the roundabout and that peculiar fortress quality of downtown Croydon. It was quite a relief, because, let’s be honest, could so easily have been something else.
This place could have been hermetic. It could have turned its back. But it didn’t. It lets people in. It lets the gardens breathe, and lets people move through. There’s a kind of generosity to it. Porosity in practice. This isn’t a citadel of high-rise ambition. Paths don’t dead-end; instead, they led into Queen’s Gardens, a public park now softened and revitalised through community input. You move through the space, not just to it. That subtle difference, porosity, makes it a connector, not a boundary. It lets life leak in and out.
And that garden isn’t just backdrop. It’s foreground and that’s the point. The buildings don’t dominate it; they frame it. A new play terrain that was co-designed with the people who’d actually use it. Soft landings and loops and corners where stories can start. Those corners are vital for a child’s imagination, a place of fable and fairytale.
I’ve been thinking a lot about play. About what it does, and why we need it. How vital it is to my process, to telling a photographic story. It has to be play, not work; this is the how of discovering, the why of imagination.
Play, as it turns out, isn’t always bright colours and bark chippings. Sometimes it’s in the way a bench sits under a tree. Or how a path bends just so, inviting detours. It’s the freedom to loiter. To feel free. To not be hurried. Space to think and wonder.
Queen’s Quarter is more than 500 new homes, a vital resource, a story of partnership. L&Q, HUB, , Grant Associates and Allford Hall Monaghan Morris have together created something that isn’t just technically mixed-use, but genuinely mixed in how it functions for people. Families. Residents. Passers-by.
So, this is a place full of good ideas and a quietly radical reminder: play isn’t something we add to a place. It’s something we should start with. It’s not just about children. It’s about a kind of urban generosity that welcomes everyone in.
Here are a collection of photographs of that landscape, ironically mostly free of people: sensitivity to GDPR, to everyone’s right to play unobserved and free from the intrusion of a photographers lens, creates a particular set of images. But it’s easy to place yourself in that garden, protected from the noise and fumes of Croydon, a pocket of carefree contemplation.
