McMahan Park, London

Centrally located at 640 Adelaide St. N, McMahan Park has a wading pool, little league ball diamonds, and a small monkey bar play structure. I don’t want to call this a playground as it doesn’t have the regular features that a playground would normally have.

View of the wading pool at McMahan Park.

*note* there is construction being done at the front (Adelaide) side of the park which appears to have taken out the horseshoe pits. The construction area is fenced off.

Meredith Park, London

We were looking through the wading pool locations in the city and discovered that a couple of them are due to close for the 2020 season by the end of this week (August 15) so we thought we better get a move on to visit them. This brought us to Meredith Park in central London.

Meredith Park playground

Located at 450 Nelson St., Meredith Park is small, but quiet, despite its more central location. At this park there is a playground, wading pool, 2 basketball courts, a tennis court and there are public washrooms however they were not open when we visited.

Northridge Area – Fanshawe Optimist Park, Northridge Public School, St Mark Catholic School and a community pool

This morning we decided to take on the challenge of going to an area in London where we could visit three playgrounds, 1 wading pool (with public swimming pool) and had 1 picnic, for refuelling purposes, all in just under 3 hours.

We’ve decided to put these together as one review due to their close proximity to one another, and because two of the playgrounds are at schools and not a city park.

If we make Northridge community pool our starting point at 15 McLean Dr in North-east London you can hit 3 pretty good play grounds within a short easy walk of one another and also have a splash in the pool to cool off.

Excuse my rough markups on this map, but as you can see by the red marks these playgrounds are all very close together.

Springbank Park

The playground.

Today’s adventure took us to Springbank Park in South-west London, a park that, I’d guess, most Londoners have visited or at least know about.

Located at 1085 Commissioners Road W., along a stretch of the Thames River, Springbank Park is London’s largest park with over 30kms of paths and trails, 4 mini soccer pitches, picnic shelters, a bandshell, pavilion, skate park, playground, wading pool and is home to Storybook Gardens, a city run amusement park for young kids.

University Heights Park

Playground at University Heights Park

Tonight, in a desperate attempt to tire out our children so that they might sleep through the night, we decided an after supper trip to a park was in order. So we loaded our herd of children into the van and went to explore University Heights Park.

University Heights Park is located at 290 Trott Drive in North-west London. The park has a wading pool, play equipment, swings and a couple kiddie sized soccer pitches.

An important thing to note, I’m my opinion, is that all the park features are easily visible from one another so, if you have a gaggle of children like I do, you can keep an eye on them all even if they run off in different directions.

Our overall review of this park is “good”. It’s not great, but it is better than some of the small residential parks in the city.

Let’s start with the “good”. This park has a wading pool, and is one of only two city run wading pools that are running in the evenings, allowing you the chance to let the kids cool off, for free, before bedtime. This pool operates Tuesday to Saturday 2:30-7:30.

My oldest enjoying the wading pool.

The thing that makes wading pools so great if you have young kids is that, even at the maximum depth point, it is still shallow enough for a toddler to stand and play, while still being deep enough for the slightly older kids to lie down to “swim” and get thoroughly wet and cooled off. While you always have to practice water safety around any depth pool, at least with a wading pool you don’t have lug around floaties for the kids.

The playground is one large structure with a number of slides and some cute features for the wee ones, including a little hippo, a music feature, and some other house and serving style features underneath the structure. The ground cover around the playground is wood chips (which looked fairly fresh at the time of our visit)

A different angle of the playground, with a few of my kids clamouring away.

Some of the cute playground features for the little ones.

One thing that my kids noted was “missing” from this playground is more things to climb and be a monkey on. I acknowledge that monkey bars and climbing features are not for all kids, but for mine, it’s what can make or break a playground rating. There is a stand alone climbing frame at this playground, but it didn’t present enough of a challenge for my monkeys.

The climbing structure.

Additionally, the park has a swing set, two little league sized soccer pitches with small goal posts, and a community garden which you can rent a plot on from the city.

There are public washrooms at the park however they were not open at the time of our visit (and it’s unclear if they are open at all this summer) so I cannot comment on the state of them.

Now, the not-so-great aspects of this park.

• There is no parking lot, so you will have to park on the street, and there are also no sidewalks on the street so you either have to walk on the road, or across people’s lawns.
• The benches by the wading pool look pretty worn and not the smoothest.
• The ground cover around the swings is sand. While sand ground cover isn’t totally horrible, it’s really not that accessible, plus, sand near water equals mess.

Overall, this is a good park. The play equipment is large and easily manageable by all ages, the wading pool is always a big plus, and, according to another family that was there, it’s not normally that busy, but if you have super adventurous kids who like a challenge then they might feel that there’s something lacking here.