My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
Yes
I am 18 years of age or above, by the application deadline.
Yes
My organisation is a registered UK entity and has a London-based address.
Yes
My organisation is a non-profit (e.g. school, university, or local authority) — not a for-profit, which can only join as a partner.
Yes
If there is a for-profit organisation as a partner in my initiative, they work on a cost-recovery basis only.
Yes
My solution is implemented at scale, or if not, I have a clear business plan, a minimum viable solution (prototype, pilot, or proof of concept), evidence of access to a lease for the space you are leveraging, and evidence of work or impact in London within your coalition.
Yes
I am aware that, if I am submitting more than one application to a Challenge run by Ashoka and Go! London, only one of them is able to progress through the stages.
Yes
Are you an employee (and their children and grandchildren) of Ashoka or any of its respective affiliates and participating advertising and promotion agencies?
No
I have read and accepted the Challenge Terms & Conditions.
Yes
First Name
Jeffrey
Last Name
Lennon
Pronouns
He/Him
I would like to receive notifications and updates about Go London!, Ashoka, Ashoka Changemakers, and other Ashoka opportunities.
1
Are you an Ashoka Fellow?
No
Are you applying from an organization founded by an Ashoka Fellow?
No
If you are applying from an organization founded by an Ashoka Fellow, please specify the name and organisation of the fellow below.
Lead Organisation Name
Hammersmith and Fulham Council
Year that you started/ registered your organisation
1965
Initiative Title
The Nomadic Playground
My initiative is designed for and delivered in London
1
Website URL(s) or Social Media Handles
www.lbhf.gov.uk
Initiative Stage
Growth (You’ve moved past the very first activities; working towards the next level of expansion.)
Sectors/Themes: What topic does your project most directly relate to?
Children & Youth
Initiative Summary: Describe your initiative in one sentence
The Nomadic Playground is a youth-led initiative set out to systematically change how play is implemented in London. It turns vacant and underused urban sites into play spaces overnight through a fleet of modular, co-designed assets and challenges our current system on how to engage with young people for true collaboration. This project is built on the shared belief that play is one of the most powerful forces for wellbeing, connection and development and that young people themselves - not adults acting on their behalf - should be the ones deciding what that play looks like and where it happens. This conviction is shared by every partner in this collaboration, and it is what holds an unusually diverse group of organisations together. We are a local authority and a major developer with one of the largest vacant development sites in central London, leaning on the expertise of a leading architecture practice that specialises in meanwhile space activation. Opportunities for play remain siloed and inaccessible to far too many young people. We believe the Nomadic Playground can spark a real transformation in how play happens - starting in Hammersmith and Fulham and inspiring other boroughs to follow.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve and who will benefit the most from your solution? How close are you to the problem and/or community impacted?
Play inspires creativity and empowers children, yet access to high quality play provisions is a known challenge faced across London, and this also true for Hammersmith and Fulham. In 2025 an independent evaluation was conducted to assess the quality of play provisions across the borough’s parks and open spaces. Alongside this evaluation and GiGL data from 2024, the borough can be said to have areas of high deficiency in access to nature and quality playgrounds. The report detailing these findings established the need for a Play Forum focused on monitoring how play grounds are managed and improved, while also exploring opportunities for broader play initiatives beyond traditional playgrounds, such as play streets and community events. The conventional response to this challenge has been to invest in permanent sports facilities. However, these fixed infrastructures are expensive to build, tied to one location, and often fail to reach the young people who need them most - particularly those who lack confidence, transport, or feel intimidated by formal settings. At the same time, development and expansion of our city means there is increasing pressure on space. Urban sites are assessed based on commercial potential, with many sites remaining vacant for long periods while land is parcelled up and prioritised for high-value development. This leaves a critical gap: play spaces are being squeezed out of a city that desperately needs them, while thousands of young Londoners are left without safe places to be active, connected, and free.
Your approach: How are you/ will you addressing the problem outlined above? How does your solution unlock or reimagine access to spaces for sport and physical activity? What role do landowners, local authorities, or other decision-making stakeholders play in your approach? We'd love to know about the origin of your idea, and what was your "aha" moment" that led you to take action?
Our approach rests on the idea that play infrastructure should be flexible enough to adapt alongside changing urban spaces - activating a vacant development site today, a housing estate courtyard tomorrow, and an empty car park the week after, ensuring temporary spaces are activated for the benefit of the community. The answer to how the fleet of nomadic playground equipment will feel, look, and move will be the result of a series of co-design workshops with young people. This forms the design brief for our deployable play modules. While young people shape what the play equipment looks like, LBHF and local partners will concurrently map and assess potential locations across the borough, evaluating ground conditions, spatial constraints, and safety profiles. The strength of our approach lies in how these two workstreams refine each other. The typology and selection of sites will be directly informed by the young people's ideas. At the same time, the real-world refinement of these sites will be fed into subsequent engagement sessions so that young people can iterate and evolve their original models in response to different proposed locations. Running as a concurrent third workstream is our collaboration with a chosen charity to map out technical parameters for storage, maintenance, and fleet mobilisation. Jan Kattein Architects will thoughtfully integrate these practical maintenance insights directly into the design. Following these co-design workshops, the initial activation of the playground will deploy onto a defined location within the Earls Court development site, before touring onward to further mapped out locations, primarily council owned, but with a flexible approach that will also consider other spaces which could be community or privately owned.
Collaboration with young people and the community: In what ways does your initiative engage young people and community members closest to the problem? What role do they play in building the solution you deliver?
We are clear about how we define collaboration in this project. Our collective adult experience is limited and we know that young people hold the answers to the questions we are trying to unlock. The engagement workshops are therefore structured in complementary phases: Firstly, we will begin with speculative, imaginative sessions held within the local area close to the Earls Court site to encourage young people to envision the type of play spaces they want to see. In subsequent sessions - once we have technical knowledge of the locations - we will bring specific site parameters to the table, asking participants how they would overcome any physical constraints. It is essential that young people are actively involved in the technical decisions around site selection and refinement, alongside defining the play equipment. Our design workshops planned to take place in June / July 2026 at locations which include Avonmore Primary School on the West Kensington/ Gibbs Green estates, Fulham Cross Academy, and with the 14th Fulham Scouts are structured as interactive discussion and model-making sessions. Rather than asking students to put complex spatial opinions into text, we will use physical crafting to draw out their instinctive understanding of movement and play. These raw concepts will be translated by JKA into buildable templates. Working with a specialised charity ensures that children recovering from trauma, young people with disabilities, and those for whom traditional sport feels unwelcoming are centred throughout. The operational anchor of this collaboration is our unique, paid Space Ambassador programme. Young people recruited from the borough will be trained, and paid to hold executive decision-making authority such as approving design briefs.
Potential for/Evidence of Impact: How do you imagine your initiative will make a difference in unlocking spaces for and access to physical activity and sport so far? If you have already implemented it, what difference have you made so far? What is the impact your initiative has had , and or what impact do you envision having in the future?
We will measure impact across three main metrics to verify our model: Participation: monitored by the Space Ambassadors via attendance logs, targeting a minimum of 500 children using the play structures during the initial Earls Court activation, and an additional 1,000 young people reached through the touring rollout over 18 months. We will also involve 50 - 100 young people directly through the workshops and Space Ambassador programme. Spatial impact: managed by LBHF and ECDC, with a strict target to open up and activate at least three underused urban spaces or estate locations for regular community play within 18 months. Scalability and learning: mapped by Jan Kattein Architects, who will compile and publish all toolkits, fabrication details, strategies, and legal access frameworks into an open-source platform to enable independent replication across other London boroughs. The partnership provides a highly credible foundation for delivery. LBHF holds direct statutory ownership of the housing estates, public paths, and community assets that form the playground's touring network. This builds upon established municipal Street Play schemes and directly answers our internal community needs assessments, which identified enhanced play as a priority. Jan Kattein Architects has delivered participatory projects with over 10,000 young Londoners, while a charity of choice such as Solidarity Sports, provides verified grassroots trust with high-need families. ECDC's prior activations at the Empress Space have already drawn over a million visitors to a site closed off for a generation, proving that the space can draw huge numbers of people when activated.
Innovation: What is different about your initiative compared to other solutions that are already out there? How is your approach original and innovative?
Most temporary play projects are self-contained; they happen, people enjoy them, and then they are gone - and too often quickly forgotten. The Nomadic Playground introduces an entirely original approach where longevity and intent are built directly into temporary assets. The modular equipment is designed with permanence in mind - manufactured from sustainable, creatively sourced, repurposed elements built to be demountable, repairable, and capable of moving from site to site as a long-term community resource. Because the fleet is modular and designed for rapid deployment, it can respond dynamically to emergency space requests from residents or local ward teams. This level of agility removes the inflexibility of traditional fixed-site development, allowing the Nomadic Playground to function as a truly responsive, on-demand resource across the borough. At the heart of this innovation is the direct and lasting connection it creates between what young people design on a temporary site and what gets built permanently on their doorstep. When the Nomadic Playground is packed up and leaves a space, there is a danger that the excitement and enthusiasm created within the local community dissipates and is quickly forgotten. By experiencing an underused space transformed through energy, creativity and play, local young people can see first-hand what is possible in a vacant space which could inspire them to initiate their own ideas. We are also exploring how a physical marker could be left ‘The Nomadic Playground Was Here’, perhaps through a plaque, or mural/ art installation, designed and placed by the youth participants. LBHF is exploring how those communities that benefited from the temporary installation can then be further engaged in the future use of the space.
Viability and Scalability: How are you setting your initiative up for success, and what is your plan to ensure operational sustainability of your solution and its impact? What are your ideas for scaling your initiative to the next level?
The project is designed so that available grant funding goes directly into delivery. ECDC provides land, security, on-site storage, and fabrication support, meaning our development budget is not absorbed by commercial rent or site overheads. LBHF provides the necessary governance, statutory compliance, and touring infrastructure through its ownership of public assets across the borough. Drawing on extensive experience in “meanwhile” architecture and activation, Jan Kattein Architects recognises that the number one cause of failure in temporary interventions is the absence of a robust plan for ongoing care. This is why the integration of A Space ambassador Charity - with the professional expertise and local roots to properly manage the structures - is essential. JKA's experience ensures we address operational viability from day one: optimising how the fleet packs down efficiently, how it is maintained, and who is incentivised to care for it. To ensure that our rapid deployment within a single day is legally viable and safe for local authority deployment, JKA is designing all installation templates to fully comply with UK public safety standards (BS EN 1176/1177) for playground equipment. Scalability is embedded through our open-source digital toolkit, allowing other local authorities to adapt and reproduce the safety compliance frameworks independently. Furthermore, in the longer term, the project will create a long-term revenue model by allowing schools, housing associations, developers, and business improvement districts to hire the assets to activate their own spaces. Income from these hires will directly fund ongoing repairs, fleet transport, and the continued employment of our youth Space Ambassadors, moving the project on from initial grant dependency .
Roles and Responsibilities: Describe how responsibilities are shared among your team or partners.
Responsibilities are clearly divided according to each partner's specialist expertise and governance role: LBHF (Lead Applicant): holds overall statutory accountability for the project, manages the development grant and financial governance, leads the borough-wide touring strategy, and coordinates access to council-owned estates, parks, and facilities. The Earls Court Development Company (Private Sector Partner): provides secure, cost-free access to sites for the initial activation, manages on-site security and equipment storage, and support from its internal staff and technical consultant teams including around marketing and communications, and access to the wider development sector. Jan Kattein Architects (Design Consultant ): conducts space auditing and site suitability mapping, facilitates the co-production workshops, and translates youth ideas into buildable, safe and demountable temporary play equipment using repurposed materials, ensuring that all moveable blueprints are built in strict accordance with UK public safety standards (BS EN 1176/1177) for playground equipment. They are also responsible for programme activation and operations throughout the project phase. A local charity (Community Partner): supporting the project via engagement with local families and the recruitment and training of the youth Space Ambassadors and participation in certain events and activities. The 14th Fulham Scouts (Community Partner): brings an established intergenerational community presence rooted on the Earls Court site itself, participating throughout the co-design process and connecting sessions to the wider local neighbourhood.
Upcoming Milestones: Please provide an overview of the milestones that are required for your initiative to come to fruition/to grow.
Months 1 to 2: Stakeholder mobilisation. Formalising service level agreements, establishing governance structures, setting up risk frameworks, and beginning initial site mapping and suitability assessments alongside JKA's outreach to local schools and youth-centred organisations. Months 2 to 4: Co-design workshops. Delivering hands-on tactile design workshops with pupils at Fulham Cross Academy, Avonmore Primary School, the 14th Fulham Scouts, and Solidarity Sports. Jan Kattein Architects have extensive expertise in working with young people, and will begin each session by presenting weak or unsuitable design proposals for participants to critique and reject, creating the conditions for young people to assert their own ideas with confidence. Following this, the young people will start crafting, designing, and drawing their ideas, which Jan Kattein Architects will turn into buildable templates. Months 4 to 8: Technical design, fabrication, and testing. Engaging community members and workshop pupils in manufacturing the modular fleet. Testing the physical moveability, playability, and rapid pack-down functionality with a local space ambassador charity to establish operational parameters. Month 9 onwards: Launch. Opening the initial youth-led Nomadic Playground activation at the Earls Court Empress Space. Months 12 to 18: Borough-wide touring. Relocating the modular fleet to the first council-identified location, capturing participation data and sentiment tracking, and assessing behavioural outcomes before moving to subsequent sites. Months 16 to 18: Produce an open-source toolkit and long-term hire model. Publishing the open-source operational guide with an information-sharing event programme, transitioning the play fleet into a self-sustaining community hire structure.
Capacity-Building Participation and Support Funding: If you were to make it as a finalist, you will be required to participate in an 8-week capacity building programme. If funding/ cost is a barrier to your participation, we may be able to offer up to 10,000 GBP of grant money available to support you. Please break down below, if it is the case, what costs you would incur and you would need covered. (Please note that there are restrictions on how the grant money may be used; please refer to the T&Cs for further details.
As lead applicant, LBHF would manage grant funding to ensure full and meaningful participation in the eight-week capacity-building programme, particularly to ensure the young people and community members at the heart of this project can participate alongside institutional partners. This would recognise lived expertise as a professional contribution and ensuring financial barriers do not exclude the young people this project is designed to serve. Costs would include participation costs for community members attending design and development sessions and external facilitation costs for community engagement sessions held during the capacity-building programme, ensuring co-production continues throughout the finalist stage. Costs for programme facilitation, design, delivery and fabrication would be recovered from relevant partners.
Now that you've explored what it truly means to put young people at the centre, how are you designing your initiative so that young people are genuine co-leaders and co-creators of the initiative?
We know that genuine co-creation is harder than it looks. Standard youth advisory boards or councils tend to be structured in ways that inadvertently reproduce adult authority, where young people are invited to respond to predefined proposals rather than originate them. Our process begins by inviting the right participants into the room. We are specifically recruiting young people who live near the Earls Court site - those who have grown up alongside an urban zone that was closed off to them for years. And will now have a direct stake in activating this land, as this is the first stop on the Nomadic Play trail. The design sessions planned to take place in June and July 2026 will use drawing, prototyping and spatial model-making to allow young people to express their instinctive understanding of movement and play without having to translate it into formal written language. The ideas that emerge will be refined by Jan Kattein Architects into buildable, working templates. The children and adult leaders of the 14th Fulham Scouts will be woven into this process throughout, adding an established community dimension and an intergenerational perspective. The same young people who take part in the co-design workshops will move directly into the technical design and testing phase with us. They will physically test the modular fleet, see their own ideas brought to life, and experience first-hand what works. This hands-on involvement turns them into genuine co-creators refining the final product through play. The Space Ambassadors provide the project's ongoing governance. Recruited, trained, and paid, they hold formal authority to approve design briefs, test prototype functionality, and determine where the playground travels next. They will be trained as peer researchers, interviewing participants to capture what the experience meant to people in their own words.
What partnerships and collaborations are most critical to delivering and sustaining your initiative and how are you building/ plan to build them?
Each stakeholder in this project addresses a specific gap that the others cannot fill, and this cross-sector combination is what makes delivery possible. Hammersmith and Fulham Council provides the statutory foundation: the permits for public highway usage, the coordination of compliance, and the alignment of the touring schedule with the borough's Play Strategy and estate improvement programmes. Without this anchor, moving the playground through multiple public sites would face significant practical and legal barriers. ECDC contributes secure, cost-free access to one of London's most prominent development sites, along with on-site storage, security and consultant support. This in-kind contribution allows the development grant to go entirely into engagement, fabrication and community activity rather than commercial overheads. Jan Kattein Architects provides the technical expertise to turn what young people design in a workshop into assets that are genuinely safe, buildable and moveable. The chosen charity acts as the project’s essential bridge to the communities we aim to serve. It will hold guardian oversight of the project and will manage the play equipment as a hireable asset. After we open-source the designs for use by other boroughs, the fleet will remain accessible while enabling the charity to cover its operational overheads. The 14th Fulham Scouts, based at the Earls Court Community Hub on the site itself, bring a longstanding, intergenerational community presence and a direct connection to the young people and families this project is for. By considering the structure outlined in Hart’s ladder of children's participation, our relationship and the level of engagement we get from the young people from Fulham Cross Academy and Avonmore Primary School is critical. They shape more than just the design. Through the Go London capacity building programme delivered by Ashoka, we have also had the opportunity to connect with a range of other innovative organisations working on some genuinely exciting approaches to similar challenges. We are actively open to developing partnerships with some of these organisations as the project evolves. We did not start with a closed model, but with the aspiration to find the best possible version of this project, and we are willing to think creatively about who helps us build it. This partnership brings together local democratic accountability, private sector resources and input from a wider design network, genuine community reach, design excellence and genuine civic energy in a way that none of the partners could replicate independently. That combination, and the shared belief in the power of play that underpins it, is the project's greatest strength.
What are you measuring, how are you measuring it, and what does the data tell you so far (quantitative and qualitative)?
One of the responsibilities of the young Space Ambassadors (who are young people that live locally to the Earls Court Development) is the collection of data to measure the impact of the play equipment. Local young people will be trained in practical data collection tools, (outlined in the budget provided). Their key responsibilities will also include recording daily attendance numbers, supporting participant surveys, and social media promotion. This approach delivers multiple benefits: it equips young people with valuable skills in data collection, programming, and project management, whilst also enabling them to feel genuinely invested and fully part of the project. The findings from each space activation will feed back into the Nomadic Playground process, allowing the assets, programme and approach to be actively refined and improved as the project develops. The full dataset, methodology and learning will be published as part of the planned open-source toolkit, converting individual data points into systemic knowledge for the sector.
Long-term impact: what lasting systems change are you seeking to create and how will you know when it has happened?
The long-term change we are working towards is a shift in how decisions about public space get made and how they are used. Too often, temporary activations and permanent development including play facilities are designed and operated as entirely separate activities. Developers run meanwhile and engagement programmes; but what young people say and do in those programmes rarely influences what gets built or how a local authority approaches play. We want to change that. The Nomadic Playground establishes a working model in which the design choices made by young people during a temporary activation are carried forward in shaping permanent spaces. If the project succeeds, the spatial preferences and ideas generated by local children and families will help shape the design of the new neighbourhood being built on their doorstep at Earls Court as well as the potential to influence the wider play approach across the borough. That is a meaningful shift in changing who has a voice in how their community is shaped. Over the longer term, we hope this demonstrates a replicable approach: that temporary, youth-led interventions can function as a genuine design tool for permanent public space and the use of it. If other developers and local authorities take up this model, the project will have changed something about how urban development and place activation works in London. The plan to create an open-source toolkit with the operational templates, blueprints, design, legal access models, risk management and operational guidance will allow communities and groups to run their own versions and further develop the model. Furthermore, a group of young people from Hammersmith and Fulham will have developed real skills and confidence as active participants in decisions that affect their lives. That is the lasting legacy.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us that you were not able to share in previous questions?
A central part of our planning from the outset has been how the project sustains itself once the grant period ends. The assets are designed with this in mind: built from climate-conscious, repairable materials with a low ongoing cost, they are intended to last well beyond the initial activation. Following the formal project period, ownership and management of the fleet will transfer to a dedicated play delivery organisation. The Nomadic Playground then functions as a hireable resource, available to community groups, housing associations, academy trusts, business improvement districts, developers and private landowners who want to activate their own underused spaces. The hire model works on a cross-subsidy principle: commercial and developer users pay at a higher rate, keeping the assets affordable for community groups and charities. The income generated supports ongoing maintenance, transport and the continued involvement of the Space Ambassadors. We want to be clear about one further thing. The Go London capacity building programme has connected us with a genuinely exciting range of organisations working on innovative approaches to some of the same challenges we are trying to solve. We have found this process energising and we are very open to bringing new partners into the project as it develops, including those not currently within the programme, and research and discussions are underway. This is not a fixed model being delivered by a fixed team; it is a living project, and we are fully committed to embracing the unexpected collaborations and ideas that this process has already started to generate. That openness is part of who we are as a partnership, and we think it is part of what makes this project worth backing. The aim is that the initial Go London investment seeds something that continues to grow, evolve and serve young Londoners long after the grant has been spent.
