UK's First Play Centre for Disabled Children Set to Open After £10m Fundraising Drive

A £10m purpose-built play centre for disabled children — the first of its kind in the UK — will open near Bristol this spring, with a further £400,000 still left to raise. Gympanzees, the charity behind the project, expects up to 200,000 visits a year once the doors open at a former service station by the Severn Bridge, north-west of Bristol.

Founder Stephanie Wheen has spent more than a decade getting to this point. The idea was born in 2016 out of her work as a children's physiotherapist in Bristol, where her sessions were constantly fully booked. She tried to get the disabled children she worked with to be more physically active in the community so they would rely less on her service. It failed.

"Poor access, attitude, equipment that was the wrong size – children's needs were just not being met in lots of different ways," Wheen said. "It was completely heartbreaking because these children need exercise more than anyone."

How big is the gap?

The scale of the problem is documented. Research by the charity Scope found half of UK playgrounds are not accessible for disabled children. Children with disabilities are twice as likely to be obese than non-disabled children, according to the same research.

Wheen concluded only a purpose-built centre could close the gap. With volunteers, she ran "pop-up" play and exercise sessions in Send schools during holidays, hauling in specialist equipment on three lorries. The results were immediate: some children walked, held themselves upright or rolled over independently for the first time; others laughed in ways they never had before. Some families travelled up to eight hours to attend.

"We had a thousand visitors over the first four weeks that we were open," Wheen said. "Families thought it was amazing, but it was still a pop-up in a school – it wasn't enough."

The pop-ups proved demand. The hard part was finding a permanent home as a small charity. After years of searching, Gympanzees bought a 60-year-old former service station using a £2.2m loan. The 4,000 square metre (43,000 sq ft) site — roughly the size of a football pitch and a half — took three years to design. The charity has raised over £10m to finish the project.

What will the centre contain?

The centre will have 10 spaces, including:

• A music room, gym, trampoline and climbing area
• Dark and light sensory rooms
• A fully accessible outdoor play park
• A two-storey soft play area with a slide and two hoist systems, the first of its kind for wheelchair users
• A party room with DJ equipment controlled by eye-gaze technology
• A cafe, a shop selling nappies and feeding tubes, and a lending library for parents to trial equipment at home

"Playgrounds are notoriously not inclusive," said chief operating officer Fran Garland. "You see people sat in wheelchairs watching their siblings or their friends playing on everything, waiting for them to come back. So when we went to the designers we said we wanted a playground that was 'What can I go on first?' rather than just 'What can I go on?'"

The party room addresses a gap Garland says is acute: "We've got 10- and 12-year-olds who've never had a party before because they can't find something that caters for them so this was really important."

Families will book sessions matched to their child's needs: Butterfly sessions for children with complex medical needs, leopard sessions for sensory needs and gorilla sessions for children who find socialising challenging.

What do parents say?

Bethan Campbell-Watkins, whose five-year-old daughter Malaya has autism and learning difficulties, described the impact of everyday exclusion. "Malaya is really active so we would try lots of different groups and just get judged everywhere we go," she said. "People stare when she's dysregulated and she's really upset, saying things like 'Why can't you control your child?'"

"I'm not exaggerating when I say Gympanzees is life-changing for families like us," she added.

Kelly Cotter's son Adam, 15, is non-verbal and uses a wheelchair. She managed play areas when he was younger, but as he grew, her options narrowed and then disappeared. "The size of this is just mind-boggling – these kids will finally be able to have a choice about what they want to do," she said.

Can the model scale?

Wheen has ambitious plans: 12 more centres across the country. "We want every child to be within an hour of Gympanzees. It is unacceptable, really, that this is the situation – what other child has to travel so far just to play?" she said. That expansion, like the first centre, will depend on whether the charity can keep raising millions — the £400,000 shortfall is a reminder that even proven demand does not fund itself.