Your new 5-11s playground is OPEN!

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After over 2 years of hard work, your new 5-11s playground is open!

We hope you love it as much as we do!

We finally opened our new £220,000 park on 29th March 2025.

The opening ceremony was incredibly well attended. Children couldn’t wait for us to cut the ribbon and play – with the fun addition of an East egg hunt and some prizes supplied by our build partner, Proludic.

Claire Wyatt, the voluntary Chair of Love Lowndes, gave the following speech.

Welcome everyone! My name is Claire Wyatt and I’m the chair of Love Lowndes, the voluntary fundraising group that’s coordinated the building of this amazing new playground. We’re a partnership between the Friends of Lowndes Park and Chesham Town Council.

I promise I won’t keep you long as I know we’re all excited to cut that ribbon and start playing!

But I do want to say a few words about how we got here and why this playground is so desperately needed.

There’s no doubt that Love Lowndes has been an amazing community success story.

Together, we’ve raised over £220,000 to build this new destination playground in the green heart of Chesham.

Play is vital to our children’s development. In a cost of living crisis and when childhood obesity is rising, while children’s mental heath is declining – having a free, accessible, inclusive and green place to play, run, dream and create is essential. A welcoming place where everyone in the community can come together for one purpose – play. I am so proud to feel that I’ve been a part of giving that to our children.

It’s been over two years of hard work and I want to give thanks to the people and organisations that have made it possible. Now, I’m going to list a lot of names here, but I want you to know that each and every one of them has been key to our success. And we’re thrilled to say that some of them are here celebrating with us today.

We are hugely indebted to:

We’re also very proud to display the names of the following local businesses who’ve come on board as our Love Lowndes Sponsors:

Platinum – Silverson Machines, Mencap and The Entertainer

Gold – Chesham Prep School

Silver – Perspectives (Home Counties) Ltd and Ash Wills.

There is a longer list of people, organisations and businesses that have supported us, either through donations, fundraising or through voluntary help. It’s published on the Friends of Lowndes Park website. I urge you to take a look. It’s heartwarming to see just how many people have been involved in making our dream a reality.

But behind all these amazing organisations, there is a core team of volunteers who have masterminded this whole operation.

So, indulge me for a few moments while I get sentimental!

Chairing Love Lowndes the last couple of years has been a humbling and eye-opening experience. It’s shown me how much can be achieved, and must be achieved, by community action. Because, and I need to be clear here, it was volunteers who’ve made this happen.

Volunteers on our committee who made the commitment to raise the money in the first place. Volunteers who fundraised and raised awareness on stalls, who designed and delivered our events, volunteers who created our logo and graphic design, volunteers who wrote the funding applications and managed all our social media and communications. Volunteers who planted the beautiful landscaping that you can see, who painted our bird houses and bat boxes, and volunteers who got on the phone and charmed our amazing corporate sponsors into donating to this incredible cause.

Every piece of equipment, every plant, every design element in that playground has the fingerprint of a volunteer on it. That’s what can be achieved when a community comes together. And nothing shows this better than all the local infant and junior schools coming together for 2 amazing mufti-days to support us. This had never happened for a community cause before – we’re really proud of that and so thankful.

There are so many of you out there that I could name, but I wouldn’t be doing my job as chair if I didn’t specifically thank a few incredible people. The core voluntary team of Kate Hutchenson, Isabelle Hatfield and Anna Elliot who’ve given their lives to this project alongside work and family commitments for over two years. Their dedication and hard work cannot be overstated. I’m in awe of all of you. I don’t think people will ever understand what really goes into making a project like this happen and who really does the work!

And, I do want to make a special mention to Kathryn Graves and Louise Hayday from Chesham Town Council too. Without their unwavering support and expertise, we couldn’t have done it.

But finally, it’s you, the people of Chesham who should be celebrated today. You attended our events, you responded to our consultations, you advised us on the design. Every single one of you, whether you paid £1 to enter our pumpkin parade, donated to our Crowdfunder or bought a legacy brick in our path to play – however you contributed- this park is not just for you, it’s because of you.

And we’ll need you again – cos we’ve got to raise another £150k for Phase 2 of the Masterplan –  the 0-4s playground! And, we’d dearly love to have some new volunteers. It’s immensely rewarding and it’s an opportunity to leave a real legacy. We need more help as we’re exhausted! If you can do anything from a little admin, to writing up minutes in our meetings, to helping at events– every little helps. And if you want to be Chair for Phase 2, my husband and children would be eternally grateful as I think they want me back!

So, watch this space and donate today!

But now, I think that’s more than enough from me.

Let me hand over to Kate Hutchenson and Louise Hayday who are going to cut the ribbon and officially open the playground.