Alex Casey tells the origin story of Tākaro ā Poi, the Margaret Mahy Family Playground.
It’s a crisp Tuesday morning in central Ōtautahi and about 100 people of all ages are crawling all over Tākaro ā Poi, the Margaret Mahy Family Playground. A little boy in a “Team Spidey” T-shirt channels his hero as he clings to lobster-shaped climbing holds for dear life. A gaggle of excited cruise ship tourists snap pictures of the giant orange petal-shaped sunshades, while a bashful dad ends his flying fox journey at a glacial pace, perfectly soundtracked by a high school cheer squad practicing on a patch of grass nearby.
The $20 million post-quake playground will be turning a decade old later this year, with celebrations kicking off with a tour at the Open Christchurch architecture festival this weekend. Boasting a four metre wide slide and a 10 metre high climbing tower, the playground’s sprawling one hectare city block site makes it the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. “It’s really the jewel in the crown,” says Matthew Tidball, one of the landscape architects, as we look out over a rubber mat rendering of the Canterbury Plains. “It brought laughter back into the city at a really hard time.”
Even nearly 10 years on, the playground still elicits tremendous excitement in local kids. “I like the spider nets that you can climb on, and the trampolines, and the giant metal slide that goes ‘WOOSH’,” said one breathless seven-year-old. Other kids praised the “twirly slide”, “the big hill” and the “spinning thing”, and even grown-up kids admitted to having a hoon. “After a night in town there is no better way to wind down than doing a very slow climb up the ropes to the top of the big slide,” said one fan in their 30s. “You also get a lovely view of the twinkly cityscape.”
Catherine Hamilton was the lead designer of Tākaro ā Poi, and says the project arrived at both a pivotal time for the city, and a transitional phase for playground design in Aotearoa. “Our playgrounds had become very modular, stock standard off-the-shelf stuff,” she explains. “All the potential risks had been designed out of them.” But in the 2010s, she says the thinking and legislation around play was starting to shift from risk aversion to risk management. “That opened up a whole lot of opportunities for doing things that were a lot more exciting and challenging.”
Early on in the design process it was established that the playground would contain character zones based on the Canterbury landscape, from the giant artificial mound that represents the Port Hills, to a sand play area that represents the coast. “It was about how the park itself weaves back into the fabric of the city,” she says. “From the very beginning, we also thought about these land forms and gradients in relation to universal play, which means that people who are able-bodied and people who have disabilities can all enjoy the space together.”
The thrills and spills – officially called “managed risk” – came in elements such as the bouncy rubber matting to cushion falls, and an imposing 10 metre tall climbing system. While it appears daunting from the ground, Hamilton assures that it was very carefully and safely designed. “It means that kids can challenge themselves and get to that impressive height to conquer their fears, but they can never fall more than a metre before they’re caught by the rope system,” she explains. “If anything, I actually think we could have gone higher.”
Of course, another essential inspiration for the playground is its namesake, beloved Cantabrian children’s author Margaret Mahy. After a community competition to design Christchurch’s dream playground, Selwyn House School won with their vision for the “Margaret Mahy Amazing Playground” – the original plans of which included a real meadow and real lions. “What we did from there was to draw inspiration from Margaret Mahy and her way of seeing the world,” says Hamilton. “We watched a lot of her interviews about the power of imagination in particular.”
Hamilton was struck by one interview where Mahy explained why she never described a certain character’s face, because she wanted to leave space for imagination in the reader. “With that inspiration, we developed the idea for the 130 metre long story arc through the middle of the park.” Inscribed with some of Mahy’s beloved stories including ‘The Man Whose Mother Was A Pirate’, the arc also includes words from Christchurch author Elsie Locke, who formerly had a park on the site in her honour, as well as the symbols and stories of local iwi Ngāi Tahu.
There’s a particular part of the story arc which Te Marino Lenihan (Ngāi Tahu whānui) says is his very favourite. Having worked as the principal hapu advocate on Tākaro ā Poi as a part of the wider Ōtākaro River revitalisation project, his role was to identify the cultural narratives of the site and facilitate local Māori artists to express those stories. The story arc features words from ‘Terea te waka’, a contemporary ngeri composed by Charisma Rangipunga and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe that tells the story of the voyage of the Uruao waka to Te Waipounamu.
“This ngeri came for us in an era where our tribe was really finding its space in the revitalisation of te reo Māori,” says Lenihan. “It also became a metaphor for where we were in the rebuild of the city – we were arriving again for the first time within the design landscape, so it felt like a really good and natural expression in that space.” He also worked with local artist Priscilla Cowie on the symbols in the arc, and the senior weavers who designed Whāriki: Te Rau Aroha ki te Tangata, the paved artwork at the entrance that represents the importance of childhood and play.
The final piece of the playground puzzle came in the planting, and one of the lead landscape architects Matthew Tidball remembers his brief to this day: weird and wonderful. “There’s lots of native plants, but then you’ve got things like Muehlenbeckia, which has got this weird, funky, hexagonal form to it,” he says, pointing out a nearby bush. “It’s a shape children might know or have learned at school, but it’s kind of cool to see it in a big specimen like this. I’m most proud of just getting that education and understanding out there for children.”
As we wander around the wetland area, he points out reeds and cabbage trees that have stood strong for 10 years, and others that haven’t weathered so well. “It’s such a hectic environment,” he shrugs. In the middle of the site, a couple of large cherry trees stand tall – they were originally planted there for Elsie Locke, relocated after the quakes, and reinstated in 2015. “As with many places in the city there’s been opportunities to start fresh, but sometimes that can erase the history that came before,” he says. “This is quite a cool element from the past to hold onto.”
It is that acknowledgement of the past, be it pre-quake or pre-colonial, and the collaboration between tangata whenua and tangata tiriti, that Lenihan says makes the Tākaro ā Poi playground an extra special feature of Ōtautahi. “We now have a valuable and valued asset to the city that reflects a process based on honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, doing it together, respecting each other’s heritage, and wrapping that all into something for families,” he says. “For me, this park reflects a new wave of thinking around what’s important and where we focus our attention first.
“Cities shouldn’t be built around buildings and enterprises, but built around people.”
