Cherry Avenue playground in Swanley reopens after £100k revamp

Sevenoaks District Council reopened the Cherry Avenue playground in Swanley on Thursday 10 September, following a £100,000 renovation aimed at giving the town's children a modern and more inclusive place to play. The scheme replaced ageing equipment with new swings, slides, hopscotch markings and balance ropes, alongside new fencing, gates, accessible pathways and sensory panels.

The project was funded through a mix of sources: £64,727 from the National Lottery Community Fund, £27,773 from Sevenoaks District Council and £7,500 from Swanley Town Council. The work was carried out by playground specialist KOMPAN.

More than 70 individual features make up the new play area, built for children under 12, and council figures show most of them were picked following consultation with local residents rather than handed down as a finished design. That distinction matters in practice: playgrounds tend to get more use, and last longer, when the people who'll actually use them had a say in what went in.

Cllr Irene Roy, the council's Cabinet Member for Cleaner and Greener, said: "We were able to remove the previously well-used units that had come to the end of their working life." The new apparatus was chosen with accessibility in mind. Swanley Town Council's Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Hayman, thanked the district council team for helping "get this project over the line" and praised KOMPAN's delivery.

For Swanley, the reopening is a small but tangible example of how National Lottery funding continues to underpin local infrastructure that councils might otherwise struggle to finance alone. The Community Fund distributes more than £600 million a year across the UK and has set out plans to invest over £4 billion into communities by 2030 — money that, in cases like this, translates directly into everyday facilities on residents' doorsteps. Whether the investment pays off long-term will come down to how well the new equipment holds up and how much it gets used by local families in the months ahead. Source: Sevenoaks District Council