Our final visit to Thames Valley Adventure Playground left a lasting image of a charity that only offers positivity, with a sincere thank you for the £13,255.11 we raised and an open offer to recycle and reuse any further donations in future.
Across the two-and-a-half acres of land, TVAP is a haven for children and adults where they can explore and play in an enclosed, safe space. Situated next to the serene Taplow Lake, the land, given to them by Summerleaze for a peppercorn rate, has grown from an original log cabin into a robust, devoted space.
With facilities that allow everyone to join in, from roundabouts with wheelchair facility to a runaround track, TVAP allows for a level of inclusivity that many yearn for. Developed over 42 years, TVAP almost suffered to COVID, only to continue down to the dedication from its devoted 30+ volunteers and 20 staff (four full time permanent, four part time and 12 sessional workers), as well as its well-deserved audience fanbase, who have donated and developed a lot of TVAP to encourage and support its continuation.
Community Outreach Coordinator Lucie Grange, who has worked at TVAP for 22 years – long enough to see children she worked with return as adults – laughingly explained as we walked around that the biggest compliment at TVAP is for your donation to be broken in a day; it means it was so popular that it wore out. Think of how threadbare your favourite childhood teddy now is – the things we love become well-used quickly.
An annex, added 15 years ago, offers a space for soft play and a sensory room that anyone would want to spend time in to relax after a stressful day, offering the exact level of meditation that makes it a favourite with TVAP’s audience. Many come to TVAP just to spend 30 minutes soaked in its luminescent calm. The annex also extends over Taplow lake, with its own window in the floor to watch the waters lap the shore.
After Hazel Compton and Courtney Shepperd handed over the £13,255.11 Courtiers raised (£6,627.55 generously matched by Courtiers CEO, Jamie Shepperd, to bring it to the new amount), Lucie and Playground Manager Gary Warrington went on to discuss how useful the sweet jars Courtiers Trainee Paraplanner Brandon Childress donated are. They’ve been used in all kinds of ways, most recently as the lanterns for TVAP’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ show. This led on to a discussion on the weirdest donations TVAP have ever received (petri dishes that they eventually used as jellyfish) and how they once received 300 wooden disks, which were used as everything from the wheels on a ‘Flintstones’-style vehicle to climbing structures.
TVAP have the resourcefulness and creativity to make something out of everything and are grateful for any and all donations. If you or someone you know is going to be cleaning out to make way for the new at Christmastime, TVAP would be very, very pleased to be featured in your thoughts when distributing any surplus items. You can find out more on the ‘Support Us’ section of their website: Support Us | Thames Valley Adventure Playground
With wishes and hopes to visit them in the future – perhaps for their fancy-dress quiz night as we did before – it’s goodbye to TVAP for now, as we look towards our new charity, Prostate Cancer UK.
