SuDS - singing in the drain

Jo Bradley knows good sustainable drainage schemes (SuDS). And as these sites manage water in our built-up inner cities, she can’t help but wonder whether we could design swales, soakaways and raingardens as safe spaces for kids to get wet and muddy and mucky?

I recently visited two sites whose designers are encouraging children to play with rainwater and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.

I remember a huge storm in Lancashire 50 years ago when my brothers and I went out in the pouring rain to race our little metal cars down a gully that had formed in the farm track. We had a brilliant time – we loved to get wet and muddy, as so many children do.

These days, I spend a lot of time taking wet-weather samples in the pouring rain. I still get wet and muddy, but I’m not sure I enjoy it quite so much now that I’m older.

But one of the glorious things about good SuDS design is that it reconnects us with rainwater. We can hear it splashing down into the swales outside our windows and watch it whoosh down rills across paved areas in town.

We can see where water goes when it rains and we can understand why it pools when it rains hard, waiting for the storm to pass so that it can soak away into the soggy soils.

If we’re lucky enough to have a water butt or, better still, a smart water butt, we can catch our own water and use it in our home and garden – washing the car, washing the dog, watering the begonias.

And by upgrading to a smart system, we can feel that little bit smug when we drain our water butt to prepare for an approaching storm, knowing that we’re playing a tiny part in local flood-risk management.

All of these SuDS features make us more conscious of rainwater management and its risks and opportunities. But maybe the people who should be engaging in this are our children.

If we teach children now about ways to capture and store water for reuse – about the risk-management opportunities of attenuation and about the value of habitat protection in drought using good water management – we can set them up with a lifelong interest in good rainwater management.

And the best way to do this? By making it fun. Some of the best schemes I’ve seen build water management into play areas.

SuDS playground

The first site I visited was a new playground in the middle of Sheffield. It’s surrounded by excellent SuDS, of course. But the Pound Park playground is fitted with a manual water pump that allows children – and brave adults – to pump stored water up from below and watch it rush down a channel around the climbing frame.

A series of valves, gates and smaller channels have been fitted along the channel so that children can tip, twist and turn them to see how they move the water. At the bottom, an Archimedes screw lifts the water, which then cascades back down towards its exit.

Best of all, you can mix sand with the water, make mud pies and get gleefully mucky. It’s a truly inspirational design. Let’s hear it for the courageous, innovative designers at Arup and Sheffield Council who dreamed up and delivered this wonderful scheme at Pound Park.

The other site I recently visited, in a park by the River Ver in St Albans, was older and had less to do with SuDS, but was no less delightful.

The Verulamium Park scheme takes treated water and squirts and sprays it across a play area to invite children to frolic in the wet. There’s a big, pink, grumpy dragon that squirts out water and, better still, the occasional puff of steam.

I visited on a gloomy day in mid-week; there were no children there. But seeing the play area gave me a frisson of fun. Had I been alone, I might have snuck in for a quick frivol.

As hot weather becomes more common and we have to adjust to higher temperatures more often, there’s an opportunity to extend and embrace wet-play schemes. That said, we need to be cautious, designing features that don’t waste water. We also need to think carefully about how and from where we source the water.

But where we can capture and reuse water as part of a SuDS scheme, there’s no reason why we can’t enjoy some of it – and learn to love wet play again. We need to build on the examples I’ve described – and on examples from abroad such as Regnlekplatsen, the Rain Playground in Gothenburg, Sweden.

This city-centre scheme is designed to be most fun to visit when it’s raining. Grey days are part of daily life in Gothenburg – it rains 40 per cent of the time – and Regnlekplatsen is designed with play puddles and rain shelters that look like waterlilies.

We seem to have been through a decade or two of discouraging children from getting wet and dirty, of not allowing them to take or judge risks for themselves.

But as we head into a riskier and less certain future, perhaps it’s time to turn that thinking on its head. I say, let’s pull on our wellies and redesign adventure, fun and soggy socks into our future SuDS schemes…

Jo Bradley is director of UK operations at Stormwater Shepherds