The team have been hard at work at NTS Newhailes. We covered the design phase in our previous Newhailes blog here and from the design you could see it had some lovely details that you wouldn’t normally see in other adventure play areas.
So, let’s give you a tour around the work in progress.
With the build, all of the individual elements have been built on site by the team. Wood comes in, play goes up. It’s a lovely organic process that allows the play to grow with the site and work more closely with the land.
Working at height does give you a great view across the site and beyond
Whilst these images are obviously taken on a beautiful sunny Scottish day, much of the teams time on site has been cold, wet and blowy, so the chance to work inside – even on a play structure you are building yourself – is always very welcome.
Detail finishing on the Central Library building.
As the buildings begin to grow and take shape, they deliver some exceptional framed views of the rest of the site. It’s one of those little pleasures about working on site that all of the team love.
And again, working inside does give you some lovely framed views of the play emerging
These are the two buildings that make up the Mill House area of play. It takes some skill to make a building like this look the perfect degree of wonky, without it appearing threatening or unsafe.
The Newhailes Mill takes shape
With the deliberately wonky design, construction on-site will always have a large element of hand finishing and tweaking to ensure a perfect fit. The only way to do this is to measure on site and cut accordingly. If you have ever tried to do this yourself, you’ll understand how complicated it is getting the finished shape just right.
Every part is hand measured and cut to fit the grand plan
The Central Library within the new play area is one of our favourites. It provides loads of play for the visitors, but also has some beuatiful details around its original library theme. We’ll show you more this when it’s finished, but rest assured, it’s cool.
This is the Newhailes Central Library taking shape
The perfectly cut panels for the roof are added last of all.
Adding the roof to the NTS Newhailes Central LIbrary
And finally here, just to give you a sense of scale, here’s a video flyover from our drone. You can see the scale of the play and start to get an idea of how all of the individual parts will come together within the perfect walled garden.
Thanks for the footage Jack Coleman – A man of many talents.
