The Nest

The Norwich City Community Sports Foundation (CSF) is the official charity partner of Norwich City Football Club. Its mission is to help people achieve their goals by delivering quality, innovative services through football and sport.

They use the power of football and sport to improve the lives of people in Norfolk and beyond and through a range of initiatives that include Health, Education, Inclusion and sports development.

The Nest facility provides a unique environment to get people active, to participate in sport whilst gaining valuable skills, employability, personal progression and making a lifelong difference to people’s lives. We have always believed in the value of play for personal development.

Our brief was to create a bespoke play space that would benefit a huge number of local people, whatever their ability, by offering a safe and nurturing space to undertake a number of interactive activities and programmes. The development of a unique and exciting multi-use adventure space adds a whole new dimension to the offerings at the nest. You can see from the initial CGI's where our thinking took us.

A new bespoke play space The new play area itself is a maze of treetop walkways, bridges and tunnels centred around a central ‘Adventure Hub’ treehouse. Encouraging a wide range of physical and mental skills, the play area is designed to be a unique and inspiring stand-alone play structure whilst also acting as a canvas for which to hold events and create further programmed activities as part of the immersive experience visitors are given whilst at the Nest. The design also lends itself to further expansion and phasing as visitor numbers increase, with the potential for more treetop routes taken from the central hub along with the integrated adventure trail set to run along the southern belt of the site.

The completed adventure play build, as you would expect, looks exactly like the CGI's.

Accessible for All

The play was designed from the outset to be as accessible as possible for users, whatever their age or physical ability. It has always been our aim to make play fun and inclusive for all. Play is always better together and creating interactive and immersive play where visitors with different abilities can play together adds more fun for all. You can see in the images below that the sensory play with the speaking tubes and musical instruments are located on the accessible walkway.

Toddler play

Soon after the main play area - Challenge Woods - had opened, work began to add Toddler play. The design for this creates a dedicated space for the smaller members of the public to play.

The CAP.CO team designed and built an area completely dedicated to Toddlers, which creates a safe space to enjoy their first mini-adventures, with sand play, zipwires, a slide, and plenty of room to run free in the woods!

Multi-use space

The space could also act as the central point from which activities begin. These could include time trials, treasure hunts or team-building exercises. It can also be used as an imaginative and exciting learning space from which lessons or presentations can be delivered.