Thurrock council has turned a patch of communal land from a joyriders’ racetrack into a safe place for children to play alongside the grazing ponies of visiting Travellers.

Until recently, the best word to describe the central green on the Broadway estate in Tilbury, Essex was “lawless”. Night after night, stolen cars rammed the fences around the play area and then driven onto the green and set alight. In summer, this ritual was set to the pounding soundtrack of stereo systems illegally wired to the mains.

“Burned-out cars seemed to be a permanent art installation,” says Sue Hastie, tenant participation and regeneration manager at Thurrock council. “As fast as one was cleared away, there would be another one. They’d wait until the police or fire brigade were on their way, then set the car on fire.”

By day, another group was trying to make the green its own. About a dozen ponies owned by settled Travellers – the borough’s largest minority ethnic group – were grazed and exercised on the grass there. Former Travellers visiting friends and relations on the estate would travel by pony-power, then “park” the animals on the green. Not exactly illegal, but there was certainly an issue about using public land without permission.

But now things are different on Broadway – the green is no longer a lawless place. A bold landscaping project completed at the end of April has set firm boundaries on activities there, giving the space back to everyone in the community. And the ponies are now welcomed onto the green with their own grooming and dressage arena.

Broadway has been revived by £350,000 of council and single regeneration budget funding, plus the innovative ideas of a offbeat architectural practice called MUF. MUF specialises in restoring so-called “public” space to the public and in capturing local people’s ideas through community consultation that it calls “action research”. Its philosophy is that a designer’s watchword should be “why not?” rather than “why?”

At Broadway, MUF was selected in March 2002 by a panel from the Broadway Residents and Tenants Scheme after the council’s housing department approached a number of architects. For the residents’ group, which had seen the council’s earlier, conventional solutions become little more than targets for vandals, the introduction to MUF was a meeting of minds.

“They were off the wall,” says chair Eileen Gledhill. “In the tenders, they showed us bits of work they’d done with a seaside theme [in a playground on a cliffside Portpatrick, Scotland]. I thought, if we’re going to do something, why not be different?”

MUF’s first priority was to regain control over the green in a physical sense. MUF partner Liza Fior explains: “The public space wasn’t neutral territory, it was highly contested. Young men had dominated by driving stolen cars onto the green. If you want to make an inclusive landscape, you first need to secure the edges.”

Fences would have been a standing invitation to vandals, so instead the edges of the green were defined by gabions – wire-mesh baskets filled with rubble and turfed over. The result looks soft, but forms an effective barrier for joy-riders and motorcyclists. When a car did attempt to drive over them and onto the green, the driver got knocked out.

The attitude was that you need huge barriers, so the fact that there was no fence was hard to take 

Sue Hastie, Thurrock Council

“Word soon went round that the green was no longer accessible,” says Hastie.

MUF’s “action research” on the Broadway estate had centred on a community fun-day in early summer 2002, where everyone had the chance to talk about what they wanted.

The children didn’t get the swimming pool they asked for, but they did get an under-fives play area inspired by children’s TV programme Teletubbies, with slides, swings and trampolines set in landscaped hills. For older children, there are a variety of play areas to colonise, separated by earth banks.

The play facilities are now so popular that parents from outside the estate bring their children to play there, an idea unthinkable just a few years ago.

But the most important part of the day was a gymkhana, complete with competitions and rosettes. MUF’s Fior says the event was a chance to “legitimise the horse-ownership and use it in a celebratory way”, as well as an opportunity to find out exactly how many children and adults were involved in caring for ponies. It also demonstrated the calming effect the animals often have in otherwise unruly lives.

MUF’s initiative also sparked the community’s interest in its own heritage. Afterwards, MUF and the Broadway residents’ group made a joint application to the Countryside Agency for a research project in which secondary school pupils studied the history of a community where some settled Travellers still live in caravans in their back gardens. Part of the project involved making a series of posters with photos of a person in a horse costume on Tilbury’s streets and the question “what is a horse without a field?”. Local people also wrote articles on the area’s history for a community magazine.

Gledhill says: “It made people more aware of why people have the horses. For instance, we didn’t know Travellers used to trade them as a way of earning a living, or that there were different clans within their community.

“It made the Travellers more visible, and opened people’s eyes to the fact that you don’t have to be black to be an ethnic minority.”

A few people thought I was mad to support the dressage arena, but it’s well-used

Eileen Gledhill, Broadway Residents and Tenants Scheme

So far, the dressage arena at the edge of the green, where the horses can be groomed, exercised and generally shown off, has not been vandalised. Users have to request a key from the concierge of a nearby block of flats. “A few people thought I was mad [to support the idea], but it’s a well-used facility,” says Gledhill.

Sue Hastie is proud that the council has dared to be different. “When we did a design in-house, our architect suggested standard fencing. The attitude was that you needed huge barriers, so the fact that there was no fence was quite a hard concept to take on board. What MUF came up with wasn’t an expected response, so other councils might not be bold enough to implement it.”

The SRB funding has also allowed the neighbourhood services department to appoint a park warden for two years, until March 2006.

Hastie says the warden Ray Diamond has a community development role as well as taking care of the look of the place. “He’s good at talking to people. If people are drinking in the under-fives area, he’ll ask them to move on.”

The warden could make a crucial difference to the future of Broadway’s new green, as of course not all the antisocial behaviour has been eradicated by the gabions and landscaping.

For instance, during the building programme, a site hut with £30,000 of construction equipment was set on fire. More recently, there have been attempts to set fire to the gabions in the dry weather early in the summer. And despite CCTV surveillance, a large number of trees have been pulled up.

But the landscaping – along with other SRB-funded interventions – has undoubtedly contributed to a turnaround. This is, after all, an estate where 30% of the homes were empty and shuttered five years ago.

“The void rate has changed dramatically,” says Hastie. “There’s now a waiting list.

You can’t put your finger on exactly when it happened, it’s been a gradual process. But it was depressing a few years ago, and now it’s been reinvented.” HT