When two local parents couldn’t find a suitable place for their child to play freely in the local area, they approached Ed Carlisle, a local Green Party councillor, to help find a solution. Working together, they identified a disused piece of land behind the Rowland Road Working Men’s Club and approached the club about developing this into a play space.

Since then, the club has been working in partnership with multiple stakeholders, including Yorkshire Contemporary, a local arts organisation curating the project, and members of the local community to transform the land into a Play Patch for children and families in the local area.

The club’s members are invested and heavily involved in the Play Patch project. Over 1,300 people in the community – over half being children – have contributed to its creation. Integral to its success, the club’s members volunteer their time through gardening, building, and maintenance, and they also manage the volunteer calendar and promote it through social media and their wider community networks.

The Play Patch offers more than just a space to play, as it creates a site for different groups to come together and offers facilities that other spaces often can’t. Despite their necessity, other types of social infrastructure don’t always offer the use of their toilets to the public, but Rowland Road partially opens the club so that visitors to the Play Patch and volunteers can access toilet facilities.

Bringing such openness means that new people have discovered the club as visitors to the Play Patch. Once these newcomers step inside the club, they see how surprisingly large it is with its many facilities, such as its games room with darts and snooker tables and 350 capacity concert room, but more importantly, they witness how its members watch out for the children in the community, ensuring that they play safely inside and outside the club.