Beacon Hill Park Playground- Victoria

Beacon Hill Park offers a fabulous collection of things to do and see including beautiful gardens, fountains, a performance stage, a petting zoo and about one million ducks. Right in the middle of the park, where Chestnut Row and Bridge Way meet there is a great playground. Now, it's worth mentioning here that I have avoided this playground until now because like Beckwith and Tulista and the Juan de Fuca Rotary, it is one of the city's favourites and I like to think that I'm on side with the underdogs- hence visiting Beacon Hill's other playground on Cook Street frequently. Well, our trip to Beacon Hill's central playground the other day proved that old theory that favourites are favourites for a good reason.

There are two main structures here- big kid and little kid, all on woodchips. The big kid side has a good assortment of things to climb up and down and a couple of towers linked by bridges. There are two slides; a short curved metal slide and a higher metal curly slide- both of which were almost too hot to ride when we were there- but we can only hope that that stays- right? There is a plastic fake rock wall at one end which 'A' loved climbing up.


The smaller kid side was really hard to photograph because of all the children, but it has two small linked towers and again two metal slides a short double one and a medium height metal one- both straight. There are a bunch of good bouncy things- a metal climbing frame car and two big kid swings/ two toddler swings. Plus.....there is a cement circle that has a water feature- this wasn't on when we were there but I will try to find out the times.

There are fabulous facilities there too: Picnic tables and a covered picnic table, washrooms, drinking fountain, parking nearby and there is even a creepy building behind the playground that might once have been the washrooms but is not all locked up.

Just to show that it is human- this playground is subject to the usual graffiti tags- but in true West Coast style, the tag scrawled on the back on the climbing frame car reads 'Honk for Hemp'.