With the weather expected to warm up across the UK as the summer holidays are upon us, many parents will start to think about what they can do to keep their children entertained during this break, but are there enough free activities?

Intrigued by this, the experts at Polybound, a Rubber Crumb Flooring analysed gov.uk data to find the total number of parks per local authority. The number of children in the local authorities was sourced from ONS, to eventually find which local authority has the most play parks per 100 children.

The results:

Local Authority	Total parks	Total children under 15	Parks per 100 children
Northumberland	2,586	51,795	4.99
Gateshead	1,148	34,862	3.29
County Durham	2,864	88,226	3.25
Newcastle upon Tyne	1,119	52,859	2.12
Darlington	410	19,879	2.06
Redcar and Cleveland	482	24,155	2.00
North Tyneside	699	37,346	1.87
Sunderland	870	48,932	1.78
Hartlepool	281	17,780	1.58
Middlesbrough	442	30,504	1.45
South Tyneside	386	26,748	1.44
Stockton-on-Tees	462	38,920	1.19

South Tyneside has one of the lowest amounts of parks per 100 children under the age of 15 in the North East, at 1.44. This is more than double the parks per 100 children than in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2.12), who have a child population (52,859) that is 1.5% larger than Northumberland (51,795).

UK breakdown

Region	Total parks	Total children under 15	Parks per 100 children
Scotland	54,838	870,678	6.30
South West	29,458	874,816	3.37
Wales	16,938	549,287	3.08
South East	53,586	1,842,903	2.91
East of England	34,876	1,202,689	2.90
East Mids	22,866	892,704	2.56
North East	11,749	472,006	2.49
North West	33,401	1,406,187	2.38
Yorkshire	22,316	1,027,762	2.17
N.Ireland	7,963	389,435	2.04
West Midlands	21,081	1,163,617	1.81
London	29,924	1,692,636	1.77

Methodology:

The experts at Polybound sought to find the UK local authorities which had the most parks per 100 children.
To do this, they scraped the listings of all parks per local authority, according to their gov.uk page.
Population estimates were sourced from the ONS, and is the most up to date data published.
The number of parks were then divided by the number of children under the age of 15, and multiplied by 100 to find the total number of parks per 100 children.
Data was collected in September 2024 and is accurate as of then.

About Polybound

Polybound is a leading UK supplier for all your resin-bound and resin-bonded surface needs, plus rubber mulch and chippings, wall coverings, stone carpets, and all the tools and equipment you need for those installations.