Top 5 Themed Playground Ideas for 2026
New year, new inspirations! Discover how you can inspire more fun and play in your outdoor areas with these Themed Playground ideas sure to excite your visitors for 2026.
Talk to our team about getting your own themed playground by booking a consultation or requesting a quote via our contact page.
Longevity and Durability
Many of our favourite outdoor spaces embrace their outdoorsiness! By incorporating nature into design, utilising naturalistic colours and sustainable materials, playgrounds can reflect the nature that surrounds them while creating a unique environment for play and fun.
With smart landscape design services, appreciative of nature, our team can develop any outdoor area to truly reflect the value of its vegetation. Even gardens with poor soil or minimal space can be given a green touch with planters, proper treeline management, and hedgerow protection. Read our garden services guide for more information on how our landscaping services help maintain a healthy natural space.
Rubber Mulch safety surfaces work with nature to create a protective environment for both the children playing on it, and the plants growing alongside it. The permeable mulch allows water to travel through to the soil below, so roots can continue to grow and stay healthy. The rubber also prevents roots from damage from trampling by humans and animals by creating a breathable, flexible barrier that absorbs the stress of activity on the surface.
Additionally, with our WeedSmart membrane installed under JungleMulch and many of our other surfaces, unwanted weeds are unable to grow. This ultimately leaves your desired plants with more room to flourish with full access to all the soil nutrients and water that they need, without unwanted guests.
Showcase Your Local History
Every community has something unique, whether it’s historic landmarks, local industry, or even sports teams. Why shouldn’t your local themed playground reflect local pride and showcase what makes your community special?
Surfacing, especially rubber surfacing, brings with it a huge potential for creativity, allowing local playgrounds to complete a show stopping, vibrant centrepiece that lasts the test of time. With our expert installation, wetpour solutions using EPDM colour smart granules can create a wide range of shapes and patterns. Our team can create intricate designs including logos and images, or simply design the play area in your area’s colours with a durable True-colour solution that doesn’t fade.
A great example of embracing what makes your local area special is our recent project for a housing developer in Crewe. The play equipment from Proludic and PlaySmart’s RubbaSmart surfacing come together to represent the local train-lines with striped train track pathways, snaking through the green of the neighbouring fields.
Design for Multi-Use Spaces
Children love bright colours! Fun shapes with vibrant hues inspire the imagination, allowing children to incorporate patterns and pathways into their games, hopping along pathways or racing one another to a certain feature of the area.
Simple shapes on the playground can enhance the play experience, drawing the eye towards certain areas appropriate for younger children. But the main benefit of bright colours- especially against darker flooring of existing paving with our EPDM patches- is to bring joy and fun to more drab spaces without the cost of redoing the whole surface and equipment.
With over 20 colour variations, EPDM MulchSmart provides this vibrancy to any play space along with top quality safety protection up to 2.3 metre critical fall heights (for 140mm installation depths). The expert formulation of our EPDM products ensures UV protection that prevents carbon residue buildup that causes the dark, dusty-looking, faded rubber you see in older playgrounds. With minimal upkeep, your colourful adventure playground stays looking great for much play to come!
Character Fun
Bring children on an adventure with themed playground characters! With fun designs built into your rubber surfacing, you can bring playgrounds to life with friendly animals and creatures to inspire imagination. Themed playgrounds can bring imagination to life with 3D elements that provide tactile stimulation to enhance play for all ages! Designers can shape mounds of JungleMulch into simple or intricate designs as unique play features or for 3D decoration.
JungleMulch is a vibrant and non-toxic sustainable flooring material made from recycled tyres. It is a versatile, useful surface with a less disruptive installation process than many alternatives. Incorporating bonded rubber mulch into your surfaces creates fun playground designs that are fully weather-resistant.
Textured playground flooring is also a brilliant way to build the value of inclusivity into your playground design. JungleMulch pathways can be used with other surfacing such as wet pour rubber or with raised bumps and bright colours to provide accessibility for the visually impaired on pathways and playgrounds. Express how important having a safe space to play is for everybody by incorporating accessibility into your playground design in unique ways.
Design for Multi-Use Spaces
Does your space have multiple uses that cater to more than one target demographic of visitors? Multi-use spaces need to be effective and appropriate for a variety of users and activities. Therefore your theming can’t be too strongly targeted at one demographic.
Outdoor spaces, particularly in public multi-use development works, need to be available to and suitable for everyone who will be using it. This includes anyone, from families to school groups, from commuters to sports-people. In order to cater to the expected variety of users of the site, your choice in surface design needs to be appropriate to an equally wide variety of needs.
We recommend a subtle surface with modern, clean lines that provides the appropriate accessibility and utility for all general uses- for example, an all-rounder surface like Corkeen. The unique texture and colour of Corkeen is suitable as a safety surface under play equipment, a durable solution for a central gathering point or event space.
