14 Best Parks and Playgrounds In East Sussex

Compact, almost every time. Most of the stress goes out of an outing at that age when the play equipment, the toilets and the way out all sit within sight of each other. Large sites look better value and then punish you when someone needs the toilet from the far corner. Save the big estates for when the youngest can walk back without being carried.

For an older child it often improves on one. Wilderness Wood is the East Sussex entry that leans that way, and woods reward children who invent their own game rather than queue for a swing. Younger children vary enormously: some take to it immediately, others want the familiar equipment and say so loudly. If you have not tried woodland with a small child before, keep the first visit short.

Hove Park carries the national parks category in our data, which is plainly a miscategorisation rather than a description of the place. We have flagged it. It affects nothing about the visit itself, but it is worth knowing that category labels in this area are imperfect, so read what a site actually is rather than trusting the heading it has been filed under.

Knockhatch Adventure Park sits in this list while being a full adventure park, and children who have outgrown a slide are exactly who it wants. Grounds attached to something else — Sheffield Park and Garden, Bateman's House and Garden, 1066 Battle of Hastings Abbey — hand an eight-year-old a story to walk around instead of a lawn.