Community Focus Group (28th January 2026) - Youth Survey

Forever young
By Quentin |
Categories:
Tags:

The Community Focus Group meeting took place on 28th January 2026 at the Community Rooms, gathering local residents from Darwin Green and King’s Court along with people from the Council’s Community Team.

Please keep in mind that these are the notes from attendees. They may be incomplete, inaccurate.

Context

Attendees for the meeting included representatives from various teams from the City Council: Community development, Youth development, and some other team looking at facilitating the integration of certain categories of people, including young people. We also had a Councillor from the City Council. Residents from Girton and Darwin Green were present as well.

Cambridge City Council has been running a young people (11-19 year olds) survey for residents of King’s Court, Darwin Green, Franklin Gardens and the surrounding area, and the objective of the meeting was to discuss the early results. This post will not provide the detailed results from the survey, but will summarise the main lines.

Survey and discussion

Requests

Requests for new facilities include:

  • Skateboard park: none is coming to Darwin Green 1, but there will be one in the Country Park in Darwin Green 2.
  • Girton would love a zip wire.
  • A water refill station at the Pavilion.
  • Cycling bumps: none coming, but we could maybe install temporary bumps during events.
  • Climbing wall: young folks love it.
  • Gym: not happening until there’s a school on the site.
  • A mound in the park - just like on Barratt’s marketing pictures! This idea has been proposed by multiple people, on multiple occasions. Where is our mound??
  • Giant chessboards, noughts and crosses, etc.

Questions

  • Tennis courts:

    • Some people have raised concerns about access to the tennis courts, in particular because they received political leaflets raising doubts on the permanence of free access for the courts in Darwin Green. The Council representatives assured that there is no plan to charge for accessing these tennis courts.
    • On sunny days the courts are often all in use. Some people would like to be able to book the courts, to ensure they can use a court at a given time.

  • There is a rumour that the opening of the library might be “not too far off” (but months ahead anyway). More details to come at the next Community Forum?

  • How to organise more sports activities? The Council is looking for a “sports activator” who will be in charge of enabling sports activities (booking the pitches, etc.) in the area. A recruitment is expected by April or May.

Generic observations

  • There is a need for coordination between the different areas. One example is Girton and Cambridge: we can’t just draw a line and consider them completely separate, there has to be some common discussions about the need and use of sports facilities, for example.

  • Sports equipment:

    • From the survey section on the ranking of equipment, the outdoors gym stations ranked rather low. Some people mention that they struggle to use it, they’re mostly made for men.
    • A free gym session to showcase the equipment to teenagers could work well, though.
    • One challenge is to facilitate full gym sessions using this equipment, because the different stations are “far” apart.

  • The Council did some research on the parks.

    • One issue raised is that many girls and young women do not feel comfortable being outside (feeling watched or being made uncomfortable, getting cat-called, absence of toilets, …). Parks are essentially dominated by boys.
    • Cambridge parks in general are not really well designed for teens.

  • Opening shops and the library would really help attract people, including teenagers, too.

  • There is an association ready to fund table tennis equipment for Darwin Green, although some details remain to sort out. The equipment could be placed under the tables so people can just turn up (although the equipment might disappear quickly), or could be available for hire at the library.

Call for action

If you have young people in your household, please ask them to consider completing the survey. It will help inform the City Council what activities they would like to see in the area. No personal data will be collected. To complete the survey, click this link. The survey is open until the end of half-term (February 2026).