In which we plan a Sylvanian town

Hannah really likes Sylvanians so it seemed like a fun way to do some geography, to create an ideal Sylvanian town using images from catalogues and magazines and thinking about what a town would need to contain.

First she thought about that and made a list which looked like this:

"What facilities?

Theatre
Sports
Schools
Shops
Transport
Businesses
Parks
Houses
Halls
Town Centre
Church
Library
Hospital
Doctor's surgery
Museum
Police station
Bus stops
Train station
Roads
Town Hall
Swimming Pool
Gym
Hairdressers
Hotels
Beach
Camping facilities

We then got all her Sylvanian magazines and picked up lots of catalogues from the Sylvanian shop, then came  cutting out all the images she could find to fit the list, although not all were possible to find. So we did the best we could and cut out every small house, some larger ones and as many of the things on the above list as we could. I stuck 2 sheets of A1 paper together and asked Hannah to pencil in the roads. She created a market square and roads connecting the market and surrounding streets to residential areas, one of smaller terraces on one side of town and larger, detached ones on the other. She made decisions about which buildings to put where.

Right outside the town, she painted a river and we added a towpath and a bridge to allow access to the water and across it to the farms and golf course that made up about 1/3 of the paper. It took ages and I did a fair amount of the painting just because it was fun to work together and also it was occupying the whole of my dining table for about 2 weeks as it was. Gradually we filled in all the details:gardens for the houses; open spaces for play/dog walking; bus stops; car parks; trees and other plants and finally, with Hannah's agreement, I made an open public space with tubs of  flowers and a war memorial. When we finally finished this morning it looked like this.