Run and Jump Wigan Soft Play: A Dad's Honest Review

I don't get many weekday afternoons off, so when a gap opened in my diary I did the sums: three hours of annual leave, two children, one soft play. I took Dorothy, 10, and Thomas, 2, to Run and Jump soft play and it turned out to be the best couple of hours I've had in weeks. Nothing dramatic happened. Both of them were happy, I wasn't on my phone, and the only things anyone needed from me were a push, a drink and £8.50 at the desk.

Why I took the afternoon off work

Running a business makes time off feel like a decision rather than a right. There is always one more email, one more quote to send, one more thing that could be done tonight instead. But the children don't remember the emails. They remember who turned up.

So I blocked the afternoon out in the morning and stuck to it. I'd recommend it to any working dad reading this. Pick a day, put it in the diary, and treat it like a client meeting you can't move.

What Run and Jump soft play does well

It's open until 6, which mattered more than I expected. No clock-watching, no leaving halfway through a good game because the slot has ended. We arrived mid-afternoon, stayed until the announcement, and got our money's worth.

There's only so much to say about padded frames and slides. What matters is whether the children vanish into it happily for two hours, and both of mine did.

Dorothy is slightly too tall, and it didn't matter

At 10, Dorothy is at the age where she's over the height limit for parts of the equipment. Some places are strict about that, and it can sour a trip for an older sibling who has been dragged along for a toddler's benefit.

Here it didn't matter. She found her own way round, mostly by taking Thomas under her wing: helping him up the steps, going down the slide with him, steering him back when he wandered off. Watching the two of them work as a team was the best part of the day, better than any of the equipment.

They both made new friends

Children make friends at soft play in about four minutes. Both of mine came away with new ones, the sort you keep for 90 minutes and never see again. Thomas spent most of the session following older children around, and Dorothy was happy to be part of whatever game was happening. Nobody needed me to organise anything, which is the quiet luxury of soft play.

Is £8.50 good value at Run and Jump soft play?

Entry was £8.50 and you stay as long as you like until closing. Stretch that to two and a half hours and it's about £3.40 an hour, which is cheap by the standards of most afternoons out with children.

The catch is the word regular. Double it for two children and a weekly visit becomes £17 a week, roughly £68 a month. For plenty of UK families that is not a small line in the budget. It's the same problem I look at in my golf reviews, where price per round matters more than the state of the fairways. Something can be good value once and poor value weekly. The honest answer is that Run and Jump soft play is decent value for a one-off trip and expensive as a habit.

If you're going often, stay for the whole session, check whether you can bring your own snacks, and go with another family so the cost is shared.

Things I'd do differently next time

• Arrive earlier and use the whole session, since you pay once either way.
• Check the sock rules and whether adults are charged before turning up.
• Go on a weekday if you can. This one was calm; weekends will be a different animal.
• Take a second adult if you've got a toddler and an older child who want to be in different parts of the room.

The takeaway

A soft play trip is not a big day out. It's two hours, a cup of tea and a bit of noise. But £8.50 for two happy children and a proper break from work is money well spent, and I'd rather spend it on a Tuesday afternoon than on something plastic that's forgotten by Friday.

If you know a soft play that's worth the entry fee, tell me where it is and what it charges. I'm putting a list together by price per session and I'll share what I find.