Residents are being encouraged to don their design hats and help shape the future of a new urban park.

The Major Urban Park initiative forms part of the creation of a huge housing development forming part of Ebbsfleet Garden City, known as Whitecliffe.

The housing development forms the largest part of what has been hailed as the UK’s first new garden city in almost 100 years and sits opposite Bluewater shopping centre in Greenhithe.

The park, which will span the equivalent of 24 football pitches, will include a new civic square with restaurants and outdoor seating, and sports and recreational facilities.

Developers are also hoping to include a community growing area, an older children’s play area, and wildlife friendly and protected areas.

But the exact recreational facilities on offer are down to the public to decide. Click here to have your say online.

At an open consultation event at Castle Hill Community Centre in Cherry Orchard Road, in Swanscombe yesterday (July 10) residents in the surrounding area were encouraged to draw their own plan for the park.

Ideas offered up included a skate park, a free art wall, basketball courts, football pitches, food stalls, a gaming cafe and an outdoor gym.

Other suggestions were for an area for pigs and chickens, vegetable patches, a duck pond, slides and a mini hedge maze.

There will also be a 5km track to cycle, run or walk around the edge.

Greenhithe resident Lisa Ayres, who went along to the consultation, said: “I think any outdoor space that can be used for leisure is positive for the area.

“I’ll definitely be making use of it and telling all that I used to play here as a child, when it used to be called the Ecki, although I have no idea why.

“You weren’t supposed to play there in those days though.”

The developers are planning to keep the area currently occupied by the derelict Alkerden Farm, on Alkerden Lane as rural by renovating the existing barn and turning the area into a petting farm and allotments.

The park will stretch from the Craylands Gorge and Alkerden Barn Area in the North, down past the Chalk Spine, across the Fastrack and then to the south where it connects into Castle Hill Lakes.

Planning permission was granted by Dartford council 15 years ago for the Eastern Quarry, now known as Whitecliffe, to be developed for a new mixed-use community including 6,250 homes, green space and new leisure, retail and commercial facilities.

The planning application will be submitted in August with a view to a decision being taken this Winter.