EN 1176 is the European safety standard for playground equipment and surfacing, adopted in the UK as BS EN 1176 and published by BSI. It's the standard your play structure was (or should have been) designed, installed and inspected against. It isn't law in itself, but it's the benchmark courts, insurers and inspectors use to judge whether equipment was safe, which in practice gives it teeth.
The parts that matter to a play venue
Part 1 carries the general requirements: entrapment, structural integrity, impact areas. Part 10 covers fully enclosed play equipment, which is the part written about indoor soft play frames specifically; our Part 10 deep dive unpacks it. Part 11 covers spatial networks (net climbing structures), and Part 7 sets the operating regime: daily visual checks by your staff, operational inspections every one to three months, and an annual main inspection by an independent competent inspector, typically someone on the RPII register.
What operators actually hold
Three things: the manufacturer's conformity documents from installation, the trail of your own checks and operational inspections, and the annual inspection reports. Modifying the structure without professional input quietly invalidates the first of these, which is the most common way good venues drift out of conformity. Start with our EN 1176 guide; SafePlay's Equipment Register keeps all three layers of evidence in one place.