IT was a fabulous bank holiday outing to Britain’s newest and most dazzling children’s park – but it left me feeling rather guilty.

The setting could not have been more gorgeous – interactive water fountains, nature trails, climbing walls and tree-lined promenades – and my young daughters loved it.

The girls scampered around an adventure playground, with slightly scary ladders and wobbly bridges built into the trees.

We took the lift to the top of the tower for breathtaking views of the London skyline, and piled into the most famous swimming pool in the land, at a knockdown price.

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s the cool £300 million price tag for converting this site – the Olympic Park, as you’ve probably guessed – for us Londoners to swoon over.

Yes, not only did those fabulous 2012 Games cost £11 billion, but an extra £300 million was tossed in afterwards, to create a “must-see attraction” in the east end.

Now, it makes sense to ensure a popular “legacy” to the Olympics, rather than allow the park to fade into squalor and become a white elephant.

But, unlike most Londoners, I can’t but help think about the rest of the country and what has happened to its parks.

I remember a story I wrote almost four years ago, just as the austerity axe started to be swung by the Coalition. It revealed plans to build scores of new play areas across this region were being scrapped, as town halls were told to hand back the money.

The playgrounds had been promised – for Darlington, County Durham, Hartlepool, Redcar and Cleveland, South Tyneside, North Yorkshire and York – to help tackle obesity. But incoming education ministers insisted the playgrounds were, sadly, being “funded on the never-never” – that the cash simply didn’t exist.

I imagine that, almost everywhere, play areas look increasingly rundown.

Week after week, I seem to stumble across more examples of this double standard, entirely missed by the London-based media, naturally.

At the last Autumn Statement, £60 million of public cash was casually tossed in to help build a spectacular Garden Bridge across the Thames. And, just the other day, Mayor Boris Johnson announced he wants to build an underground ring road around London, at a cost of £30 billion – yes, £30 billion.

As I’ve written before, there’s little doubt that, if HS2 is scrapped, a “cost-benefit analysis” will rule that the money should be spent in the capital, perhaps on Crossrail 2.

Of course, this is a protest as old as the hills – but it’s getting worse. Take it from this guilty, adopted Londoner.

SHE is Britain’s most successful Paralympian, but that counts for little with some the old fogeys that haunt the corridors of the House of Lords.

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, who lives in Redcar, revealed: “I’m still quite frequently called ‘the young girl in the wheelchair’.

“In the corridors, people have been patting me on the head, which – if that happened in the outside world – I think I probably would have said something.

“But it’s picking your battles, because the chap that did it was 91 and he comes from a different time.”