Landscape The Journal of the Landscape Institute
Summer 2014
Just add water
President’s review / 23 Greening the Royal Docks / 09 Noel Farrer looks ahead / 36 World War One and landscape / 40
landscapeinstitute.org
A S T R O Fascinating encased gemstones for modern urban settings – The
numerous configuration options cater for the many technological and formal requirements of urban settings. At the heart of the luminaire lies the optics unit, an integral system of LED, reflectors, the assembly unit and the surrounding passe-partout – ensuring a high level of efficiency and visual comfort, with three different directional characteristics. Astro can be equipped with an optional LED ring around its central light engine for ambient lighting or subtle zoning.
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Landscape Summer 2014
Editorial
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Should our rural landscapes be on a war footing? y ou look at the black and white photographs of British agriculture during World War One on pages 40–45 they are obviously charming yet seem scarcely relevant to our current concerns. But that is not so. One of the effects of war is to lead to massive changes within a short period of time. Cover image ©: — Bethany Gale and Sarah Tolley 1, Agnese Sanvito
WHEN
In World War One (and also in World War Two of course) this meant a drive to produce more of our own food and, with mechanisation, a pressure to make land more productive and efficient. We have had a century of this ‘efficiency’ and it is salutary to see where the origins lie. Because, as Lyndis Cole of LUC pointed out in the Landscape Futures debate in Bristol earlier this year, we have been seeking the wrong kind of efficiency. The countryside that most people love has been disappearing and becoming what Cole dubbed ‘the factory floor’ in the pursuit of greater production.
That has been known for some time, and there are many who understand that the energy input which intensive agriculture demands will be neither affordable nor justifiable in the future. But the floods of the past winter have also been a wake-up call. The harrowing stories of farmers and homeowners in the Somerset Levels and elsewhere experiencing depths of floodwater that were hitherto unforeseen are a harbinger of something we are likely to see more often with global warning. If we are to mitigate the effects it won’t just be with localised dredging but with consideration of the entire water course as the open letter to the prime minister from Sue Illman and others pointed out. Cole’s lecture took this one step further, by talking about multi-functional landscapes which can, at the same time, offer biodiversity, improved soil fertility and enhanced amenity – plus providing and maintaining the sort of landscape that we love and enjoy. Landscape is a finite resource and we can no longer afford to have it serve a single purpose. Achieving this will take planning and this may be where we can learn from wars. Rather than saying that we cannot afford to invest in landscape we must realise that we cannot afford not to. The phrase ‘war on...’ is a hackneyed one, frequently misused or the excuse for ill-judged initiatives. But the kind of centralised thinking that war demands is just what is needed to make our landscapes work harder – not with the single-minded vision triggered by immediate food shortages but in an understanding of the battles that a changing climate will bring. Landscape Summer 2014
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Landscape Contents
The Journal of the Landscape Institute
Publisher Darkhorse Design Ltd 42 Hamilton Square, Birkenhead Wirral, Merseyside. CH41 5BP T 0151 649 9669 www.darkhorsedesign.co.uk Editor Ruth Slavid landscape@darkhorsedesign.co.uk Editorial advisory panel Tim Waterman, honorary editor Edwin Knighton CMLI Jo Watkins PPLI Jenifer White CMLI John Stuart Murray FLI Ian Thompson CMLI Jill White CMLI Eleanor Trenfield Amanda McDermott Landscape Institute president Sue Illman PLI LI director of policy and communications Paul Lincoln ––– Subscriptions landscapethejournal.org/subscribe Advertising landscapeinstitute.org/contact Membership landscapeinstitute.org/membership Twitter @talklandscape ––– The Landscape Institute is the Royal Chartered institute for landscape architects. As a professional body and educational charity, it works to protect, conserve and enhance the natural and built environment for the public benefit. ––– Landscape is printed on FSC paper obtained from a sustainable and well managed source, using environmentally friendly vegetable oil based ink. The views expressed in this journal are those of the contributors and advertisers and not necessarily those of the Landscape Institute, Darkhorse or the Editorial Advisory Panel. While every effort has been made to check the accuracy and validity of the information given in this publication, neither the Institute nor the Publisher accept any responsibility for the subsequent use of this information, for any errors or omissions that it may contain, or for any misunderstandings arising from it.
Landscape is the official journal of the Landscape Institute, ISSN: 1742–2914 ©May 2014 Landscape Institute. Landscape is published four times a year by Darkhorse Design.
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Regulars Editorial
3 Should our rural landscapes be on a war footing?
Bigger picture
6 Snow and trees photographed in the Peak District 9 News analysis Winners and shortlisted schemes in the ideas competition for London’s Royal Docks 59
Technical
Understanding and benefitting from
Features
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President’s review As her eventful and successful two years as President draw to a close, Sue Illman looks back over a period that started with the Olympics and ended with the Farrell Review.
ecology surveys
Practice 1
Practice 2
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A Word
65 A proposal for urban natural burials 73 The importance of good photography
Petunia
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Lest we forget The way that we think of memorials has changed several times since the end of World War One. Now they are less about visceral memories and more about coming together.
Photo 1 Š: LDA Design 2, Tom Lee 3, MERL, University of Reading 4, John Pegg 5, Hugh Clout
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House-proud and playful
Housing and play are the two specialisms of Noel Farrer, the Landscape Institute’s energetic next president.
Rebuilding Northern France
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The devastation of war in northern France led to new approaches to planning as well as reconstruction both ancient and modern.
Feeding the nation
The first of our features on World War One looks at the pressures on farming and the resulting impact on the rural landscape.
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Bigger Picture By Ruth Slavid
Snow and trees
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his beautifully composed photograph of Edale in the Peak District was taken by Martin Malies in February 2013. Malies is an amateur photographer in the sense that he doesn’t make his living from his pictures (he is a retired surveyor) but he has the dedication and approach of a true professional in what he describes as ‘an all consuming hobby’. The purpose of his landscape photography is different from that of the photographers capturing landscape architects’ work seen on pages 72 to 76 but the approach is similar. ‘It is time and the effort of finding and producing the picture, plus years of experience which have honed my expertise,’ Malies says.
There is a pleasingly old fashioned look to a black and white photograph, but of course today all photographs are in colour and the decision to go with black and white is one that is made in Photoshop. This is a reminder that all photography, while trying to capture an inner truth, is essentially artificial. You cannot just photograph ‘what is there’.
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Photo ©: 1 — Martin Malies
So, unlike the average photographer who will happen to take a picture while they are out, Malies set out deliberately from his home in Manchester to take photographs in the snow. ‘There is a very graphic quality which appealed to me, with a lot of snow and sky. It emphasises the bleakness of the area,’ he said.
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News Analysis By Ruth Slavid
Royal Docks Competition
1 — Aerial view of the Royal Docks, London. There are real development plans, but the ideas competition sought water-sensitive solutions.
Some 65 teams produced proposals to revitalise London’s Royal Docks in a resilient and water-sensitive manner. We publish the best of them.
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o landscape architects, Bethany w Gale and Sarah Tolley, have won the competition to design a scheme for London’s Royal Docks that would create a more resilient and water-sensitive environment. The competition, organised by the Landscape Institute and Ecobuild, with support from the Mayor of London, London Borough of Newham and OpenCity, and sponsorship from Marshalls, attracted 65 entries, of which 20 were shortlisted and exhibited at Ecobuild.
Photo ©: 1 — Jason Hawkes
Following two well-attended seminars on water-sensitive urban design, a winner, a second prize and four runners up were announced. The three docks that make up the Royal Docks in east London have a total water area of nearly 250 acres, making them the largest enclosed docks in the world. Speaking about the shortlist Sue Illman, president of the Landscape Institute, said: ‘It’s time we started to see water as a valuable resource – rather than something to be hidden away underground. Recent events in Somerset and elsewhere in the country have demonstrated that the UK desperately needs a fully
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integrated approach to flooding, water supply and land use management. The designs on the shortlist show what is possible if we adopt a mixed green, grey and blue infrastructure approach. I hope this competition helps stimulate debate about how we should be planning and managing more “liveable” and water sensitive places in the future.’ The judges of the competition were: Peter Barbalov – partner, Farrells Richard Blakeway – deputy mayor for housing, land and property, Greater London Authority Jamie Dean – regeneration manager, north east area, Greater London Authority Nuala Gallagher – London Borough of Newham
Sue Illman – President, Landscape Institute Thomas Lane – group technical editor, Building magazine and Ecobuild Mike Luddy – managing director, Royal Docks Management Authority Victoria Thornton – founding director, Open-City. Every submission consisted of two boards. You will have a chance to see these during the London Festival of Architecture when they will be on display at the Building Centre in central London on the evening of 12 June. There will also be presentations by the winning and shortlisted teams. For more details go to the LI website. In the meantime, you can learn more about the winning and shortlisted schemes on the following pages. /... Landscape Summer 2014
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News Analysis Winner
Silvertown Docks by Bethany Gale and Sarah Tolley Prize: £2000 The judges said of the project, ‘This has a sense of place and a notion of history. It has a seeming effortlessness that comes together into something that is believable. It creates a green oasis in the docks and has elements that will appeal to everybody, humanising the dock and softening its hard edges, making the most of existing assets.’ Gale and Tolley described their project as follows: ‘Silvertown Docks proposes a new type of marina for the Royal Docks that balances the past with the present. Once used as a graving dock for shipbuilding and repair, the site is transformed into a unique series of spaces that encourage both ecological and human uses. /... 1
1 — Map showing area covered by the proposal (red circle). 2 — Historic drawing of the area. 3 — Section through water bodies showing activities. 4 — Section through water bodies showing habitats.
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Image ©: 1, 2, 3, 4, — Bethany Gale and Sarah Tolley
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News Analysis
5 — There would be leisure opportunities on land... 6 — ...and on the water. 7 — Visualisation of how the greened docks could look. 8 — Concept diagram showing the different emphases of the various parts of the docks.
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‘The proposal for the Silvertown Docks provides space for flooding mitigation, habitat development, interaction with the water and play. The docks to the West allow for a variety of wildlife to recolonise the area and thrive on sunken ships. This harks back to the site’s industrial past and provides a much needed green open space for the neighbouring communities. ‘The green axis links Thames Barrier Park through to the Crystal, Emirates cable car and DLR stations, adding legibility and accessibility to the site. Docks to the East then provide more interaction with the water, including opportunities for paddling, swimming, scuba diving and canoeing. ‘These will be supported by new mixed-use development plots that frame the docks and create active waterfront edges. Silvertown Docks recognises the area as both a visitor attraction and a neighbourhood and it aims to draw together the two elements with community space and an exciting hub for sport, leisure and wildlife preservation.’
Image ©: 5, 6, 7, 8, — Bethany Gale and Sarah Tolley
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News Analysis Second place
E16 6BL by Arup Prize: £1000 This project was a masterplan to create a technology hub around London City Airport. The judges said, ‘This is an approach of technical expertise in addressing so many of the issues related to the docks. You can apply it as you need to, and the strategy is communicated very well.’
• large-scale food production utilising the public realm, water, roofs and walls with technologies including hydroponics;
The Arup team described it as follows: ‘E16 6BL embraces the unique landscape of London’s Royal Docks, characterised by a palette of six blues each with their own intriguing environments. From the power and might of the River and undefended estuary downstream of the barrier, through to the deep still water of the three docks and the natural cycles of water percolating amongst the green fingers in the urban development, E16 6BL brings a landscape that combines productivity with recreation and economic regeneration.
• a water cycle that makes use of run-off to create dynamic landscapes that purify and reduce flood risk;
• systems to re-use waste from industries and the northern outfall sewer, generating energy;
1 — In the outer estuary, flood defences are integrated in the landscape, which also includes recreation space and a productive landscape. 2 — Urban wetlands will offer an increase in property prices adjacent to enhanced landscape, and will also slow the release of water to reduce flooding and enhance water quality. 3 — Algae grown in South Albert Dock will absorb more than three times as much carbon dioxide as a hectare of land. Photobioreactors will generate biofuel. 4 — Creating the elevated landscape in North Albert Dock will be a cost-effective way to re-use spoil generated across London. There should be a 60% reduction in particulates in the air.
• a cost effective solution for London’s excavated material, used to create a new topography for the Docklands. ‘Above all, E16 6BL achieves this while maximising development opportunities, enhancing land values through intelligent multifunctional landscapes and tackles the social deprivation of the wider communities by creating a vibrant new place.’
‘The vision creates a technology-rich hub around London’s airport, utilising landscape in a way that responds to the challenges of climate change, makes beneficial use of the infrastructure, land use and services present and forms a warm and inviting public realm in a vast industrial setting. ‘The vision incorporates:
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Image ©: 1, 2, 3, 4, — Arup
• improved connectivity through a network integrating the key hubs of rail, air and water; creating a local transport zone dominated by pedestrians and cyclists;
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News Analysis
Highly commended
Narcissus by Christos Diplas Prize: £500 Christos Diplas is a student at the University of Sheffield. His project places greenhouses in the water, where they can act as community spaces for growing vegetables and hosting workshops and exhibitions. The technology that he uses includes aquaponics, algal pods and transparent photovoltaics. The judges said: ‘There is something poetic about the images. It offers a real way of addressing the industrial hard edge of the docks. This is a fantastic design for a student.’
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1 — The glasshouses will act as landmarks. Rainwater will be collected from the roofs. 2 — The edges will provide seating and walkways at different heights. 3 — There are recreational islands, and floating pathways leading to the glasshouses.
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Image ©: 1, 2, 3, — Christoph Diplas
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Highly commended
Re-connecting the Docks by James Hartwell Prize: £500 James Hartwell is also a student at the University of Sheffield. His proposal would create an urban farm beside the Thames, a linear public park called Wharf Park linking Victoria Dock with the Thames and a new neighbourhood within Victoria Dock, to be called Victoria Village. The judges said, ‘The idea of reactivating the old lock entrances is genius. Hartwell has majored on the urban form, on a community orchard and on connecting people and water, which is a different emphasis. It recognises that the docks have always fed London.’
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Image ©: 1, 2, — James Hartwell
1 — Masterplan showing the proposed development, and the new connection to the river on the left. 2 — The floating village will cater to a diversity of recreational users and increase water interaction, whilst creating opportunities for flora and fauna to flourish in the system of small canals and enclosed wetland habitats.
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News Analysis Highly commended
Biophilia by Studio Engleback Prize: £500 Studio Engleback described this proposal as ‘a framework for a floating garden city’. Housing, a square, offices, reedbeds and a farm would all exist on the water, adding capacity to the capital and also landscape. The judges said, ‘There is a practicality about this proposal. It brings back some of the vibrancy and vitality that the docks would once have had. There is a high employment density and a complete community on the water combining traditional maritime and land-based elements.’
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1 — Reedbed platform – water cleansing. 2 — Floating farm. 3 — Coffee speedboat. 4 — Boat workshop. 5 — Super trench with biochar for street trees. 6 — Canal boat affordable housing.
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Image ©: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, — Studio Engleback
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Highly commended
Water Boulevards by Baharash Architecture Prize: £500 This proposal uses aqueous thoroughfares to weave existing surrounding communities together and to provide economic, environmental and social sustainability. The judges said, ‘There were some very good concepts dealing with the issues of water and water management. The proposal integrates buildings and landscape and takes the docks through to the surrounding community to encourage an environment using water and greater biodiversity. It’s a simple and very effective idea.’
Image ©: 1, 2, — Baharash Architecture
1 — One possible use for the new water boulevards could include allotments with salad gardens. 2 — Section showing street types of varying widths and uses sitting above the water.
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The following projects were also shortlisted. 3 Systems by Metrostudio UK Designs for new canal side living and a riverside park. Albert Island by B|D landscape architects The creation of an urban park as a new link across the docks with productive orchard and boardwalk riverwalk. The use of biodiverse swales provides filtration for grey water.
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Life in Technicolour by Carl Hong, Farah Dakkak and Brad Clothier A floating village, public square, wetlands, beach and rain gardens creating a vibrant new waterfront. Project Float by Jonathan Dancey, University of Gloucestershire Floating development based on a modular design with infinite uses and layouts.
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The Ecosystem Engines by The Ecology Consultancy, The Green Roof Consultancy, Charlotte Harris Landscape Design, Marianna Magklara Architecture and Environmental Engineering Clusters of island pods and pontoons, including a wet woodland, flower-rich habitats and grey water harvesting. Fade-in Landscape by GAAM. Architectes A greenway stretching the length of the docks with mixed-use activity islands, a green-power island and flood reservoir. Floating Forest by Greysmith Associates Designs for a floating forest to connect neighbourhoods and act as a new educational attraction.
The Resilient Docks by Shu Kuei Hsu, University of Washington and Qian Qian Ye, Cornell University The creation of a liveable and sustainable development integrating green infrastructure and water-sensitive design to mitigate urban runoff and protect the shoreline ecosystem. The Sensory Docks by Kay Pallaris, Jamie Abbott, Francesco Bernabei, Nick Udal, Briony Turner, Mena Shah, Francesca Guarascio & Luis Rojas Green-blue connectivity for all five human senses – a place more physically, emotionally and ecologically connected with its local surroundings. Silvertown Green Docks by Artem Barkhin, Leeds Metropolitan University A new floating village, urban forest and wetland networks with green roofs for food production and green corridor for wildlife.
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A Landmark for Living by Gensler A new park, bridges and transport links to improve connectivity within the Royal Docks. 4
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Silvertown Quays and Minoco Wharf by Konrad Boncza-Pioro A plan to establish an aquarium as a centre for marine and inland water ecosystem studies, a centre for urban agriculture and a SUDs system incorporated into the buildings and landscape.
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Silvertown Wetlands by Andreas Boden and Malan I Jákupsstovu A design to create a green nature retreat and walkway to act as a wetland flood plain.
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What if we move the River? By HWP Planungsgesellschaft mbH A radical plan which imagines the redirection of the Thames to unlock land to form a new River Thames Park, which would provide a continuous greenlink from the O2 Arena to Gallions Hill.
Image ©: 1 — B|D landscape architects 2, Greysmith Associates 3, Carl Hong, Farah Dakkak and Brad Clothier 4, Artem Barkhin 5, Leeds Metropolitan University Konrad Boncza-Pioro 6, Andreas Boden and Malan I Jákupsstovu
News Analysis
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Landscape Institute
Photo ©: 1 — MERL University of Reading 2, Room 60 3, LDA Design 4, Agnese Sanvito 5, Burns + Nice Design
2012/14 President’s Review
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The Landscape Institute has enjoyed a busy and successful two years, influencing policy and raising its profile. As Sue Illman’s presidency draws to a close, we look back over the achievements and events of the period.
Landscape Institute
2012/14 President’s Review
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The start of my presidency in the summer of 2012 coincided with the opening of the Olympic Park. What better way to start? In its review of 2012, The Architects’ Journal gave this advice to its readers: ‘Resolution 1: Engage a landscape designer at the outset of your project.’ In the same article the AJ said: 2
‘2012 will go down as the year British landscape design reinvented itself. Two of the main talking points, the Olympics and green infrastructure, have put the emotive power of quality landscape design firmly in the public eye and in professional consciousness.’
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1 — Sue Illman judging the President’s Award at the 2013 LI Awards. 2 — Wild flower meadows were one of the great successes of the Olympics. 3 — Play area in the north park, designed by LUC and opened in 2013. 4 — The south park, designed by James Corner Field Operations, opened this spring.
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As I come to the end of my presidency, the Farrell Review, which helpfully speaks of landscape as the ‘primary infrastructure’, was published to industry-wide enthusiasm and government indifference. Just a few days later, it was great to see the enthusiastic public response to the opening of the Olympic South Park as 50,000 people enjoyed this much anticipated Olympic legacy. This has been an exciting two years for the Landscape Institute and also a great period for public appreciation of landscape architecture in general. Over this time, despite a challenging operating environment, the Institute has significantly increased its activities. Recognition of the Institute has improved massively, its profile has risen through greater partnership working and there is now a wide following for what we do way beyond the constituency of UK-based landscape architecture. In the area of green infrastructure our publications, videos and competitions have made a huge impact and our recent work campaigning for a coordinated
response to flood prevention from government has not only generated considerable media coverage but has also complemented our longerterm work on sustainable drainage, water management and water sensitive urban design. Our aim is always to work with our individual members and registered practices not only to fulfil our role as a chartered body representing the landscape profession but also as an educational charity preparing future generations of landscape practitioners. Over the past two years I have visited almost all of our branches and our devolved nations; they have inspired me and I hope that I have inspired them with our shared devotion to good quality, well-designed and properly managed landscapes. I have only been able to do this work with the support of our members, our Advisory Council, our many committee members, our sponsors and our Board of Trustees, both LI members and independent appointees. To all of them, I would like to offer my considerable thanks. I would also like to offer special thanks to Alastair McCapra who served for five years as chief executive. His contribution to the LI over a period of immense financial and organisational challenge has been incalculable; we all owe him a considerable debt. I am also delighted to welcome the appointment of Phil Mulligan as our new CEO. And I want to record my thanks to our staff team who have worked with incredible enthusiasm to support and develop the work of the Institute. Sue Illman, PLI
Photo ©: 1 — Agnese Sanvito 2, LDA Design 3, LUC 4, Lesley Malone
Introduction by the President
A new vision for landscape architecture Landscape professionals will need to become more flexible and more knowledgeable in order to address new challenges.
There is a strong team of officers and staff. However, cuts to public and statutory service are set to continue, which means the LI needs to be very focused on its messages if it is to get landscape on the agenda locally or nationally.
“Landscape and urban design are often the most valued by the public and yet contradictorily, the least valued in terms of fees and are frequently where the first savings are made on any given project”.
As population grows and living standards rise globally, pressure will increase on natural resources. Climate change is placing additional strains on current systems. The shift to urban living and pressure on infrastructure is set to continue. All of this means that in the UK and internationally the landscape profession will have an ever more important role to play in helping create thriving communities that are sustainable. There will also be a greater need for landscape professionals to integrate and work alongside others from the built-environment sector. Members of the Landscape Institute will need to be both more flexible in their approach and more knowledgeable across a range of specialist topics. The Institute will need to play an increasing role both in promoting the landscape profession to specialist and lay audiences and in promoting and ensuring competence and standards within the profession.
Many in the profession echo this gloomy observation from the Farrell Review. However it is made at a time when there is also acknowledgement of the need for major infrastructure projects as well as new housing; an increasing awareness of the public-health agenda following organisational changes in the NHS; a genuine recognition of the value provided by green infrastructure (evidenced most recently by Arup Foresight’s Cities Alive report), increasing understanding of designing with water as well as an evolving debate about the value of natural capital.
Photo ©: 5 — Robert Taylor
The Institute is in a good position to respond to these challenges. Membership has grown steadily over the last five years. Annual budgets have been producing a surplus so that reserves have been built up. The quality and quantity of policy and communication projects has risen significantly; training, events and the range of educational materials have increased and a wide range of new partnerships has been established.
5 5 — Wayne Hemingway presented the 2013 Landscape Institute Awards and talked about the importance of landscape for housing.
In response to this the Landscape Institute has adopted a new vision: ‘Inspirational landscapes and liveable places are at the heart of thriving communities’. This complements our mission statement: ‘To promote the landscape profession for the benefit of society and the natural and built environment’. The Landscape Institute does this by playing an important role in helping to protect and enhance the environment and helping to create thriving communities through the design and management of inspirational places. No other professional body brings together environmental analysis, spatial planning, site management and design. This unique mix enables members of the Landscape Institute to offer design and management solutions which are environmentally led, sustainable, and enhance the quality of human life. /...
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Landscape Institute
2012/14 President’s Review
Leading the profession
6 — The LI website has been described as ‘a priceless resource’. 7 — Carys Swanwick speaking at the Landscape Futures debate in Bristol.
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The Future in Landscape The Landscape Futures lecture series which ran from January to April 2014, aimed to stimulate debate about the future of landscape and explore the major challenges ahead that will affect how our land is used and managed, and how that use will affect the prosperity and quality of life of all citizens. The series was filmed and documented online. This, together with a year-long ‘conversation’ with members on the future of the profession, has provided an inspiring analysis of the way in which a profession that seeks to address both the built and the natural environment is facing the challenge of a fast-changing political and professional situation. The first lecture at Sheffield University saw Jonathon Porritt challenge the profession to ensure that it was educating the next generation of landscape architects with the skills required to create a truly sustainable future. Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden showed what a sustainable society could look like from a grass-roots perspective. In Birmingham, Frazer Osment (LDA Design), Mary Parsons (Places for People) and David Birkbeck (Design for Homes) asked why we had such difficulty in building beautiful places. In Cambridge, Alister Kratt (LDA), Selina Mason (Olympic Delivery Authority) and Tim Mould QC (Landmark Chambers) tackled the demands of big infrastructure and at the Arnolfini in Bristol, Lyndis Cole (LUC), Carys Swanwick (NT) and Naomi Oakley (Natural England) looked at how we can create functional rural landscapes, which are fit for the future. The final two took place at the LI’s HQ in London. The first looked at the effect of the digital revolution on the urban landscape. This was addressed by Sophie Thompson (LDA), Alan Thompson (Hayes Davidson) and Rick Robinson (IBM). And in the final lecture, called ‘What does the future of landscape architecture look like?, Tom Armour (Arup) presented new research from Arup Foresight called Cities Alive, and Phil Askew (Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park) and Sue Illman debated the key trends shaping the future of landscape architecture.
Photo ©: 7 — Lesley Malone
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Digital Landscape In December 2013 the LI website was described by the Landscape Architects’ Network (USA) as ‘a priceless resource for landscape architecture’ and rated #2 in its top 10 landscape websites worldwide. At Ecobuild 2014, @talklandscape was voted in the top 25 twitter accounts focussing on sustainability and our range of short videos is now an established and hugely popular form of communication. The careers animation made by Room 60, ‘I want to be a landscape architect’ has been viewed 129,000 times and is in use by landscape architecture departments across the world. Our video on Water Sensitive Urban Design made with CIRIA, AECOM and Arup came top in the Sustainable Water Industries Group Awards in the Communications category. At the heart of the LI website is the fast-growing Case Studies Library and Register of Practices. These taken together showcase not only the best work of the profession but also enable users to obtain the details of the people and practices behind the landscapes. Our recently expanded News and Reviews website and fortnightly Update keep our members and supporters in touch with all the most important industry developments.
8 — Burns + Nice’s work at Leicester Square, London won the President’s Award at the 2013 LI Awards. 9 — Dominic Cole gave the 2013 Jellicoe Lecture. 10 — Cover of the Spring 2014 issue of Landscape. 11 — ‘Barge Walk’ by Erika Richmond and Pei-Chi Chi was highly commended in the High Line for London Competition.
The High Line for London Ideas Competition (October 2012) A green infrastructure approach to redesigning London was at the heart of the High Line for London competition. Run in conjunction with the Mayor of London, the Garden Museum and The Architects’ Journal, this competition received 170 entries, which triggered considerable national and international press coverage and ensured that the ideas behind making London a greener city were communicated to a huge audience. The exhibition moved to London’s City Hall, and a website, newlondonlandscape.org, has now been created to showcase the best projects. The competition and exhibition were complemented by a seminar on green infrastructure starring the founders of the High Line in New York.
Photo ©: 8 — Burns + Nice 10, S Wilson 11, Erika Richmond and Pei-Chi Chi
The Royal Docks Ideas Competition In September 2013, Ecobuild and the Landscape Institute launched a competition for ideas on how to turn the Royal Docks into a green infrastructure space for east London in which water sensitive urban design (WSUD) would inspire a liveable approach to east London. The competition, which was backed by the Mayor of London, Newham Council, Marshalls, Building magazine and London Open City, attracted entries from all over the world and was exhibited at Ecobuild. A proposal by Bethany Gale and Sarah Tolley, landscape architects working respectively for Building Design Partnership and Levitt Bernstein, to turn Silvertown Docks into a new type of marina won the competition. Other recent competitions have included Barrow in Furness, Wood Wharf at Canary Wharf and Public Health and Green Infrastructure in conjunction with the Garden Museum. Jellicoe Lecture The Jellicoe Lecture, named in honour of Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, has become an established annual event. Robert Townshend, founder of Townshend Landscape Architects and designer of Brindley Place and King’s Cross Central in London, gave the lecture in November 2012. Dominic Cole, designer of the Eden Project, spoke surrounded by his achievement in November 2013.
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Landscape Institute Awards The Landscape Institute Awards are presented annually to encourage and recognise outstanding examples of work by the landscape profession. The LI Awards aim to promote the art and science of landscape architecture; advance the knowledge and understanding of the discipline; celebrate professional expertise and reward schemes that demonstrate a high level of commitment to sustainability. Incredible Edible Todmorden’s Pam Warhurst hosted the 2012 Awards Ceremony held at Congress Centre. The Olympic Park topped the bill. The 2013 ceremony was held at the Bloomsbury Big Top on 21 November and was hosted by designer Wayne Hemingway MBE. The 2013 Awards included a new category for Adding Value through Landscape and six design categories. The College of Fellows also awarded a prize for Climate Change Adaptation.
Landscape, the Journal of the Landscape Institute and News and Reviews The LI’s quarterly journal Landscape is edited by Ruth Slavid and published by Darkhorse Design. It showcases the best of design, management and thinking, and addresses the key issues facing the profession, from how to win work to the latest technical advances. This is complemented by the News and Reviews website and fortnightly Update. /...
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London Open House The LI’s sponsorship of London Open House has led to a considerable expansion of the coverage of landscape projects and landscape guided tours in this annual event showcasing the best of the capital’s built environment. In 2013, 75 landscape projects were included in the programme. Our involvement has led to a significant number of Open House participants recognising the value of landscape. Research by Open House has shown that 63% of those surveyed said that Open House in 2013 had given them a better appreciation of the value of well-designed public space and landscape. In 2013 we hosted the first Open City Debate ‘Is London becoming a sterile city?’, a topic that moved nearly 11,000 people to apply for tickets. The Landscape Institute archive at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading The LI has transferred its archive to the University of Reading’s special collections based at the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL). For many years the Institute has worked to build up an archive as a repository for the work of the profession and its contribution to society. The extensive archive includes the drawings and professional papers of many leading landscape architects including the urban designer Michael Brown (Redditch New Town), Sylvia Crowe (Commonwealth Institute, London and the roof garden for the Scottish Widows building in Edinburgh) and Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (Atlanta History Center and JFK Memorial at Runnymede). It includes many intricate sketches and drawings by Peter Shepheard – an accomplished artist as well as landscape architect, invited by Pevsner to illustrate two books on ducks and woodland birds. The Landscape Institute has set up a friends group to support MERL in growing the Landscape Institute archive and making it accessible to all.
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12 — BBC correspondent Razia Iqbal chaired the Open City Debate. 13 — Drawing from the recently acquired Milner-White archive, now held at Reading. 14 — Logo for the Capability Brown festival.
Photo ©: 12 — SimonGregorPhoto 13, MERL, University of Reading
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Capability Brown Festival The Capability Brown Festival has received £139,200 of development funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The Landscape Institute is managing the project and led the bid on behalf of a partnership which includes the Association of Gardens Trusts, NADFAS, English Heritage, the Garden History Society, the Historic Houses Association, the National Gardens Scheme, Natural England, Parks & Gardens UK, Visit Britain, Visit England, Kolab and the National Trust. The Festival plans to bring the beauty and importance of Brown’s landscapes to a wider audience and to celebrate the legacy of one of history’s most influential landscape architects. Known as the ‘father of landscape architecture’, Brown’s surviving landscapes include the World Heritage Site at Blenheim Palace, Highclere Castle (the location of the ITV series Downton Abbey), Alnwick, Chatwsorth, Syon Park and Compton Verney.
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2012/14 President’s Review
Influencing policy and responding to government The LI’s Policy and Communications Committee has continued to advocate on landscape issues through the development of position statements and responses to public policy consultations. Policy consultants are now in place in each of the devolved nations. Their remit is to respond to consultations; to ensure that LI-generated policy and positions are disseminated for their audiences or repurposed to enable this to be achieved; and, to ensure that experience in each of the devolved nations is brought to bear on all LI policy development. Green infrastructure Green infrastructure (GI) has been a key theme in the LI’s policy and communications since the original position statement was launched in 2009. This was followed by a shorter booklet, published in 2011, targeting local authorities and community groups in response to the English localism agenda. An updated position statement, launched at Ecobuild 2013, was issued to take account of significant planning reform in England and provided the opportunity to emphasise once again the importance of GI. This, coupled with reiteration of GI messages through our response to public policy consultations, partnerships with other organisations and integration of GI into LI competitions, has coincided with GI becoming more widely understood and accepted in both policy and guidance, for example by the Natural Capital Committee, in the National Planning Policy Framework and National Planning Practice Guidance and in practice. Public health November 2013 saw the launch of a major new position statement from the LI on the subject of public health. Public health and landscape: Creating healthy places highlights landscape as a key factor in promoting good health and outlines five principles of a healthy place. Produced with input from LI members and representatives from
the public health sector, the publication marks the beginning of a two-year period of activity to embed the five principles outlined in the publication in LI activity by targeting three key audiences: public health professionals; built environment professionals and policy makers.
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Housing Two new publications on housing are in preparation. The first is a marketing brochure aimed at developers. This publication will showcase housing case studies where landscape has informed the location, layout and design of development with positive outcomes. The ambition is that it will inspire anyone in the business of creating new homes and communities to take a landscape-led approach. The second is aimed primarily at local-authority planners, planning committee members and members of parish councils and neighbourhood forums. This position statement will provide up-to-date advice on how to create the right conditions for excellent landscape-led housing development. Water The Landscape Institute joined with 12 other professional organisations in writing an open letter to the Prime Minister on flooding and water-management, to ask for proper long-term planning to avoid further flooding devastation in the UK. The letter, which led to wide-spread media coverage, stated that a comprehensive range of water management techniques could have helped prevent the effect of flooding in villages, towns and over surrounding land seen recently, and it warned against dredging as a universal panacea for the problems as it may increase flooding to towns downstream. It called for proper exploration of larger catchment management issues, and of how forestry, land management and soft-engineered flood alleviation schemes /...
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15 — An updated position statement on green infrastructure was published in 2013. 16 — The position statement on public health was published in November 2013.
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can hold back water in the upper reaches of rivers, and work alongside a dredging programme in the lower reaches. The group called for an immediate cross-departmental conference with DECC, DEFRA, DCLG, the EA and NRW, in a similar manner to that which was convened to address the problem of ash dieback.
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Liveability The need for a commitment to liveable cities was at the heart of the LI response to the Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built Environment (July 2013). The Strategic Framework 2014–17 revises the LI’s vision to read: ‘Inspirational landscapes and liveable places are at the heart of thriving communities.’ Liveability is an increasingly useful way of communicating LI messages as it encompasses work on public health, water and housing and also addresses issues of pedestrian-friendly transport and sustainability. Responses to public policy consultations Responding to public policy consultations continues to be one of the primary means of highlighting the importance of landscape in a range of different contexts. The last two years have seen responses issued to consultations on matters as diverse as: National Planning Practice Guidance (DCLG), Review of Planning Practice Guidance, Common Agricultural Policy Reform (Defra), Creative Industries Classification (DCMS), EIA Directive (DCLG) and Lyons Housing Review (Labour Party). In Northern Ireland, responses have included Revised Draft Planning Policy Statement 15 (PPS15): Planning and Flood Risk, Rural Development Programme 2014–2020, Living Places: an urban stewardship and design guide for Northern Ireland.
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17 — The animation on WSUD is based on work by CIRIA, AECOM and Arup. 18 —The open letter to the Prime Minister about flooding and water management resulted in a front-page story in the Daily Telegraph on 21 February.
Photo ©: 17 — Room 60 Photo ©: 18 — © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014
The letter to the Prime Minister continued the LI’s work on this theme which was initiated by Sue Illman on assuming her presidency. It forms part of her commitment to campaigning for full implementation of the Flood and Water Management Act, a proper understanding of the importance of sustainable drainage (SuDS) in towns and cities and promotion of water sensitive urban design (WSUD) as a major way of designing to make the best use of water. A number of seminars on this topic were presented at Ecobuild in 2013 and 2014. In July 2013 a short animation was launched at the student conference on water sensitive urban design. The brief for the Royal Docks Ideas Competition specifically encouraged a WSUD approach.
19 — Cartoon from the Farrell Review showing the importance of public realm. 20 — Landscape is one of the five key disciplines making up ‘PLACE’ a concept used for review and education.
In Wales responses have included: Welsh Government’s Environment Bill white paper, the first Corporate Plan of the new agency: Natural Resources Wales, and the Welsh Government’s Planning reform proposals: ‘Positive Planning’ including their draft Planning Bill. In Scotland responses have included: Proposed Amendments to Directive 2011/92/EU (EIA Directive), Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee Inquiry into the Scottish Government’s Renewable Energy Targets: Planning and consents, Consultation on Proposals for an Integrated Framework of Environmental Regulation (SEPA), Community, Empowerment and Renewal Bill Consultation, Consultation on a Policy for Architecture and Placemaking in Scotland, Procurement Reform Bill.
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In addition to LI publications and responses to public policy consultations, the LI works closely with a number of allied organisations and Government departments/agencies where there are shared objectives. Examples over the past two years include: • Design Review Principles and Practice publication, with Cabe at the Design Council, RIBA and RTPI; •P lanning for climate change: Guidance for local authorities, with the TCPA; •P lanning for a healthy environment: Good practice guidance for green infrastructure and biodiversity, with the TCPA; •G reen Infrastructure Partnership, led by Defra, since transferred to TCPA; • contributions to Policy Exchange publications on green infrastructure; •N ational Pollinator Strategy, Defra; • National Planning Forum.
Photo ©: 19, 20 — Farrell Review
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The LI is a member of the APPG on Excellence in the Built Environment which is serviced by the Construction Industry Council. Farrell Review Following earlier criticism from the Landscape Institute of the narrow focus and lack of appreciation of landscape, Sir Terry Farrell set up a number of consultation workshops including one on landscape and urban design. This bore fruit since landscape is mentioned broadly and significantly. So, for example, the report recommends that there should be ‘PLACE reviews of existing places like high streets, mega hospital and housing estates and of infrastructure projects’ where PLACE stands for ‘planning, landscape,
architecture, conservation and engineering’. Farrell calls for a radical reform of architectural education, which would include a common foundation year before students chose to specialise in one of the five PLACE disciplines. This, the report argues, ‘promotes joined up thinking and specialisation’. Sue Illman welcomed the publication of the Review saying: ‘The Landscape Institute is committed to “inspiring great places” and welcomes the Farrell Review’s promotion of a new understanding of “PLACE” bringing together planning, landscape, architecture, conservation and engineering. This is a major step forward in recognising the need to fully integrate planning and design of the places that we create and maintain. ‘The Review acknowledges that “landscape is the primary infrastructure” and that one of the greatest failures of focusing on development control is the quality of the public realm and that there is a need to strengthen the contribution of landscape, urban design and public art in making great places. We fully support the idea that funding for landscape should be demanded from developers by local authorities. ‘Following the LI’s recent publication on public health we particularly welcome the acknowledgement of the way in which public health can be “improved by creating humanscale pedestrian friendly spaces.” ‘Landscape architecture addresses both the built and the natural environment; therefore the commitment to a new level of connectedness between Institutes and government departments, is welcomed. The flooding of the past few months illustrated the way in which different elements of the natural and built environment need to be fully coordinated and integrated in order to both tackle and prevent this type of disaster. A considered and integrated approach to how we create, plan and manage places is a highly desirable way forward. ‘The proposal to create a foundation year for all of those choosing a career in the built environment is a good way to ensure that the next generation of practitioners fully understand cross-disciplinary working and is equipped to meet the need to understand sustainability as well as design.’ /...
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Informing and educating the profession for the future Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment and masterclasses Following the publication of the third edition of Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment in printed and digital formats, 16 masterclasses were held across the UK, run by Mary O’Connor, Professor Carys Swanwick and Andy Williams. The events were extremely successful – many had long waiting lists and requests for further classes are continuing to be received. Feedback showed that 94% of attendees found the event useful or very useful. Attendees clearly appreciated being able to spend a day with the book’s authors. Feedback on the content and presenters was overall extremely positive, and also provided useful suggestions on making sure attendees get the most out of the day at future events. Feedback on the new edition of the guidance was also generally positive, with over two thirds indicating that they felt it to be an improvement on the second edition. The clarity of writing, structure and presentation received particular praise, and the move away from prescriptive guidance to professional judgement was welcomed.
Pathway to Chartership 2012: In May examiners saw 89 candidates with an overall pass rate of 72%. In November examiners saw 81 candidates with an overall pass rate of 78%.
Building Information Modelling The publisher Taylor and Francis, which published GLVIA3, has agreed to publish a new book on BIM for landscape. There are currently no books in the market on this specific topic, and the book will be a major addition to the LI’s range of BIM advice, which also includes a programme of BIM masterclasses. BIM for Landscape, due for publication in summer 2015, will be written by members of the LI BIM Working Group, both landscape architects and specialists in other areas, bringing together a wide range of expertise. The masterclass content is being finalised, following feedback from a useful ‘dry run’, and the programme is planned to start later in the year with a series of events around the UK.
Olympic Learning Legacy videos We continue to explore different approaches to providing members with CPD opportunities. Affordability and delivery are important factors when considering options. We recognise the difficulties and challenges members experience when taking time out of the working day to attend CPD.
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21 — Publication of the third edition of Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment received widespread praise and was accompanied by a series of masterclasses. 22 —The LI has videoed the Landscape Futures debates and put them on its YouTube channel. 23 —Still from Creating Healthy Places: Dalston Eastern Curve Garden.
2013: In May examiners saw 49 candidates with an overall pass rate of 76%. In November examiners saw 61 candidates with an overall pass rate of 74%. Fast track Pathway to Chartership pilot The LI has wanted to find a way to support mid- and late-career landscape professionals with an interest in becoming Chartered. We recognise that personal career achievements can make an effective contribution in gaining Chartered status. We have developed an approach that supports these candidates working towards Chartership through a structured fast track programme of learning and development. Working with Natural England we have identified a number of employees interested in progressing to Chartership via this route, the first of whom will sit the exam in May 2014.
Videos are an attractive medium that can support learning and understanding. We offer a range of videos via our website that can add a dynamic element to any presentation members may develop as part of their work. Videos play an increasingly important role in careers promotion.
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JCLI new editions and Scottish version New editions of the three JCLI contracts were published in June 2012 following changes in the law. A new set of documents enabling JCLI 2012 contracts to be used in accordance with Scottish law was published in 2013, filling a significant gap in our landscape contract documentation provision. A new JCLI form of contract for domestic landscape works was also published in 2013. Landscape Consultant’s Appointment The LI’s standard form for appointing a landscape professional was merged with our work stages document and guidance on fees to form a new Landscape Consultant’s Appointment, published in April 2013. Available to members as a free download, the documentation includes a new range of scopes of services templates reflecting the diverse range of work undertaken by today’s practitioners. The new documentation brings the LI standard form into line with the RIBA work stages used across built environment industries, and the new modular online format enables updates to be incorporated quickly when required. CPD The LI is committed to support the continuing development of both individual members and the wider profession through CPD. Our CPD days continue to prove popular, and we carefully select and plan events across the country. CPD days have been held in: Sheffield, 28 March 2012 / Bristol, 20 June 2012 / Glasgow, 10 October 2012 / London, 10 January 2013 / Manchester, 18 April 2013 / Newcastle, 25 June 2013 / Cornwall (Eden Project) 8 November 2013 / Birmingham 3 February 2014. LI devolved nations and English branches work hard to support members with their CPD. Designed by landscape professionals for landscape professionals, these events make an invaluable contribution to our CPD offer to membership.
Photo ©: 24, 25 — Room 60
Revised syllabus 2013 saw the introduction of a revised exam syllabus designed to better reflect practice whilst safeguarding standards. The last examinations using the old (pre Elements & Areas) syllabus were held in November 2013. From May 2014 all candidates will be following the new, broader and more flexible syllabus.
Investing in our relationship with accredited schools LI-accredited courses play a critical role in ensuring that a healthy number of graduates enter the job market. We need employable graduates who are able to build on their qualifications, adapt to the demands of the workplace, and progress towards Chartership. The LI’s Professional Review Groups (PRGs) play a crucial role supporting accredited courses, acting as a critical friend to enhance the employability of graduates. They use the collective experience of group members to advise schools on current landscape practice, and report back to the LI on key indicators in accordance with accreditation criteria. PRGs also advise the LI on developments within universities and, where necessary, call universities to account on areas that require improvement. PRGs consist of Chartered LI members who offer their time to support this vital area of work. Careers project – reviewing our approach to promoting careers in landscape and responding to the challenges facing higher education The higher-education sector has become a market, and is facing unprecedented challenges. Many smaller, specialist courses that feed into a wide range of professions and career choices are under threat. Sadly landscape architecture subjects are facing similar challenges, with some courses facing closure.
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The LI is to revisit its careers information, building on the success of the ‘I Want To Be A Landscape Architect’ campaign. We will prioritise the promotion of LI-accredited courses and the career options open to graduates. Building relationships with heads of schools SCHOLA, the Standing Conference of Heads of Landscape Architecture, is a key partner for the LI in safeguarding the future of the profession. We will continue to develop this relationship to promote discussion and debate, build stronger links between academia and practice, and work to future-proof the education of landscape subjects. 24 — The video ‘Invest in Green Infrastructure’ helped spread the GI message. 25 — ’I want to be a landscape architect’ has had more than 132,000 views. 26 — The Landscape Institute made a number of Learning Legacy videos connected with the Olympics.
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2012/14 President’s Review
The Landscape Institute is a volunteer-led organisation. All of our committees, the working groups and the advisory panels that support them are run by volunteers. Their time, energy and insight is vital to all that we do. Members of Advisory Council – From 1 July 2013 Kathryn Bailey CMLI Penny Beckett CMLI Michelle Bolger CMLI Until 03/02/2014 Daniel Bowles, Student Clare Brockhurst FLI Until 23/11/2013 Adrian Clarke CMLI Annie Coombs FLI Candida Diamond CMLI Timothy Dyer CMLI Stephen Fancourt CMLI Noel Farrer FLI Carolin Gohler CMLI Robert Holden CMLI Susan Illman CMLI, PLI Amanda McDermott Clare Michael CMLI From 03/02/2014 Jonathan Miley CMLI Colin Moore CMLI Alan Nowell CMLI From 13/02/2014 Ian Phillips CMLI Sarah Reece-Mills CMLI Katharine Schofield CMLI John Stuart-Murray FLI Claire Symons CMLI Jane Thomas CMLI Helen Tranter CMLI David Watkiss CMLI Julia Watts FLI Adrian Wikeley CMLI – 1 July 2011 to 30 June 2013 Lindsey Abbott Nick Allin CMLI Until 10/10/2012 Penny Beckett CMLI Rachel Bodiam CMLI Until 10/10/2012 Clare Brockhurst FLI Until 23/11/2013 Helen Brown CMLI Until 19/12/2012 Krishanthi Carfrae CMLI Brian Clouston PPLI, FLI, OBE Candida Diamond CMLI Susan Illman CMLI, PLI Merrick Denton-Thompson FLI, OBE Christopher Frost FLI Martin Hird CMLI
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Peter Hutchinson CMLI Edward Hutchison CMLI Susan Illman CMLI, PLI Ian Lanchbury CMLI Kirstie Mawhinney CMLI Amanda McDermott Colin Moore CMLI Gethin Owens CMLI Ian Phillips CMLI Emily Smyth CMLI James Spence-Watson CMLI Until 04/07/2012 Claire Symons CMLI Rachel Tennant FLI Jane Thomas CMLI Helen Tranter CMLI Sally Visick CMLI Jo Watkins CMLI, PPLI Adrian Wikeley CMLI
Christine Tudor CMLI Marc van Grieken FLI
– Board of Trustees Penny Beckett CMLI From 01/07/2011 Michelle Bolger CMLI From 31/01/2014 Robert Branson FLI From 28/11/2012 Brian Clouston PPLI, FLI, OBE Until 30/06/2013 Merrick Denton-Thompson FLI, OBE From 18/07/2013 Anthony Edwards FLI Until 28/11/2012 Noel Farrer FLI From 25/08/2009 Elizabeth Ford FLI Until 09/11/2012 Deborah Fowler From 16/11/2009 Susan Illman CMLI, PLI From 04/06/2010 Dominic McVey Until 16/11/2013 Michael Owen From 16/11/2009 Ian Phillips CMLI From 01/07/2013 Irene Shaw FLI Until 01/10/2013 Phyllis Starkey From 23/11/2013 Helen Tranter CMLI From 01/09/2011 Mark Turnbull FLI From 08/01/2013 Jo Watkins CMLI, PPLI Until 30/06/2013
– Education and Membership Committee Michelle Bolger CMLI (Chair) Avra Ploumi-Archer CMLI Christine House CMLI Clare Michael CMLI John Stuart-Murray FLI Lindsey Wilkinson FLI Natalie Murray CMLI Nicholas Harrison FLI Emily Smyth CMLI Sophie Parker-Loftus Stephen Plumb CMLI Vanessa Ross CMLI
– Technical and Professional Services Committee Mark Turnbull FLI (Chair) Colin Moore CMLI (Vice-chair) Bill Blackledge CMLI Elaine Cresswell CMLI Anna Dekker CMLI Karl Jones CMLI Roger Kent FLI Romy Rawlings CMLI Jon Rooney CMLI
– Heritage and Archive Working Group Penny Beckett CMLI (Chair) Hal Moggridge OBE PPLI Ralph Cobham FLI Tony Edwards FLI Edward Hutchison CMLI Lindsey Abbott – College of Fellows committee Paj Valley FLI (Chair) Annie Coombs FLI Nick Harrison FLI Tony Edwards FLI Bill Cairns FLI Neil Williamson FLI, PPLI
– Member Panel Mary McHugh CMLI Nigel Thorne FLI Nick Harrison FLI – Accreditation Sub Committee Catherine Neve CMLI Christine House CMLI Jennifer Exley CMLI Steve Plumb CMLI – Policy and Communications Committee Merrick Denton-Thompson FLI (Chair) Kate Bailey CMLI Annie Coombs FLI Richard Copas CMLI Sue Evans FLI, MBE Noel Farrer FLI Ian Houlston CMLI Val Kirby FLI Ian Phillips CMLI Richard Sumner CMLI Tim Waterman
– Awards Committee David Withycombe CMLI (Chair) Rob Beswick CMLI Nicola Cox CMLI Anne Evans CMLI Paj Valley FLI Jo Watkins CMLI, PPLI – Editorial Advisory Panel Tim Waterman (Honorary Editor and Chair) Eleanor Trenfield CMLI Edwin Knighton CMLI Amanda McDermott John Stuart Murray FLI Ian Thompson CMLI Jo Watkins CMLI, PPLI Jenifer White CMLI Jill White CMLI Many Landscape Institute events and activities would not take place without the support of our sponsors, many of whom have been partners with us for many years. – Landscape Institute Awards Hardscape Vectorworks McParland Finn Marshalls Aggregate Industries Brett Landscape English Heritage Ground Control Wienerberger – Landscape Futures Lecture Series Woodhouse – Royal Docks Ideas Competition Marshalls – CPD Days The NBS Wildflower Turf Vectorworks – GLVIA Co-author IEMA Sponsors: English Heritage Natural Resources Wales (formerly Countryside Council for Wales) Scottish Natural Heritage The President’s Review 2014 is published as an offprint of the summer edition of Landscape, the journal of the Landscape Institute.
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House-proud and playful
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Feature
Housing and play are the two specialisms of Noel Farrer, the Landscape Institute’s energetic next president. BY RUTH SLAVID
THE LANDSCAPE next president, Noel Farrer, INSTITUTE’S is a man of extraordinary
energy. He runs a practice, Farrer Huxley, in which, despite the name, he is now the sole principal and which has recently won two fantastic jobs in competition. He has just moved offices. He works in London but has his home in the Lake District. Last year he was made a fellow of the LI, he has been vice-president at the Institute, he was formerly a CABE commissioner and he has a regular column in Horticulture Week. It sounds exhausting and yet he is willing, and eager, to do more by taking on the presidency to which he will dedicate three days a week. Sue Illman is a hard act to follow but Farrer, while as hard working and as keen to communicate and to build profile for the Institute, has very different interests. Illman’s main focus has been on the technical and topical issue of water – a message that she will continue to promote – but for Farrer the vital issue is a different part of the sustainability message. ‘There are three aspects to sustainability,’ he says, ‘environmental, economic and social – that third one is my baby.’
Photo ©: 1 — Tom Lee
He brings to the role wide-ranging experience, particularly in the fields of housing and play, so that it is apposite that the two recent wins for his practice were the rethinking of Coram’s Fields, a children’s dedicated space in the heart of London, and the Maritime Streets competition for a depressed housing area in Barrow in Furness. Farrer has an impressive professional pedigree, having worked in the public sector, as a private practitioner on public-sector projects and, more recently, as opportunities for that kind of work
shrank, in the private sector. But what kind of person is he? What kind of a landscape architect? I can describe this best by relating my first meeting with him, when he got in touch a few years ago during the London Festival of Architecture and invited me on an evening tour of the Peabody Estate in Victoria where he had designed improvements to the public realm. That reaching out to somebody unknown is sadly uncommon among landscape architects. The tour was fascinating not so much for the design ideas as for the aspects of his work that most pleased Farrer. Of course he showed off the seating and the giant sculptural fruit in the new public realm, but he was much more pleased by the fact that the atmosphere had changed so much that parents now felt they could leave their prams downstairs safely, that there were casual meetings by the bin store and that some of the residents had colonised areas of the scheme with their own planting, even creating a mini allotment in front of an electric transformer box. It wasn’t what Farrer had intended but he was delighted that it had happened. Good landscape design is vitally important to Farrer, but in the service of people rather than as an end in itself. After our meeting I wrote a feature but I haven’t referred to it in order to write this piece. I remembered it, I remembered his messages, and when I met him again a couple of years later at an LI reception, I remembered him and he remembered me. Noel Farrer is a people person, he wants to communicate and, fortunately for the Landscape Institute, he wants to communicate on its behalf. ‘I want to get people to realise that investing in landscape will deliver value for money beyond their wildest dreams,’ he said. /...
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Feature
So where does this boundless energy and work ethic come from? It doesn’t seem to be inherited. ‘I am the first member of my family to have worked for six generations, ’ Farrer said, adding rather quaintly that he grew up as one of the ‘landed gentry’ in the Lake District. He was a second son and the money was running out so, the first in his family to do so, it was time to get an education. It was the 1980s and ‘I rebelled’ he said, studying landscape architecture at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University) and living in a squat. The course, which recently closed, was, he believes, one of the best in the country, and students in his year and the year above included Jason Prior, Peter Neal and ‘a lot of other very successful landscape architects’. A year out with what was then British Rail ‘made a great impression’. After his diploma, Farrer joined the parks department of Haringey Council in London ‘where I started to develop a public-sector ethos and values. The real role of landscape is to improve people’s quality of life, particularly people more unfortunate than oneself. What interests me is the public domain that is available for public use.’ He decries the growing demonization and isolation of the poor and the lack of investment in the areas where many live as ‘the last acceptable discrimination’. Both in Haringey and subsequently in Islington, Farrer worked in some of the most deprived housing estates. He learnt that the first requirement was to make people feel safe and that if that required the erection of a huge security fence for a time then so be it. Once the area became safer, the fence could come down and other improvements could begin. Feeling safe and feeling valued makes people feel better and behave better, Farrer believes. He points to a wall at the back of the small park facing his office. It was previously covered in graffiti but was
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then painted white. Some people might have thought this was mad, but the result has been – no graffiti. ‘I want to articulate the relationship between landscape and people,’ Farrer says, ‘so that we can all start to recognise its importance.’ He believes that the profession’s work should have an impact on every scale, not just at the local level but in what he describes as ‘the big moves’. When growing up in the Lake District he was as enchanted by the views of distant power stations as of the fells and fields. ‘Landscape shouldn’t all be about mitigation and hiding.’
‘I want to get people to realise that investing in landscape will deliver value for money beyond their wildest dreams,’ Some of the changes Farrer would like to see are unlikely to happen during a two-year presidency. For instance he thinks it would raise the prestige of landscape architecture in the UK, and therefore the amount the profession was listened to, if there were courses in the subject at the Russell Group universities. It would be the equivalent of the landscape programmes at Harvard and – cause or effect? – landscape architecture has a much higher profile in the US. Achieving this might be hard, but it is a great aspiration to have. So, if Farrer doesn’t manage everything that he hopes for in two years as president, he may still do a lot more than many would think possible. He understands what it is like to run a practice in good times and bad, and he knows about making places better for people. He believes passionately in the value of landscape and wants to tell everybody about it – the public, the profession, the politicians. How could they fail to listen to such a persuasive advocate?
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Photo ©: 2 — Agnese Sanvito
He is keen to engage in the political process. ‘I am interested in the political agenda,’ he said. ‘I do want to influence government.’ And not all of this would be behind the scenes. ‘I would like to be on the Today programme every three months,’ he said. Housing, he believes, is a good basis on which to talk about landscape. ‘If you talk about landscape and housing,’ he says, ‘you are talking about health and wellbeing, about human conditions. That is very translatable to all other areas.’
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Feature
WW I – Agriculture
Feeding the Nation 40 Landscape LandscapeSummer Summer 2014 2014
In the first of our three features reflecting the centenary of World War One, we look at how the push for increased agricultural production heralded sweeping changes to the British rural landscape. BY JONATHAN BROWN
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Feature Feature 1 — An American Advance-Rumely tractor being put through its paces before interested farmers, probably from the county agricultural executive committee, in 1917. 2 — Harvest on George Baylis’s farming estate in Berkshire, 1914. 3 — The Titan was one of the most successful of the World War One tractors. An army officer is in charge of this ploughing operation.
THE WAR HAD for two years when the BEEN GOING government fell late in 1916.
The Somme offensive had not produced the military breakthrough. The harvest had been poor, and, with losses of shipping, concerns were growing about the supply of food. That was before Germany launched its full submarine offensive in February 1917. Something had to be done, and Lloyd George’s new government embarked on new policies to sustain the war effort, including a new direction for food and agriculture. There would be no more reliance on the market to persuade farmers to grow more food. Instead, R. E. Prothero, who took over as President of the Board of Agriculture, launched a ploughing-up campaign to increase the output of cereals and potatoes. A combination of carrots and sticks would achieve that result: there would be the enticement of price guarantees, and local executive committees to exhort – if necessary enforce – compliance. It is from this time that the war began to have a serious effect on the rural landscape. Prothero set out to reverse the trends of decades with his battle cry ‘Back to the seventies’. What he meant by that was plough up grassland. For 40 years British farming had been taking on a more pastoral aspect, as farmers turned to grass and livestock as better propositions than cereals. Imports of low-priced wheat from the prairies had undermined the market for British-grown grain. The price of wheat in Britain fell by about 50 per cent between the 1870s and the 1890s, when the bottom of the cycle had been reached. The price had risen a bit
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by 1914, but not enough to effect a turnaround in farmers’ growing patterns. The result of this ‘Great Depression’ in British agriculture was a reduction of the area sown to wheat by nearly 1.5m acres between 1875 and 1900, of arable land by 2.4m acres, and an increase in the acreage of permanent pasture by 3.4m. With the outbreak of war in 1914 farmers were called upon to grow more food, in particular cereals. There was the need to reduce dependence on imports, while the argument was already being advanced that growing cereals for human consumption gave people more calories directly than were got by feeding grain to livestock. Farmers were encouraged to grow more grain, but they were not told to, any more than men were conscripted into the army. With prices in the market going up, that should be enough. Sure enough, farmers did respond to the prices by sowing an additional 379,000 acres of wheat during the autumn of 1914.
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Photo ©: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — MERL, University of Reading
4 — Steam cultivation on A. Stratton’s farms in the Vale of Pewsey, Wiltshire, in 1917. The strange implement is a harrow. 5 — Earl Howe sold his Gotham estate in Nottinghamshire in 1918.
They grew more oats as well, but what they did not do was plough up the pastures. They reduced the amount of temporary grass sown in the arable rotation a little, but most of wheat’s increase came at the expense of barley. It was the same the following year, except that the process was reversed. Difficult conditions in the autumn of 1915 had restricted sowings of wheat, and land went back to barley the following spring. There was little change again in 1916. This will have been frustrating to the government. Wheat prices more than two-thirds higher than they were before the war ought to have had greater effect, one might have thought. The farmers would argue that the land they were being asked to plough was quite unsuitable, disregarding the fact that most of the fields in question had grown wheat in the 1870s. More important, they resisted ploughing up grass on the fairly reasonable expectation that war was not going to last for too many years, and would be followed by a return to the status quo. Besides, farmers had become rather attached to grassland and livestock farming. They had adapted to the regime of low prices, achieved a measure of stability in their farming systems, and there was little incentive for them to change now. To do so required capital, and that was in short supply. Change was also likely to add a disproportionate amount to the farmer’s costs, so that he would get better returns by continuing with his existing methods.
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So it took a bad harvest, loss of shipping and a new government before the farming scene began to change noticeably. Although the ploughing-up policy took time to get going – it came too late to have any but the slightest effect on the 1917 crops – by the end of the war the effect was apparent. Between 1916 and 1918, nearly 1.5m acres had been added to arable land – of which 661,000 acres were sown with wheat and 245,000 acres with potatoes – while the pasture acreage had come down by 1.6m. Harvests for 1917 and 1918 were much better than 1916. It could be argued – and was, at the time and since – that this achievement was modest, and that more could have been done. But the changes in acreage were generally at least two-thirds of what the government aimed for, and they were achieved by consent. The amount of land taken over by government committees was minuscule. The effects of the ploughing-up policy varied widely across the country, differing even between local districts. In Sussex, for example, it was on the Downs that ploughing was most felt. Broadly, there was least impact in the east, where there was a greater proportion of arable already. Land under the plough increased by 8.9 per cent in eastern England between 1916 and 1918, compared with 39.9 per cent in north-west England and 52.2 per cent in Wales. As a result Wales had 287,000 fewer acres under permanent pasture in 1918 than in 1914. The pace of change might seem slight, commented one review of Welsh farming in the 1920s, but, with the small number of tractors available, the achievement was quite considerable. /...
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Feature
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Mechanization thus was a key component of ploughing up, in particular the motive power of the tractor. Tractors had hardly made a mark on the agricultural scene before 1914, but war gave them a chance, as the government placed orders for large numbers, mostly of north American manufacture, to be distributed to farmers through the war agricultural executive committees for each county. The programme culminated in an order for 5,000 Fordson tractors placed in 1917.
‘My heart is broken for Lidcombe,’ commented Lord Wemyss at the felling of woodland near his house at Stanway, Gloucestershire. Britain had been as dependent on imports of timber as of wheat. Demand from the military, mining and industry, and disruption to shipping led to a sudden change, with more British timber felled than had been for decades. It started early in the war, and over its course about 450,000 acres of British woodland were cut, with perhaps more visible impact on the landscape than ploughing up grassland.
Established technology had its place too. John Allen, owner of a major steam ploughing business, persuaded the government that steam had a valuable part to play, especially with the limited power of most contemporary tractors. Appointed honorary advisor to the Food Production Committee, he sought out some of the big double-engined steam ploughing sets that had been left derelict after trade declined in the 1880s, and brought them back into fields, especially on heavy soils, to prepare ground for wheat and potatoes. New steam ploughs were built as well, 70 of them to government order. Machines were important, but so was labour, and that was in short supply after large numbers of farm labourers had enlisted. To plug the gap, farmers employed irregular forces, such as the
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6 — A group of country girls engaged to prepare land for potatoes, at Stephens Hall Farm, Ryton on Tyne. 7 — Tractors and ploughs outside the premises of T. Dibben & Sons, motor engineers, Wimborne, Dorset. 8 — Land girls cutting timber at Buckland Warren, Berkshire, 1917. 9 — Two land girls with a Titan tractor, possibly in north east England.
Photo ©: 6, 7, 8, 9 — MERL, University of Reading
‘village women’ – wives and daughters of local families. Alongside them were ‘industrial women’ drawn from the towns. Soldiers on home leave and prisoners of war were also deployed. Then in 1917 a new mobile force, the Women’s Land Army, was formed, its members mainly from the towns who had to be prepared to go wherever directed. The organisation was envisaged as 10,000 strong, but 30,000 applied, and about 23,000 women were placed in agricultural work between March 1917 and October 1919. Between them these groups made up most of the shortfall in labour on the farm.
longer-term trend. But not entirely: while the steam ploughs were retired again after the war, tractors had come to stay. Impecunious farmers might revert to horses for a while, but with 5,000 Fordsons and several other models left over from the war, arable farming soon took on a more mechanical aspect. Farmsteads and fields were adapted to accommodate the tractors. The felling of timber prompted a government response in order to protect the supply of pit props and other needs. The Forestry Commission, founded in 1919, set about making good losses of trees. As it grew to become one of the greater landowners of Britain, its impact was one of the most lasting legacies of the war.
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As the example of Lidcombe Wood demonstrates, felling timber was one way in which the war came to the country house. Closer to home came the military, who leased houses as barracks and training grounds. They parked their tanks on the lawn – or would have done if they had been available in 1914. As it was, they turned the parkland at Belton, near Grantham into a ‘quagmire of mud’, while Lady Warwick was dismayed at the way the army ignored the paths and trampled over the grounds at Easton Lodge, Essex. Houses that were used as hospitals and convalescent homes – there were many, including Dunham Massey in Cheshire and Chapelwood in Sussex, where Siegfried Sassoon spent a month recuperating – were treated more gently, but even so their gardens and grounds were not always maintained as they had been in peacetime. Even at those houses lived in by the owners it was not possible to keep up all the ways of country-house living. Flower beds were turned over to vegetable growing, as the country emulated townspeople’s new enthusiasm for allotments, and, with much hunting and shooting in abeyance, maintenance of hedges and coverts was neglected by the depleted gamekeeping staff. Costessey Hall, Norfolk, seat of the Jerningham family, was requisitioned for military use during World War One. Immediately afterwards the parkland was sold in small lots to house workers from Norwich, who built a village of wooden houses and old railway carriages. The hall was left to decay and was gradually demolished. It was one of many examples, for the war was in many ways a precursor to what was to come in the rural landscape. As the farmers of 1914 had expected, government support was not maintained, prices for cereals fell in free markets, and farmland reverted broadly to its pastoral pattern. The war, it might be said, was but an interlude in a
The effect on the structure of landholding was equally lasting. Landowners had been unsettled before the war by the effects of decades of low returns from land, added to which came death duties. Some made sales. A few more sold during the war, sometimes as the result of the loss of heirs to the conflict, such as the sale of the Antrobus estate in 1915. These were as nothing compared with the rush to the market immediately after the war, when it seemed as if there was scarcely a member of the House of Lords without land for sale. Talk of ‘England changing hands’ was exaggerated; even so millions of acres were sold from estates, mostly to the farming tenants. As a result, the proportion of land farmed in owner-occupation in England rose from about 12 per cent in 1914 to 36 per cent in 1927, producing a farming landscape reflecting the choices of a larger number of owners. Then there were the ‘homes fit for heroes’. Most of the post-war houses were built in suburban estates, but some appeared on the edge of villages and along the roads into the countryside. Their effect on the landscape was one of the concerns of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, founded in 1926 as a new chapter in conservation and planning opened.
Jonathan Brown is a fellow at the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.
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Feature
WW I – Memorials
Lest we forget The way that we think of memorials has changed several times since the end of World War One. Now they are less about visceral memories and more about a secular coming together. BY JOHN PEGG
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1 — The RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London.
IN RECENT t here has been an apparent YEARS acceleration in the creation of war
memorials across the UK. Memorials to specific groups have been scattered across the parks of London and the National Memorial Arboretum has been developed, and now enlarged, to accommodate the appetite to provide new commemorations of both past and active conflicts. From a landscape architect’s point of view, it is useful to speculate on the reasons and motivations for this movement to create new landscapes and landscape-defining objects that are so clearly bound to an evolving national identity.
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Photo ©: 1 — John Pegg
The generations for whom the events of the World Wars had a deep visceral impact have gone. Secondary generations who experienced the long, slow aftermath of the effects of a lost generation of uncles, fathers and grand fathers are now giving way to another generation for whom the void left in families and society by the losses of the war might form little more than a footnote in their family history. However, this distance does not appear to be diminishing the new-found engagement that is gaining momentum in commemorating the wartime casualties and losses of the conflict.
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The protracted marking of the centenary of World War One has thrown into focus questions regarding the nature and character of the memory and myth of the war. The contemporary meaning of the events and commemorations must vary between the generations that experienced the events and those that have only known their fading aftermath. The nature and character of immediate post-war commemoration was dramatically contested, a social commentary that is apparently lost beneath the calm dignity of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites. At the time the herculean task of locating and burying all the dead was the obvious priority over the creation of a more abstract memorial at home. Lutyen’s temporary cenotaph in Whitehall became a sufficiently powerful national focus for it to be recast as a permanent national focus for commemoration and, as with other memorials, became a site at which the memory of the casualties was evoked to lend weight to social protest in the aftermath of both wars. /... Landscape Summer 2014 47
Feature 2 — Monument to the Women of World War II, London. 3 — New Zealand War Memorial, London. 4 — Canada Memorial, London. 5 — Animals in War Memorial, London.
The forces behind the movement to reinvigorate the commemoration of wartime casualties are varied. The specific memories of personal loss and the fragmentation of lives are receding to a comfortable distance, apparently merging a new collective narrative beneath a benign gloss of history. The apparent unity this fosters is further tempered by the changing values of society, specifically the rise of secularisation and the individual. Religious sanctity, communal habits and unification have been significantly eroded, leaving a void in communal identity. The commemoration of wartime losses may have developed to fulfil a need for new sacred sites and activities appropriate to a secular society seeking a communal identity in the face of the rush towards globalisation. War memorials have been co-opted as a form of sacred secular architecture.
The CWGC eschewed the use of the symbolism, mottoes and figurative art that dominated the memorial palette recently inherited from the Victorians. The battles fought on moral and aesthetic grounds throughout the post-war period were vicious and bitter, not least on the issues of the repatriation, the adherence to military hierarchy and the deep-felt desire to fragment commemoration to the military unit, local area and down to the individual. In the two years following the armistice, more than 5000 war memorials were raised in Britain as individuals, communities and military units all sought the speedy commemoration of the dead. However this response was not centrally controlled. Many grieving families opted out of commemorating their loved ones as a part of another’s interpretation of conflict. The scattered community war memorials that define Britain’s commemoration of the wars, remain small scale and incomplete. 48 Landscape Summer 2014
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Photo ©: 2, 3, 4, 5 — John Pegg
We look back at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries that span the globe marking the scenes to British and Imperial loss with the calm, democratic order of the arts and crafts, as a defining twentieth century landscape. This is a landscape that co-opted the corporeal remains of servicemen and women to act in perpetuity as a physical memorial to the sacrifices made to defend ‘civilised’ values. Fabian Ware’s drive to create these commemorations in a form that expressed the unity of Empire and the dignity of equality were matched by Lutyens’ intent to avoid the imposition of a specifically Christian formality and Kipling’s emphatically secular literary contributions.
Formal memorials such as Charles Sargeant Jaggers’ Hoylake War Memorial (1922) and the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner (1925) invoke a populist modernism with robust heroic ‘realism’ which contrasts with the almost camp Beaux Arte Machine Gun Corps Memorial (1925) that is the neighbour of the latter. All these memorials drew contemporary criticism from traditionalist and modernist alike, but then the domestic war memorial building boom ended. The long hiatus in the development of new war memorials through the latter half of the twentieth century was obviously due to the significant retrofit of most World War 1 Memorials to accommodate the casualties of World War 2 and then the thankful lack of conflict. However the millennial period saw the pace of World War specific commemoration pick up dramatically. This acceleration reflected parallel resurgences in memorialisation both domestically and internationally.
Photo ©: 6, 7 — John Pegg, 8 — National Memorial Arboretum
Internationally, the clear success of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial (1982) in Washington DC demonstrated the acceptability of contemporary memorials in civic spaces. Almost simultaneously the global Holocaust memorial building programme gave societies and designers licence to reflect on the horror and loss of the wars as a means of education and reinforcement of identity. Domestically, public expectation and subscription led to the September 11 Memorial Garden (2003) The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain (2004), National Police Memorial (2005) and the 7 July Memorial (2009) all earning space in London’s parks and squares.
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6 — Royal Artillery Memorial, London. 7 — Machine Gun Corps Memorial, London. 8 — Wreath Table and North Statue of the Armed Forces Memorial of the National Memorial Arboretum.
The World Wars were also represented in this Millennial rush to memorialise with construction of the Canada Memorial(1994), Commonwealth Memorial Gates (2002), Australian War Memorial (2003), Animals in War Memorial (2004), the Battle of Britain Memorial (2005), Monument to the Women of World War II (2005), New Zealand War Memorial (2006) and most recently the Bomber Command Memorial (2012). Further afield, in 2001 the creation of the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Staffordshire was probably the single greatest contribution to the new generation of memorials. The site was conceived as a national focus for a range of civilian and military remembrance and has been a resounding success, currently drawing as many as 300,000 visitors a year and with ambitious expansion plans being guided by landscape architect FIRA. /...
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The memorial sets a new twenty-first century standard for British commemoration of conflict, listing as it does all casualties by name in a single place detached from the site of conflict. At the same time, it marks a shift in focus from the symbolic societal memorial to the loss of individuals. As with O’Connor’s earlier Commonwealth Memorial Gates, the design vocabulary draws heavily on Lutyen’s architectural language and Ian Rank-Broadley’s heroic bronze figures reinstate the figurative art Lutyen’s would not accept. The reintroduction of military hierarchy through precedence of the services, ranks and titles marks a clear deviation from Ware’s founding principles of equality in death. Somewhat by chance, our practice has stumbled headlong into the swirling debates about contemporary commemoration and finds its work the focus of the full range of contemporary sentiment regarding the commemoration of conflict casualties. As part of an architecture 50 Landscape Summer 2014
studio that we ran, we elected to focus on Dover as a case study of how intelligent development and adaptive reuse could be the catalyst for conservation of heritage assets that might be at risk and turn them from a community liability to an asset. The UK is peculiarly well placed in this field having as it does a surfeit of historic sites and both a large domestic ‘heritage consumer’ base and a large tourist base of visitors wanting access to, and engagement with, the authentic and specific heritage that litters the country. Our studio objective was to find interventions, both architectural and landscape, that could reverse the trend of decay that has defined the recent decades for many of Dover’s heritage features and recast the same sites as assets through limited intervention. We took the opportunity presented by the studio to develop a proposal, taking the principle of commemorating all individual casualties as applied at the Armed Forces Memorial and extending that same level of commemoration back to include all British and Commonwealth casualties of the two World Wars. It was a big concept as we were attempting to list 1,700,000 names on a single memorial at a single site. This has to be seen in the context of the Armed Forces Memorial’s capacity of 30,000 and the Vietnam War Memorial’s completed roll call of 58,000. The story should have ended in 2006 with the concept consigned to the bottom drawer of great ideas destined for nowhere. There was no site, no
Image ©: 9— Craft Pegg
The site is home to a broad spectrum of memorials, the most significant of which is the Armed Forces Memorial (2007) by Liam O’Connor. This lists, by name, each British Armed Forces casualty since 1945, to date something in the region of 15,000 names with scope for as many again. The form of the memorial, set on a 100m-diameter mound, is a direct consequence of the decision to site the arboretum within the flood plain of the River Trent.
Feature 9, 10, 11, 12 — Craft Pegg’s proposal for a memorial to all the fallen of both World Wars would comprise 12 granite retaining walls inscribed with 1,700,000 names on Dover’s Western Heights.
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budget, no client and no fees; however there was a kernel of sudden and unexpected local support.
Image ©: 10, 11, 12 — Craft Pegg
We found local council officers became enthusiastic and urged us to present the scheme to a wider and wider audience. Key stakeholder buy in followed, and the Local Planning Authority and landowner began committing time and resources to the potential of the scheme. The core of all engagement at both public and stakeholder level has always been the emotional resonance of the subject matter but to that core supporters started adding the commercial, political and investment rationale that is required to lift a scheme off the drawing board and into construction.
The plans to date have been through several iterations as interest groups and site constraints pushed and pulled at the plans, but the conceptual integrity remains. The memorial comprises 12 white granite retaining walls that step down over a former barrack site above the White Cliffs on Dover’s Western Heights. Each of the walls represents one of the years of conflict from 1914–1945 on which the casualty names, as recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, are inscribed. The heritage benefit comes from the investment in the frayed historic fabric of the area. Both the North Entrance to the historic fortress complex and the remarkable Drop Redoubt will be drawn into the scheme, deriving investment, use, visitors and a significantly enhanced identity from the memorial’s presence. Less comfortably but equally necessarily the local business community has established that the local economy would derive annual indirect benefits from the memorial’s visitors of around £12.5 million. It remains to be seen if the National War Memorial will become a reality. Potentially the Millennial rush to commemorate has left the country and Commonwealth with memorial fatigue but that is never evident when we consult on the scheme. Whether it is the need for a secular architecture that can be deemed sacred, a yearning for a personal connection with the individuals who fell in the wars or the creation of a new national foundation myth, there is clearly a latent demand for appropriate and personal commemoration of the wars to continue, unintentionally turning landscape architects into social entrepreneurs. John Pegg is a founder of Craft Pegg landscape architects
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Feature
WW I – Planning and reconstruction
Rebuilding Northern France The devastation of war in northern France led to new approaches to planning as well as reconstruction both ancient and modern. BY HUGH CLOUT
Extending from the Channel coast to the Swiss border, the régions dévastées contained much of France’s most fertile farmland, and contributed one-third of its manufacturing output and most of its coal on the eve of war. Places close to the relatively stable front line experienced prolonged destruction but severe devastation could occur in just a few days or weeks of military advance or retreat. Whatever the circumstances, 620 settlements were annihilated, 1,330 were more than half destroyed, and 2,350 suffered rather less damage. Most were villages or small market towns, and thousands of isolated farmsteads were also destroyed. Among larger towns suffering damage, the mining centre of Lens and the textile
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town of Armentières were reduced to heaps of ruins, and the cathedral cities of Reims and Soissons lost four-fifths of their buildings. Destruction of churches, town halls and theatres so devastated the cultural legacy of northern France that it was a shattered wilderness at the end of 1918. Military and civilian workers set about demolishing dangerous ruins and collecting human remains at temporary cemeteries prior to the establishment of the war cemeteries that now form such striking features in the landscapes of northern France. Official surveyors used four colours to map differing degrees of damage. Red showed complete destruction, yellow indicated important damage, green represented slight damage, and blue marked land that escaped destruction in the war-torn zone. Local residents feared that the state would requisition property in the ‘red zone’ and prevent it being farmed in future. During the 1920s, most of these contentious areas were purged of dangerous wartime paraphernalia. The ‘red zone’ was reduced in size and most was returned to agricultural use as the landowners desired. Only a few patches of ‘red zone’ survive, as state forests (around Verdun), military training grounds (near Reims), or commemorative sites. It is in these areas that the overgrown ruins of a score of villages that were not rebuilt in the 1920s may still be found./...
1 — The town hall at Armentières, designed by Louis-Marie Cordonnier.
Photo ©: 1 — Hugh Clout
During 2014 events to commemorate the start of the World War One will attract large numbers of visitors to northern France and Belgium. Doubtless they will focus attention on battle sites, war cemeteries and museums, and I suspect that few visitors will think of exploring the landscapes and townscapes of post-war reconstruction that are often dismissed as being ‘ordinary’. Of course, most of those who suffered loss (the sinistrés) wanted their familiar environments to be ‘reconstituted’ and to closely resemble what had been lost. Reconstitution à l’identique was a phrase in common use after the Armistice of 11 November 1918.
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In October 1914, the French state pledged to assist the sinistrés with reconstruction but not until April 1919 was legislation passed to specify how they might request compensation. The process proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare through which rich landowners could navigate with help from lawyers and accountants, but less affluent sinistrés were left to their own devices. New legislation eased the situation in 1920 allowing sinistrés to form reconstruction cooperatives in order to employ professionals, claim compensation, prepare plans for rebuilding, and retain architects and builders. By 1926, 2,600 reconstruction cooperatives with 176,000 members had been set up, with other cooperatives pooling funds and expertise to rebuild churches, schools and town halls within dioceses or départements. Most of these organisations were not wound up until well into the 1930s. Long-awaited legislation, known as the ‘Loi Cornudet’, on the planning, ‘embellishment’ and extension of French towns, was passed in March 1919. Covering towns in the Paris region, those with more than 10,000 residents as well as smaller places that were growing rapidly, it also embraced all settlements that had undergone destruction during World War One. This ambitious law sought to ensure that urban growth and reconstitution 54 Landscape Summer 2014
should be both orderly and hygienic, and conform to official town plans. Application of the law was to prove remarkably slow and contentious for places that were simply expanding. Indeed, only one-sixth of such settlements had their plans drawn up and approved by 1940. By contrast, the situation was much more urgent for war-torn towns and villages since no reconstitution work (for which compensation might be claimed) was permitted until a plan had been drawn up and had received official approval. The introduction of improvements to street layout, housing, water supply and mains drainage was an essential feature of this well-intentioned law; however it generated layers of bureaucracy and slowed down the fundamental task of rebuilding. Hundreds of thousands of sinistrés spent years, rather than months, living in huts provided by the state, in patched-up ruins, or in overcrowded homes of family or friends. Temporary churches, town halls, shops and other commercial buildings were commonplace across northern France throughout the 1920s. Early in that decade French architects and builders were confronted with an unprecedented challenge as plans for what came to be known as the ‘great reconstruction’ had to be prepared, since they were called upon to design or construct
Image ©: 2 — University College, London
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Feature 2 —Map showing the varying degrees of damage. 3 — War memorial at Comines. 4 — The chamber of commerce in Lille.
whole settlements or neighbourhoods rather than satisfying the wishes of individual clients concerned with single buildings. At this time, the planning profession was in its infancy and most reconstruction plans were drafted by architects with little or no expertise of complete settlements. Members of the Alliance d’Hygiène Sociale and similar organisations argued that good design, access to light and air, and provision of clean water and efficient drains were essential if reconstruction were to succeed. Architect-planners wholeheartedly accepted these objectives but opinions were divided on matters of style. ‘Regionalists’ drew inspiration from what had been lost and from the bricks and stone of surviving buildings, whilst ‘modernizers’ favoured innovative designs and the maximum use of concrete and steel. In practice, use of concrete for infrastructure and brick or stone for exterior cladding provided a workable compromise. Among construction companies, family firms favoured traditional, artisanal approaches, whilst big firms from Paris or industrial areas employed machinery and large teams of workers.
Photo ©: 3, 4 — Hugh Clout
The ‘great reconstruction’ of the 1920s remodelled the layout of thousands of villages and small towns, and saw the rebuilding of numerous churches, mairies (town halls) and schools. Farmhouses across northern France were improved, but few landowners took advantage of funded schemes to reorganise fragmented agricultural holdings. At a different scale, the reconstitution of devastated neighbourhoods in larger towns produced notable changes in the townscape that surpassed the
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replacement of individual buildings. As they contributed to this process, some architectplanners looked resolutely to the future, whilst others favoured the reinvention of tradition. The widely publicised destruction of the ancient cathedral city of Reims, where kings of France had been crowned across the centuries, attracted attention from around the world and especially from American architects, planners, building companies and benefactors who were eager to assist the work of reconstruction cooperatives set up by local sinistrés. The Renaissance des Cités mutual welfare group enlisted the services of George Burdett Ford (1878–1930), who had studied architecture and planning in the USA and Paris. An ambitious ‘Ford Plan’ for Reims proposed creating broad, modern avenues and parks as well as restoring the cathedral and other historic buildings à l’identique. Some of Ford’s early ideas had to be scaled down because of cost, but by the early 1930s many had been implemented and Reims had been largely rebuilt. Its reconstituted art-deco banks, cinemas, department stores and car showrooms, aligned along widened city streets, symbolised a new age of consumerism. Visitors from across the Atlantic declared that Reims had become the most ‘American’ of French cities. Smaller examples of remodelled townscapes that benefited from international expertise and funding during the 1920s are found at Soissons and Verdun, where historic fortifications were declassified, thereby providing additional space for reconstruction work. /... Landscape Summer 2014 55
Feature initial settlement plans and proposals for individual buildings proved too expensive to implement and had to be simplified. Cordonnier’s work is particularly well represented around the central square of Armentières, where the town hall and belfry, the main church, market hall and the monument aux morts were designed by him. However, the smaller town of Bailleul arguably conveys the most complete expression of his distinctive style. Mundane workers’ dwellings were replaced by elegant brick houses, and a model hospital and several schools were rebuilt in ‘neo-Flemish’ style as well as the vast town hall and the church of Saint-Vaast. In continuation of his pre-war activities, Cordonnier employed his talents in the coal-mining town of Lens, where he designed the Grand Bureaux des Mines, now occupied by the science faculty of the University of Artois.
By contrast, much of the rebuilding in French Flanders involved a reinvention of tradition and the application of ‘neo-Flemish’ designs for churches, public buildings, shops and houses that typically surrounded re-organised town squares and lined newly widened streets. Louis-Marie Cordonnier (1854–1940) was the most prominent (but not the only) architect to work on towns and villages in the devastated Lys Valley, located to the west of the city of Lille. He had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and drew inspiration for the work of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, best known for his application of medieval designs. Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier (1820-1902), father of Louis-Marie, had been a renowned architect who designed apartments in Lille and weekend retreats along the northern coast. Between 1880 and the outbreak of war, Louis-Marie designed ‘neoFlemish’ town halls, belfries and commercial buildings in and around Lille and on the northern coalfield, as well as the massive Peace Palace in The Hague. The reconstruction plans that he and his associates prepared in the 1920s incorporated additional space for markets and the movement of vehicles. The replacement churches, town halls and belfries that they designed made abundant use of brick and stone. As well as working with reconstruction cooperatives in Armentières, Bailleul, Merville, Laventie and nearby towns, Cordonnier designed many churches that would be rebuilt by ecclesiastical cooperatives in the dioceses of Lille and Arras. In some instances, his 56 Landscape Summer 2014
The landscapes of war-torn northern France that were reassembled during the 1920s comprise a variety of unmistakably new features such as the cités-jardin (garden suburbs) that were laid out around Reims to accommodate residents displaced by rather more spacious rebuilding in the inner city. Other examples include estates for railway workers that were built adjacent to major junctions and marshalling yards. By contrast, few visitors
5 — The town hall in Merville. 6 — St Pierre church in Merville. 7 — Louis-Marie Cordonnier was the most prominent architect to work on reconstruction in the Lys Valley.
6
Photo ©: 5, 6, 7 — Hugh Clout
5
7
8 — The town hall at Méteren is an example of neo-Flemish design. 9 — Church in Méteren. 10 — Church in Comines.
8
Photo ©: 8, 9, 10 — Hugh Clout
9
to Arras would imagine that its two great market squares, belfry, elaborate town hall, bishop’s palace and cathedral had suffered intense destruction during the First World War and had been reconstructed à l’identique by architects using photographs and drawings. Local stone created a visual illusion of authenticity but reinforced concrete was employed in building frames. In sharper focus, the townscapes of reconstruction are also assemblages of reconstitution in which architects employed by cooperatives or by individual property owners gave full expression to their ideas. As a result, art-deco buildings are found not only in Reims and Soissons, but also near the Gare de LilleFlandres in central Lille, around the Grand’Place in Béthune, and along the shopping streets of Lens as well as adjacent to its rebuilt railway station.
Unlike their ‘invisibility’ in past decades, the reassembled landscapes – and reconstituted buildings – that resulted from the great reconstruction of the 1920s have started to be reappraised as cultural features in their own right after many decades of neglect. Special websites, brochures and maps have been produced, and new museums, information panels and way-marked heritage trails now play their part in revealing and interpreting the reconstituted landscapes of northern France to residents and visitors alike. Indeed, four of Cordonnier’s belfries (Armentières, Comines, Dunkirk, Loos) figure on the list of two dozen across northern France that were recognised by UNESCO in 2005 as forming a World Heritage Site. Most certainly, there is another landscape history to explore in the dozen northern départements for those who may not be satisfied by visits to changing frontlines, battlefields, military cemeteries, and war museums. However, the story cannot end there, since these areas experienced further waves of destruction associated with the German advance of 1940, Allied bombing of transport nodes and manufacturing sites, and further damage linked to the German retreat in 1944–45. This shaped a different geography of destruction from that produced during 1914–18, since coastal ports, bridging points, industrial areas and settlements near airfields experienced intense loss. A second phase of reconstruction duly followed in the late 1940s and 1950s that required much more effective urban planning than that associated with the Loi Cornudet. This process added an array of often strikingly modern features to the palimpsest of cultural landscapes in northern France that awaits the attention of perceptive visitors. Professor Hugh Clout is a geographer who has taught at University College London since 1996.
10
Landscape Summer 2014 57
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Technical By Sarah Yarwood-Lovett, Nadine Clark and Rosie Whicheloe
1 — Otters are fully protected under UK and European law.
Protect and prosper Understanding when to do an ecology survey, and making sure that it is done early, can turn what many see as a liability into an opportunity.
Photo ©: 1 — The Ecology Consultancy
Ecology surveys often make the press when they are costly and cause delays, but these problems often reveal more about poor project management than the cost of safeguarding our natural heritage. Ecologists, protected species and the collection of survey data rarely cost the millions of pounds that headlines allege. But failing to seek ecological advice early can lead to the late discovery of issues and the subsequent delays to site works, which can become extremely expensive. This needn’t be the case; effective project management can prevent delays by providing ecological input at the earliest stage of a project. Seasonal surveys for seasonal habits Identifying the potential ecological issues of your site early is critical for two reasons. Firstly, the seasonal nature of many species restricts when surveys can be carried out and secondly, some surveys require multiple visits within that restricted timeframe. So the key things to determine are: • w hat species may be supported by the habitats on site; • t he appropriate survey needed to identify presence or likely absence, and • t he right time of year to conduct the appropriate survey for that species.
1
A Protected Species Survey Calendar is a useful tool that makes it easy to reference the appropriate survey periods for commonly occurring legally protected species in England. For example, great crested newts spend most of the year in scrub and woodland. But for the 12 weeks between mid-March and mid-June they breed in ponds, and it is in this short time that surveys for newts should be carried out. Newt surveys involve up to six repeat visits for each pond within this 12 week period, and weather conditions have to be warm and dry. Contacting an ecologist as early as possible, and definitely before the season starts, ensures that there is time for contingencies such as bad weather. Site assessment – towards a landscape ecology Species may potentially use a site for a number of different activities, such as foraging, hibernating, breeding, sheltering or commuting. It is important that these activities are not affected by the development to the extent that they could threaten the conservation status of the species population. Looking at the wider landscape from an ecology perspective provides the context for the habitats on site and enables assessments about their potential to support protected species to be made. In making these assessments, an ecologist will look at the wider landscape using aerial photographs, Ordnance Survey maps and biological data sets, such as the Multi-Agency Geographic
Information for the Countryside (MAGIC, 2013), for a number of different features including asking: • Are there any habitats of ecological value within 1km of the site (such as designated and priority habitat sites)? • Is the site near any barriers for species dispersal? • Are there any ponds or wet ditches within 500m of the site and are they connected to the site by semi-natural habitats or hedgerows? • How intact is the hedgerow network? • Is there ancient woodland within 5km and/or connected to the site? • Are there other habitat corridors that connect to the site, such as railways, road embankments, and brownfield sites? • Are there any watercourses within 800m and/or linked to the site? • Are there any mature trees on or adjacent to the site? • Is there rough, unmanaged grassland, scrub or rubble (concrete, brick, brash) piles on site? • Are there habitat mosaics on or adjacent to the site to support the species’ seasonal requirements? Ecological protection is a legal requirement Protected species are safeguarded through planning policy as well as through European and British law. The various levels of legal protection usually reflect the /... Landscape Summer 2014 59
Technical Table 1: Key information on the commonly occurring protected species. Species highlighted in red are protected under European and British law. Those highlighted in black are protected under British law.
rarity of the species, which then affects assessments of impacts and what constitute legal (or illegal) activities on site. The historical updates and revisions of the various types of legislation can make the different restrictions confusing. A list of the main points is provided below: • European Protected Species (EPS) have high levels of protection which extend to their resting places. Where these species would be disturbed, or their resting places damaged, destroyed or obstructed, a licence from Natural England is needed; • Natural England Licences take 30 working days to process and an allowance of time to prepare and implement the licence, as well as to complete the surveys to inform it, is required; • for species protected by British law, such as water voles, the protection is similar but less restrictive; • breaches of legislation can carry hefty penalties, including custodial sentences and fines per animal, not just per offence. Table 1 provides key information on the commonly occurring protected species in England, their legal status and a check list of the sorts of habitats where they are found. Some additional information is given on typical dispersal distances, which are often referenced in guidance documents, but caution is needed as these can vary depending on availability of good foraging habitat, habitat connectivity and population dynamics. 60 Landscape Summer 2014
Protected species
Legislation
Habitats
Bats (all 18 species)
Fully protected under UK and European law.
Roost in all types of buildings and trees. Landscape networks of woodland, trees, hedgerows and water-bodies are used for foraging and commuting.
Breeding birds
All species are protected while nests are active. Certain species are protected from disturbance during the breeding season.
Trees, hedgerows, scrub, shrubs, and in occupied buildings.
Great crested newts
Fully protected under UK and European law.
Breed in ponds and ditches in spring. Found in terrestial habitats under leaf litter, soil and rough vegetation in spring / summer, hibernating in soil, rubble, mammal burrows over winter. Can be found quite far from a pond (up to 500m).
Palmate and smooth newts
Protected in UK from injury or killing only.
Similar habitat to that of great crested newts.
Reptiles (6 species)
Smooth snake and sand lizard are fully protected under UK and European Law. The remaining four widespread species are protected in the UK from injury or killing only.
Smooth snakes and sand lizards are very rare and found on heathland only. Grass snakes, slow worms, adders and common lizards are found in scrub, rough grassland, rubble piles and railway ballast. They particularly like south-facing slopes with open vegetation. They hibernate in scrub, rubble piles and in woodland.
Otters
Fully protected under UK and European law.
Otters use all types of water-bodies (marine and freshwater, still and flowing) for foraging. Woodland, dense scrub and tall ruderal vegetation within 800m of a water body are used for resting and raising their young.
Water voles
Fully protected under UK law only.
All freshwater (still or flowing) water-bodies. Burrows dug in steep earth banks. Shaded stretches less suitable due to lack of marginal vegetation.
Hazel dormouse
Fully protected under UK and European law.
All kinds of woodland, including conifers, hedgerow networks, scrub and heathland. Hazel does not need to be present.
Badgers
Protection from persecution only.
Forage in all habitats, including gardens. Slopes in woodland or hedgerows are suitable habitat for setts, particularly on chalk on railway embankments, or under electricity pylons and even on active construction sites.
2 — A female slow worm. 3 — Detailed survey of a feature that is potentially suitable for roosting bats.
Once a client is made aware of the potential ecological issues on site, they should seek tailored ecological advice for the species concerned, to ensure appropriate action is taken and potential breaches of legislation avoided. In addition, they should be made aware that the time between purchasing land and obtaining planning permission can sometimes enable the site to become more ecologically valuable (e.g. uncut grass and broken windows can increase the site’s ability to support reptiles and bats).
Photo ©: 2, 3 — The Ecology Consultancy
It is also worth mentioning that the legal protection afforded to species can bring substantial weighting to an argument to retain a feature of ecological value, compared to the same feature on just landscape grounds. Therefore, legal requirements to protect the ecology of a site can provide a supporting tool to reinforce the argument to protect the landscape along with other ecosystem functions. The ‘Avoid – Mitigate – Compensate’ Sequence In considering design options, an early understanding of the ecological value of features on and surrounding the site enables impacts to be designed out, and allows the detailed design to progress with an awareness of the needs of maintaining ecosystem functionality. Preventing direct and indirect effects on features of ecological value is the best option as this negates the need for further measures to be taken.
2
For example, a canal or line of trees may provide a striking feature in an urban setting and from a design point of view and may benefit from lighting for safety and/or visual effect. But the same feature may also provide a foraging resource for light-averse bat species. Lighting the feature would make the bats avoid it and its function as a feeding or navigation resource would be lost. Depending on the availability of other similar features in the area this may have a significant effect on the local bat population. If the feature can remain unlit then the impact will be avoided.
Where lighting can’t be avoided, the next best option is to mitigate. This could be achieved through minor design changes – perhaps low-level lighting (sunk into the pathway or directional lighting) could be used to limit light spill onto the habitat. Lux levels and different lighting types (depending on the design objectives and the bat species present) can help reach a satisfactory compromise between design ambitions and ecological function. Where this can’t be achieved, compensatory foraging habitats would need to be provided in the locality. The preferred, and invariably the cheapest, option is always to avoid impacts on wildlife in the first place. If mitigation cannot be avoided then design options should be considered and evaluated by an ecologist. Mitigation measures may be secured through planning conditions, but should always be proportionate to the impacts and the value of the ecological feature being conserved. The main problems in dealing with ecological impacts arise when advice is sought after a design has been finalised, limiting the capacity to accommodate changes that would avoid or reduce the impact on that species.
3
In cases where mitigation is not possible, for example because of site constraints, the only solution may be to provide a compensatory habitat off site. This can be expensive and time-consuming. A suitable /... Landscape Summer 2014 61
Technical Mitigation hierarchy
I n c r e a s i n g
AVOIDANCE Highly desirable
REDUCTION
c o s t s
COMPENSATION Least desirable
4 — This pond is potentially suitable for breeding great crested newts.
site has to be found, and time allowed for habitats to be planted and established, which can delay projects. So early engagement of an ecologist can help avoid impacts or enable effective mitigation to be designed seamlessly into the scheme.
design, then ecological requirements can bring additional functions and benefits to the designed landscape. Successful partnerships will bring good press and better places for people. These successes should help demonstrate that, through early consideration, the pitfalls that make the headlines can be avoided.
Conclusion If you consider ecology early on and avoid impacts or at least mitigate them within the
Dr Sarah Yarwood-Lovett CEnv, MCIEEM is a principal ecologist and Nadine Clark BSc MSc MCIEEM and Rosie Whicheloe BA MSc ACIEEM are ecologists with the Ecology Consultancy.
4
Survey calendar for protected species Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Dormice Bats Reptiles
Breeding birds Otters Water voles Badgers
62 Landscape Summer 2014
Photo ©: 4 — The Ecology Consultancy
Great crested newts
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64 Landscape Summer 2014
Practice 1 By Ann Sharrock and Ian Fisher
Urban natural burials Natural burials are increasingly popular, but are usually in hard-to-reach edge of town environments. Could our cities offer the answer?
T
e debate over land use and h availability and new space for burial sites is becoming critical in England due to the increasing proportion of the population who are in the latter quarter of their lives. ‘Almost half of England’s cemeteries could run out of space within the next 20 years,’ a BBC survey suggests. And a quarter of 358 local authorities responding to the BBC said they would have no more room for burials within a decade.1 This situation is compounded by restrictions on reusing existing graves and the taboo on discussing alternative approaches. In 2011 there were 556,229 deaths in the United Kingdom, and while the majority of those were cremated (74.4%), many cremations are increasingly followed by a formal burial.2 There will always be a significant minority of people who wish to be buried, perhaps for religious reasons. This choice should be respected without pressure being applied to select cremation, which has already occurred in the South of England3. Cemeteries, large tracts of land originally located on the urban fringes, came into common use from the 1820s, and are mostly owned by local authorities. Many
have the quality of a vast manicured garden, an idealised version of nature and, although they are designed with glades for privacy, they offer an anonymous, unemotional experience. In addition their location makes them an unlikely resource for those who need their spirit refreshed or some quiet contemplation. Natural burial is a process whereby bodies or ash from cremation are interned in the ground to allow the remains to recycle naturally. In England, the first natural burial site opened in 1993 in Carlisle. There are now 270 registered sites, managed by either local authorities or private companies. Natural burial sites are generally on the periphery of urban areas, as the expectations of ‘green meadows’ or ‘sylvan woodland’ are an inherent part of the decision to bury green. However, to a degree this makes them socially exclusive as they are often in areas not easily accessible to inner city dwellers. In his 1997 report The Cemetery in the City, Ken Worpole argues that the burial ground is a vital cultural landscape because it is one ‘where the cycles of nature and time are so clearly evident – in the weathering of the headstones, in the fading of the letters carved in sandstone, in the lichen growths ...’ 4 While the cycle of life and continuity represented by the lichen-covered headstones in Victorian graveyards is not a feature of natural burial, this metaphor is apparent in the regenerative quality of nature in the
dynamic woodland with its whips, lofty oaks and seasonality. The Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee Report on Cemeteries said in 2001 that ‘ways have to be found to ensure that local, accessible burial space is provided. Local authorities should address this need in their Development Plans.’ Our proposal is based on a reprogramming of the relationship between the non-secular activity of burial and the re-territorialisation of space subsequent to this act to provide what would become a secular surface. The natural burial site would become part of the urban infrastructure, supporting essential services within the city and performing culturally, socially and ecologically. Green infrastructure Cemeteries and graveyards are considered part of the green infrastructure, which includes ‘established green spaces and new sites and should thread through and surround the built environment and connect the urban area to its wider rural hinterland. Consequently it needs to be delivered at all spatial scales from sub-regional to local neighbourhood levels, accommodating both accessible natural green spaces within local communities and often much larger sites in the urban fringe and wider countryside.’ 6 As the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) advocated /... Landscape Summer 2014 65
Practice 1
in 2007, we should be designing for the living, not just the dead , and it advised that local authorities should include burial grounds in their green space strategies so that finance could be allocated for horticulturalists and maintenance workers, proper landscape, visitor facilities and specially designated walks to encourage exploration and exercise. The value of existing cemeteries and graveyards should undoubtedly be realised. And in addition, we propose that land-use plans direct future cemeteries away from the community fringe and encourage the incorporation of burial facilities in appropriate temporal un-programmed spaces, awaiting development. In other words, we should reframe death spaces as places that provide services to the living. These would be reintroduced at a local scale, mirroring, albeit with much more stringent control, the situation at the start of the 19th century. We propose that these sites would be, although not exclusively, finished with trees as the key green infrastructural and remembrance element. Climate change and urban microclimate extremes Trees fulfil a number of key requirements in this process. They are the most efficient in absorbing PM10s, gaseous and other particulate pollution, as well as increasing humidity, providing shelter, reducing peak 66 Landscape Summer 2014
run-off flows, enhancing the potential for other biocentric systems and providing psychological benefits. They can also provide a commercial return through purchase of the tree by a bereaved family. In addition in some locations there may be gains from the timber via coppicing or clear felling. There are also indirect economic gains such as increased land, property and rental values associated with urban trees. Trees also define the site as a place of passive recreation. The stigma of death and its associated bereavement gives a special context to these spaces. The fact that there are no formal reminders of the paraphernalia associated with death, addresses people’s natural hesitancy to enter cemeteries, but equally the knowledge that this is a place of remembrance would generally influence users in their response to the site. Research by Doris Francis has shown that those who visit graves are far more numerous than we had ever expected, and therefore the role of the burial ground in enabling people to come to terms with their loss, or of celebrating the identity of someone who is dead, is an extremely important one. 8 Strategically a network of green infrastructural spaces of a substantial density (the minimum size would be Ÿ acre or 1011 m2) reflects current research. This shows that, to make
any substantial impact on mitigating microclimate extremes, trees should be planted strategically in larger groups as proto urban forests, rather than spread as thin green threads. In addition, cemeteries have been identified as areas with potentially high levels of biotic diversity, especially in urban areas, and according to Alexander Harker even small burial grounds contribute to biotic diversity. 9 Making death pay Within urban areas there are a large number of temporal un-programmed spaces, awaiting development. These are principally privately owned, with only a small number under the jurisdiction of local government. At present local authorities do not have the resources to buy or rent land. This is a major barrier, since private land owners would need a commercial return on their land if they sold it, or a rent that reflected the current market value of the plot. There are two potential solutions: either a change in the way that future tax revenues are apportioned or through private investment. A carbon tax is almost inevitable and the revenues this creates could be used to support the payment of rent by local authorities on private land at the market rate. A more intriguing solution is aimed at private investors, who, in effect, lease the designated green burial land, then sell it later at a profit. ...continues on page 70
Diagram 1: Site selection
Case study Our case study focuses on the Northern Quarter in Manchester city centre. This area is a residential, commercial and cultural hub with a diverse demographic, high density and development flux. The sites that offer potential for natural burial are greater than 0.4 acre or 1011m2 and all but one supports a temporary car park. They are surrounded by dense development with busy thoroughfares and are easily accessible, with residential occupation nearby.
Landscape Summer 2014 67
Practice 1 Diagram 2 Site preparation: suitability and works The reprogramming of the site provides the opportunity to introduce a sustainable urban drainage system (SuDS). Rather than channelling water through pipes and sewers, SuDS mimics natural drainage regimes, reducing surface-water flooding, improving water quality and enhancing the amenity and biodiversity value of the environment. This is achieved by lowering flow rates, increasing water storage capacity and reducing the flow of pollution to the water environment. This alternative drainage helps ameliorate environmental challenges such as climate change and population growth.
68 Landscape Summer 2014
Diagram 3 Site preparation: drainage A 972m2 grid holds approximately 216 graves. Mapping tools along with a microchip enable grave location. There are no permanent markers. An area may be reserved for gathering.
Diagram 4 Site preparation: structure A structure of extra heavy standard trees will be planted to give identity, scale and structure to the site. Species will be selected for their tolerance of urban conditions: pollution, drought, wind, tolerance. There will be insufficient room to plant a tree at every grave.
Diagram 5 (bottom) Site preparation: planting 1011m2 holds approximately 66 trees, although the number will depend on the species, design and commercial considerations. In the example there is a mixed canopy with glades to achieve a diversity of ground layer with its ecological benefits. Bird boxes and bulbs may also be selected by the bereaved as a means of personalising the space.
Landscape Summer 2014 69
Practice 1
1 — Visualisation of how the dynamic woodland space could look.
1
...continued from page 66 This scheme claims investors could make 60% in as little as two years. ‘The concept is very simple. We allow investors to forwardpurchase individual plots at a discounted rate. They are then managed by the cemetery and offered back to the public at their usual market value, providing you with the returns,’ says promoter Alex Ogden. He claims nearby local cemeteries are selling spaces for between £1,480 and £1,600, so buying at £875 today will give investors almost guaranteed returns. Are cemeteries the new safe investment? 10 It would be desirable to have detailed case studies about how to design burial grounds to better integrate them into existing communities. These designs would accommodate multiple uses both environmentally as conservation space and socially as a community resource. They would bring burial facilities back into community life, connecting the living with the space through the connection with dead relatives and friends. These spaces would contribute to the green infrastructure strategy and, through respect, guarantee and conserve their longevity. While all is in flux around, they would provide the permanent unique identity of the area. This is a new kind of urban landscape supporting a wide range of social interactions and relationships and offering both residents and visitors a different urban experience.
70 Landscape Summer 2014
Ann Sharrock is a landscape architect. Ian Fisher is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. References 1 B BC survey 27th September 2013 – http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24283426 accessed October 2013 2 h ttp://www.srgw.demon.co.uk/CremSoc4/Stats/ index.html 3 House of Commons, Select Committee on Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Eighth Report on Cemeteries, April 2001 4 Worpole, Ken. (1997) The Cemetery in the City (Stroud, Comedia) 5 H ouse of Commons, Select Committee on Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Eighth Report on Cemeteries, April 2001 6 h ttp://www.naturalengland.org.uk/regions/east_ of_england/ourwork/gi/ 7 h ttp://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20110118095356/http:/www.cabe.org.uk/news/ design-cemeteries-for-the-living-not-just-the-dead 8 F rancis, Doris. (2003) Cemeteries as cultural landscapes, Mortality, 8, pp. 222–227 9 A lexander Harker, Landscapes of the Dead, an argument for Conservation Burial, Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012 10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/oct/16/ cemeteries-burial-investment 11 British Geological Survey
Landscape Summer 2014 71
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Practice 2 By Ruth Slavid
Snap happy
1
1 — Photo by Nick Harrison of an event at Ordsall Hall in Salford. 2 — The same image after photoshopping to remove water drops from the lens and bring a dead topiary bush back to life. 3 — Nick Harrison’s image of Hythe Promenade for the Landscape Partnership. It takes patience to get the right conditions. Harrison also removed some graffiti in Photoshop, sharpened the image and brightened the colours.
Landscape architects tend not to spend money on photography, but their ability to communicate their work suffers as a result.
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Photo ©: 1, 2, 3 — Nick Harrison
o u could argue that nobody really needs a landscape architect. Architects can think about the surroundings of their buildings, a drainage engineer can ensure the water goes away, a decent contractor can lay some paving and as for soft landscape – well, we can all do a bit of gardening, can’t we? Are you feeling irate yet? Landscape professionals have of course a great deal to offer, and we should not presume that others can do their jobs just as well. Yet many in the profession are guilty of the same kind of blinkered thinking when it comes to photography. Digital cameras and simple manipulation tools have raised the standard of photography at the bottom. Whereas once many people took really awful pictures, today most people’s are OK. But there is a great difference between alright and the best. Your family snaps probably don’t look much like professional portraits, so why should you expect your snatched photos of your landscapes to look anything like the work of a professional photographer who has the time, the experience, the skills and, if chosen correctly, the eye to show off your work in the best possible way?
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It costs how much? The only real downside of using a professional photographer is that it costs money. It might look like a lot, but just think what you are paying for – even discounting the intangible cost of the photographer’s skill. They may well have travel expenses, which will tot up in terms of time and money. They will probably take a lot of pictures, which takes time, and they will hang around for the best light and conditions – possibly even coming back on a better day. /...
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Architectural photographer Guy MontaguPollock says, ‘One difference between an amateur and a professional is the amount of time that you are prepared to spend. A good architectural photographer will look at maps and do a recce. And they may wait 30 to 40 minutes after they have set up a shot before they take it.’ This also means that they can’t always work – weeks of torrential rain will mean that they do very little. They need to update equipment regularly – not only cameras, but also computers and software. And they will spend time correcting your photos – even supposedly unaltered photos need quite a bit of work. Photographer Nick Harrison estimates that for every half-day shoot he will spend a day getting the best out of the pictures in Photoshop. But it is worth it Photographs play a vital part in winning work. The higher your profile the more likely you are to win work. Even when entering large competitive situations you have to remember that the judges will have the near-impossible task of looking at a vast number of entries very fast. A good photograph may catch their eye, or they may recognise your work because it has been published in a magazine or on a website or a blog – and good photography is going to make that far more likely. Similarly you can use the photographs for entering awards, on your
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website, in brochures, on newsletters or to give presentations. Unless your work is in a very prominent place, potential clients are unlikely to have seen it. It would be great if they did visit – but what is most likely to persuade them to do so is the photography.
at an early stage, usually as soon as the building is complete. At that stage, it will be smart and shiny and unsullied – in fact looking its best. But the poor old landscape will certainly not be established and planting may not even be complete.
Andrew Grant, founder of Grant Associates, says, ‘When we realised that Gardens by the Bay [the practice’s multi award winning project in Singapore] would be really important to us, we paid more attention to how we promoted ourselves and our marketing. We were told that we needed to get into the habit of commissioning proper professional photos. If we want a project to be publishable, we will commission photos.’ Grant said that at first it felt as if they were spending a lot of money but now he just sees it as one of the costs associated with the practice’s work. ‘When you are faced with the bills you think, can we afford it, but you get to the point where it has to be affordable.’
There is a good reason why the Landscape Institute stipulates that projects entered for its awards have to have been open for at least a year. On the one hand, any planting should at least have started to mature; on the other, any mistakes with quick fixes are likely to have appeared. But in terms of photography, even a wait of a year is likely to be too long for other members of the team, let alone going back after several years to see how the scheme has developed. So, if you want to share photography costs your only chance is likely to be right at the beginning of the project. If you want to go back later on, you will be on your own and paying your own bills. You may however decide that it is worth it. Andrew Grant for example says that his practice is planning to embark on a project of re-photographing older landscapes. It will be asking photographers who will be travelling to newer projects to take in some of the older ones as well – a way at least of cutting down on travel time and costs.
The trouble with landscape The difficulties with photographing landscape are not technical. A good photographer with sympathy for the subject will be able to do a good job. The problems are more structural and financial. If there is any media interest in a project, and if there is going to be any money available – for example, a commercial client putting money up to promote a building that they want to let or just add to their portfolio – then that will be
One reason why the practice is doing this is that it is coming up to its 20th anniversary – a good time to take stock and look back at the portfolio and forward to posterity.
Photo ©: 4 — Grant Associates
4 — Grant Associates took this photo in-house at the Japan Expo, but with great care. The focus is on capturing the mood rather than individual plants.
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5 — Photo of a housing development in Putney by Guy Montagu-Pollock for Churchman Landscape Architects and Feilden Clegg Bradley. The focus on the pool would not be normal for a straightforward architectural photograph. 6 — Guy Montagu-Pollock made use of dramatic shadows in this photograph of the same scheme.
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Photo ©: 5, 6 — Guy Montagu-Pollock/arcaid.co.uk
Chicken and egg Because few landscape architects commission photography, there are very few photographers who are dedicated to the subject. Whereas there are plenty of specialised architectural photographers, working either on their own or represented by agencies such as Arcaid and View, pure landscape photographers are rare. (I am talking about photographers who record the work of the profession rather than those who photograph beautiful natural landscapes as art). Nick Harrison, who is based in the northwest, is not only a landscape photographer but also a landscape architect who worked for Salford council for 26 years. Always enthusiastic about photography, he started photographing the projects that his team was working on and now is a full-time photographer. But this is the exception. A good architectural photographer will have a great eye for architecture but may be less clued up about landscape. In which case briefing, always important, will be vital. Piggy backing If you don’t have much money and want to share the architect or the client’s photography, you have to hope that this is a project on which the architect appreciates the importance of landscape. ‘Landscape is becoming more part of the currency of any scheme and its completion,’ says architectural photographer Tim Soar. ‘This is particularly so in education.’ Different
architects will have different views about the importance of landscape, he says, and this will affect his brief. ‘But if the idea is to think about the landscape it will be very much in terms of how it relates to the building,’ he says. Good time, bad time One of the problems may be that the best times and conditions for photographing buildings are not always the most appropriate for landscape. Guy Montagu-Pollock, an architectural photographer who is represented by Arcaid, has on occasion been asked to take some extra photographs by a landscape architect on a project. ‘Harsh lighting may allow you to take a dramatic photograph of a building, but it will not be at all suitable for the landscape,’ he says. Nearly always an overcast day will work best for landscape, and the softer light that comes between seasons or at dawn or dusk. ‘I think that landscape is even fussier than architecture about the kind of light,’ he says. In his experience, ‘When architects give me an incredibly detailed brief, the landscape scarcely features at all.’ At the computer Just as using a camera properly takes skill, experience and time, so does manipulating photographs. Nick Harrison uses Photoshop or Apple Aperture to get the colour and lighting balance right, and to take out small unfortunate elements. It isn’t about lying,
or about pretending. Indeed Harrison is very much against making images supersaturated so that they seem unreal. ‘The problem with digital cameras,’ he says, ‘is that they don’t take a photo as you see it. It is toned down. It is about recreating that impression you have when you look at the landscape and what you want to convey.’ Occasionally he will do something more technical, such as stitching a number of photos together to create a panorama, but normally his work at the computer involves selecting the best images and then getting them to look as good as he can. /...
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7 — Aerial shots are certainly not within the capability of amateur photographers! This one shows the landscape at The Hive, Worcester, by Grant Associates. 8 — This image of the Stirling Prize winning Accordia housing development in Cambridge captures the relationship between buildings and landscape.
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Points to consider when commissioning photographers • Find a photographer whose work you like. • The nearer the photographer lives to the project, the less the travel costs will be and the more likely they will be to go back. • Only commission photographs of projects of which you are really proud. • Give the photographer a detailed brief and tell them how you plan to use the photographs (web, print, boards etc.). • See if you can share costs with an architect / client. • Try to find a way of going back to your earlier jobs, perhaps as part of another assignment. • If you really can’t afford a professional photographer, get the best camera you can, allow as much time as possible, take a lot of photos and learn to use Photoshop.
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Photo ©: 7 — Simon Kirwan Photography 8 — Grant Associates
Harrison has been using Photoshop for years. He compares it in complexity to AutoCAD. ‘I would say to become proficient in Photoshop takes 6-12 months of constant use,’ he says. Yet another reason to leave your photography to the professionals.
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A Word By Tim Waterman
Petunia
The US-based Project for Public Spaces, however, exhorts us to ‘start with the Petunias’ in its Eleven Principles for Turning Public Spaces Into Civic Places, ‘Short-term actions, like planting flowers, can be a way of not only testing ideas, but also giving people the confidence that change is occurring and that their ideas matter.’ Hanging baskets and other floral displays are more than just ‘quick wins,’ though. For many local authorities they are not just a way of demonstrating commitment on the way to a sweeping solution, but they are consistent, everyday ‘wins’ that are a visible show of continued care and action.
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Many years ago, when I was working for Rummey Design, we took a field trip to see the Coventry Phoenix Initiative, a sparkling regeneration project that our practice had undertaken. It was crisply executed and studded with public art and architectural features; a typical display of the showers of New Labour largesse characteristic of the time. Right in front of the BBC’s spanking new office and ill-fitted to and overhanging the angular stone stairs were a series of bulky stainless-steel planters filled with showy annuals. There was no doubt about the fact that these shipwrecked planters looked tokenistic next to the cool and sophisticated design, but on the other hand, could the local authority be faulted for wishing to decorate its new civic rooms? In a way, organisations were simply moving in and becoming inhabitants, much as one might hang pictures in a new house.
What is the answer, then? Do we continue to specify hooks on lamp standards so that ‘pimp my street’ bling can continue to be applied? Do we try our best to ignore it? Do we legislate against the pelargonium? Actually, as I write, my window boxes are filled with the most garish pelargoniums I could find, and it pleases me to hear people pause and comment. Recently a fashion photographer posed a model in front of my planters. A windowsill is a natural place for a bit of decoration, and a window box is a token of pride and ownership and a gift of beauty to one’s neighbours. We need to include a few windowsill equivalents in our landscape designs, but also to use our skills to rethink display planting. Freiburg im Breisgau has wreathed many of its central streets in wisteria, for example. Arching over the street, it has much greater public meaning as a sign act of beauty and fragrance than it would climbing a private building. It is important to contemplate what the sustainable, contemporary equivalents of display planting might be. We should, for example, incorporate the WSUD technology of flow-through planters in our streetscape designs. The answers may well emerge from much of the valuable research that has gone into green walls, living roofs, and other such technologies. These have yet to fully connect with the daily civic life of the street. Let’s start by rethinking the petunia.
Photo ©: 1 — Agnese Sanvito
L
e t’s imagine a scenario. You’re out walking on a sunny day and the streets are full of colour and cheer. You might even be whistling. You’re transported with delight, until your mood shifts suddenly as you feel a cold trickle down your neck. You’ve walked under a freshly watered hanging basket. Instantly you’re reminded of just how much you loathe hanging baskets. Your mood darkens as you contemplate the vulgar annuals, the enormous wasted expense, the extravagance with water, the unsustainable use of peat in potting mediums. People could be doing something useful with their time instead of planting these damn baskets! The sky has blackened with clouds, and you can hear distant thunder. Petunias. Bah!
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