Landscape Journal - Spring 2016 by Landscape, the journal of the Landscape Institute

Landscape The Journal of the Landscape Institute

Spotlight on Sheffield / 26 Rewilding / 9 A rural manifesto / 56

Spring 2016

landscapeinstitute.org

DESIGN TANK PHOTO CHARLOTTE SVERDRUP

Enjoying the outdoors since 1947 vestre.co.uk 2

Landscape Spring 2016

Vestre Berlin Design: Espen Voll, Tore Borgersen & Michael Olofsson

Editorial By Ruth Slavid

A lot to learn o f the great advantages of landscape as a discipline is that it is ‘baggy’. Universities of course teach a defined curriculum, particularly if they are decent and have courses accredited by the LI. But it is always difficult to determine where landscape ends and other subjects begin. Anybody for ecology, planning, urban design, horticulture, sociology and architecture? There are others as well, I am sure. Perhaps ‘porous’ would be a better word. There are boundaries around landscape but knowledge and ideas travel through them in both directions. Having spent a lot of my career writing about architecture, there is a difference that strikes me between architecture and landscape. Architects are fascinated by other areas – by boat building, by photography, by history – but they like to subsume them all into their discipline, to ‘acquire’. Landscape seems to me to be far less interested in acquiring specialisms and much more about genuine exchange. You can find some of the exchanges throughout this issue. Simon Brown, a young landscape architect who is eager to redefine the concept of rural practice, talks about the influence of his first degree in anthropology. Nicola Dempsey, one of the

Photo ©: 1 – Agnese Sanvito

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researchers at Sheffield, describes her work which gives landscape professionals the benefit of her earlier efforts in tourism and architecture and now in planning. Sheffield features strongly in this issue. We have focused on it because of the forthcoming LI conference which will look at the interfaces between education, research and practice. We examine an exercise that students undertook recently, guided by a local practice which, while keen to ‘give back’, will also benefit by positioning itself to attract the best graduates. James Hitchmough, the head of department, talks about the ways that research can be disseminated to practices, also saying that he would like more practices to sponsor research. There are of course practices that engage considerably in research – Arup and LDA Design spring to mind. Keith French, whose practice Grant Associates is masterplanning the revitalisation of the main campus at Sheffield University, explained that his practice is compiling a list of trees and shrubs that can resist climate change and disease. These exchanges don’t just need to be between traditional disciplines. The publication of journalist George Monbiot’s book Feral has had an enormous influence, not least on LI president Noel Farrer who is now looking at his beloved Lake District with new eyes. He told me, after his daughter was cut off in Kendal for three days by flooding, ‘It is strange how you can all of a sudden, after a lifetime of rose-tinted conservation based romanticism, see the bare hills for what they are. Wounded, shaved and vulnerable landscapes where the stress of grazing has reduced them to poor unsophisticated places. ‘The protection of “rare” species under the name of conservation of the rural economy, derived from this stress is nonsense. I now cannot look at where I live in the same way. I now see in my mind’s eye the true natural context, the hills with rich verdant sides and tops. The advantages are enormous, but in the longer term it means the residents of Kendal will have 67 times less chance of flooding than now as the soil under trees holds 67 times more water!’ Landscape is so rich as a discipline, because it learns from everywhere, including personal experience.

Landscape Spring 2016

Landscape The Journal of the Landscape Institute

Editor Ruth Slavid landscape@darkhorsedesign.co.uk T 020 8265 3319 Editorial advisory panel Tim Waterman, honorary editor David Buck Joe Clancy Edwin Knighton CMLI Amanda McDermott CMLI Peter Sheard CMLI John Stuart Murray FLI Eleanor Trenfield CMLI Jo Watkins PPLI Jenifer White CMLI Jill White CMLI Landscape Institute president Noel Farrer PLI Landscape Institute CEO Phil Mulligan To comment on any aspect of Landscape Institute communications please contact: Paul Lincoln, deputy CEO paull@landscapeinstitute.org ––– Follow the Landscape Institute on twitter: @talklandscape Advertising, subscription and membership enquiries: www.landscapeinstitute.org/contact ––– 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 Spring 2016

Regulars 3

Features

Editorial

A lot to learn

Bigger picture

6 Beneath our feet Becky Brewis

Update

Wild times

Ian Houlston and Peter Shepherd

Update

21st century Capability Ruth Slavid

Update

GI and resilience Ruth Slavid

Practice

Rural manifesto Simon Brown

Culture

We must cultivate our garden Alastair McCapra

A word

‘Profession’

Tim Waterman

Learning in Sheffield In the run up to the LI conference, to be held in association with the University of Sheffield, we look at the university and at the work of the landscape department. Ruth Slavid

Photo ©: 1 – University of Sheffield

Publisher Darkhorse Design Ltd 42 Hamilton Square, Birkenhead Wirral, Merseyside. CH41 5BP T 0151 649 9669 darkhorsedesign.co.uk

University challenge

Photo ©: 2 – Grant Associates 3 – University of Sheffield 4 – James Hitchmough 5– Nigel Dunnett 6 – Nicola Dempsey

Grant Associates is now delivering Stage 1 of the masterplan that will pull Sheffield’s main university campus into a coherent and greener whole.

The research that gave us the Olympic meadows is now spreading across the globe.

Nicola Dempsey’s work on place keeping addresses one of the most important issues for the profession.

Seeds of change

Education for all With an unusually close relationship between teaching, research and practice, Sheffield is an ideal place to consider how these elements can work together for mutual benefit.

In keeping

52 5

Greening the city centre Nigel Dunnett’s work at the Barbican in central London is a culmination of his interest in green roofs and sustainable planting.

Benchmark for inclusion An appealing film and a hard-hitting manifesto highlight the importance of benches for the wellbeing of all members of society.

Landscape The Journal of the Landscape Institute

Spotlight on Sheffield / 27 Rewilding / 9 A rural manifesto / 56

Spring 2016

landscapeinstitute.org

Cover image Sheffield University masterplan. Credit: Grant Associates

Landscape Spring 2016

Bigger Picture By Ruth Slavid

Beneath our feet

Landscape Spring 2016

Image ©: – Becky Brewis

rixton Hill is a fairly nondescript street in south London, forming part of the London to Brighton road. It actually has a considerable history as it follows the line of a Roman road. And of course, like every major road, it has been dug up numerous times and has all sorts of things going on beneath the surface. Most of us just don’t think about these things as we walk or drive or cycle to a destination, but one person who has considered it is Becky Brewis. Becky’s name may be familiar to readers, since she worked for the Landscape Institute until the end of last summer, when she left to pursue her studies in drawing. You can find more of her work on her website, www.shipsbiscuit.wordpress.com (a brewis is apparently a kind of ship’s biscuit). This drawing is not like any that a landscape architect would produce in the course of a job, but its combination of archaeological enquiry and carefully judged whimsy shows how interesting it can be to think about landscape vertically rather than horizontally, and to think of the people who used it as well as the geology, both natural and manmade. This is both a cross-section and cross-disciplinary – an intriguing delight.

Landscape Spring 2016

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Update By Ian Houlston and Peter Shepherd

Wild times Rewilding has become a buzzword since the very successful publication of George Monbiot’s book Feral. But what effect will it have in practice, and what role will landscape professionals play?

o vernments from across the globe are in a celebratory mood as they leave the Paris Climate Talks, bringing 20 years of rollercoaster diplomacy to a close by securing an agreement that will keep temperature rises in check and avoid dangerous warming of the planet. At the same time I see pictures of the clean-up operations following the recent unprecedented storms that have caused havoc and distress across the north and Scotland, and which highlight our vulnerability to a changing climate. I very much doubt news from Paris will be of any comfort to those affected by the floods or who are at risk of further

flooding over the winter months. I doubt also that government announcements on the billions of pounds allocated to flood management and defences over the course of this parliament will come as any reassurance to the communities that are endeavouring to rebuild their lives. Undoubtedly flood defences need to continue to be constructed and maintained in the areas that are vulnerable. However, there are increasing calls for investment in the planting of trees and changing land management practices to encourage the restoration of natural climax vegetation communities in areas upstream of our towns and cities.

Such interventions, it is argued, would dramatically increase the infiltration rate of water, meaning that rain that percolates into the ground is released more slowly than rain that runs off the surface of closely grazed hillsides. Maximising the contribution that rural areas can provide to society to mitigate the effects of climate change is one benefit of taking a fresh look at how we manage our landscape. However, it is not the only reason why an increasing number of people are thinking differently about the way we plan and use our rural areas. The Lawton Review, published in 2010, reported compelling evidence that England’s wildlife sites are

Image ©: 1 – Peter Cairns / wildmedia.org

1 – A major rewilding initiative by a private landowner at Glenfeshie in the Cairngorms.

Landscape Spring 2016

Update

2 – More than 200 square miles of Caledonian pine forest has been rewilded at Abernethy Forest, which is owned by the RSPB.

generally too small and too isolated, leading to declines in many species. A recently published report in the journal Nature Communications on the fragility of the UK’s wildlife adds further weight to the concerns that informed the Lawton Review. This is clearly a vital issue, not just for wildlife, but also for humans. Further damage to natural systems means our environment will be less able to provide the goods and services (not just flood mitigation) upon which we depend. Lawton sets out a clear vision for the future in which whole landscapes are vibrant, wildlife-rich and ecologically functional. It is a vision shared by landscape professionals, planners and ecologists – professions that have been at the forefront of designing and delivering multi-functional landscape for decades. However, it is clear from Lawton that the scale at which we plan needs to be greatly increased. Lastly, but no less important, is the debate around the increasing urbanisation of the UK population and the profound effects of decoupling people from contact with nature and 10 Landscape Spring 2016

the natural world. Whilst in the UK we understand the importance of nature and landscape to our quality of life, our experience and knowledge of what most people consider to be the natural world is based on our highly managed countryside or urban green spaces and nature reserves. Our landscape has been changed and managed over thousands of years, meaning that there are very few, if any, places where people can experience truly balanced functioning natural habitats and the sense of wildness that these places generate. Whilst the historical interrelationships and landscapes that have been created by our management have an inherent value in themselves, we have all but lost the experience of wildness; of being just one part of the environment rather than the one that controls it. It was providing access to wild lands that inspired John Muir and colleagues in the Sierra Club to argue for the first National Park at Yellowstone in America in 1872, and remains a foundation of most national parks around the world. We cannot continue to rely on tried

and tested approaches to landscapescale planning if we are to address some of the practical, landscape, ecological and emotional challenges of a changing climate and increasing pressure on our use of land, and what we need from it. It is vital that we continue to challenge ourselves and explore new ways of thinking, and perhaps also re-visit the pioneering thinking of John Muir and his contemporaries. Ecologist Dr Peter Shepherd and I have been discussing ‘rewilding’, a process of allowing natural processes to reassert themselves, for some time and strongly believe that this has great potential to form part of the future approach to tackling many of the issues that we currently face. We want to revisit the way that we manage the land and create resilient and inspiring landscapes that will deliver maximum benefit to society and to nature. In this article we talk to Helen Meech, director of Rewilding Britain about the concept of rewilding, its role in strategic environmental planning and the delivery of multi-functional landscapes. We also explore how

Image ©: 2 – Mark Hamblin / scotlandbigpicture.com

3 – Essex Wildlife Trust has restored the saltmarsh at Abotts Hall Farm, Essex.

landscape professionals, ecologists and planners will be essential to the fostering of wild places.

Image ©: 3 – Terry Whittaker / wildmedia.org

How would you define rewilding, and why is it different from other forms of conservation? Rewilding is the large-scale restoration of ecosystems. Unlike some other forms of conservation, rewilding does not attempt to produce fixed outcomes. It sees dynamic ecological processes as an essential, intrinsic aspect of healthy living systems. At Rewilding Britain, we hope to restore the ecological dynamics that allow successional processes to take place and living systems to keep changing. You have recently joined Rewilding Britain. What is it and what are its objectives? Rewilding Britain is a charity set up with the objective of restoring ecosystems in Britain, on land and at sea. We believe it is not enough merely to try to preserve the tiny fragments of our wildlife. Meaningful conservation must involve restoring

broken ecosystems and re-establishing missing species. The animals we lack, such as beavers, boar, lynx, wolves, large tuna, pelicans, cranes and storks, are not just ornaments of the ecosystem – in many cases they have a role as ecosystem engineers and are essential to a proper functioning environment. We now know that highly simplified ecosystems of the kind that prevail across Britain are much less resilient to environmental change, such as climate change and invasive species. By 2030 we would like to see 300,000 hectares of core land areas and three marine areas established where nature is starting to take care of itself and key species are starting to become re-established. These areas will be ecologically connected, supported by an engaged and enthusiastic public, and delivering a range of benefits for local communities and landowners. Within 100 years we would like to see at least one million hectares (4.5%) of Britain’s land and 30% of our territorial waters rewilded. To put this in perspective, in England alone

there are 380,000 hectares managed as golf courses. (www.bbc.co.uk/news/ magazine-24378868) One of our challenges is to change public perceptions of what a healthy, attractive landscape looks like. We would like people to embrace and delight in the opportunity to experience nature finding its own balance and for landowners to see the benefits of new ways of managing landscape. What would successful rewilding look like, say in 100 years? Imagine wild rivers and regenerating forests creating complex, unpredictable landscapes inhabited by keystone species. Then imagine continuous wildlife corridors through productive farmland lining these places into the heart of our cities and towns. That is our vision. Imagine the delight of seeing cranes feeding on the mudflats of a great estuary and pelicans flying out to their fishing grounds. Vast shoals of salmon and sea trout pushing their way up the river and otters, boar and (in remoter areas) lynx flourishing and playing Landscape Spring 2016 11

Update

With so much pressure on the land for development and to deliver food and fuel, why should we rewild? Rewilding offers the possibility to work

12 Landscape Spring 2016

with landowners and communities in areas where other forms of land use are perhaps increasingly marginal or uneconomic, to restore the wonder and enchantment of wild nature; to allow magnificent lost creatures to live here once more; and to provide people with some of the rich and raw experiences of which we have been deprived. Landscape professionals and ecologists are well aware of the value that green infrastructure can bring in social, environmental and economic terms. Rewilding is a way of going beyond this to re-establish functional ecological systems that are going to work for people, provide for nature, and provide essential ecosystem services. Progressive business leaders are increasingly seeing the potential benefits. Water companies are interested in buying up land to protect water tables and insurance firms to address flood risk. In Scotland alone more than a million trips are made annually for the primary purpose of viewing wildlife, and nature-based tourism is

estimated to be worth £1.4 billion, with 39,000 associated jobs (Deinet et. al. 2013) A growing number of studies show that reconnecting people with wild nature leads to better health and generally higher levels of well-being, and it can help tackle social issues such as youth offending.

4 – Alladale Wilderness Reserve in the Caledonian Forest is currently the UK’s largest wilderness reengineering and rewilding project.

Rewilding has the potential to change the character of cherished and historic landscapes and challenge perceptions of what is beautiful. Is this an issue of concern? Landscape evolves in response to a range of cultural, social and economic drivers. In the past 100 years the rural landscape has changed significantly and it can be anticipated that it will continue to change. Rewilding is just one of these potential changes. I am excited about the potential for these landscapes to not just be a recreation of the past – they will come to symbolise a new relationship with the land and one of the mechanisms that this and future generations adopt to address climate change and other

Image ©: 4 – Peter Cairns / scotlandbigpicture.com

their role as ecosystem engineers. Beavers are building dams in the tributaries which slow down the river flow, reducing flooding and creating rich habitats for other species. On the uplands there is a rich mosaic of forest, glade and wild pasture that is allowed to shift and change. Nature-based tourism is flourishing and bringing income and opportunities that help young people stay in their communities. Upland farmers with diversified income through tourism and rural enterprises are being paid to be stewards of a diverse landscape that produces a range of environmental benefits for towns and cities many miles away. Within the century we want to see everyone living within 20 miles of an abundant, thriving living system and school children spending at least one day a month in one of these wild places.

Image ©: 5 – Mark Hamblin / scotlandbigpicture.com

5 – Sgurr Dubh, Liathach and Beinn Eighe from above Loch Clair, Torridon, Scotland. Beinn Eighe is Scotland’s first National Nature Reserve, now being rewilded by Scottish National Heritage.

challenges. In essence rewilded landscapes will be part of a continuum of the evolving relationship we have with the land. How can a landscape be encouraged to revert to a wild state, and what role will landscape professionals, planners and ecologists have? The process of rewilding seeks to frontload ecological interventions to bring back missing elements that can kick-start dynamic, successional processes, then to stand back and intervene as little as possible. The principle applies as much to vast upland landscapes as it does to lowland wetlands. It can also apply to smallerscale areas, say in cities and towns. A range of professions will be needed to plan, design and create these wild places. While rewilding will involve some management interventions, the role of land managers will change. Rather than preserving landscape features (sites, habitats, species) their role will be to restore ecological functions. Among the missing elements that

could be introduced are islands of trees in places too far from the nearest seed sources for natural regeneration to occur and free-flowing rivers in which canalisation, weiring, dredging etc. can be reversed. Rewilding may involve removing drainage and fences, reducing stocking densities, managing the return of once native species or fulfilling the role of keystone species where these haven’t yet returned. There will also be roles in monitoring and researching the dynamic living systems as they emerge. We believe that landscape professionals should play a critical role in re-imagining and restoring land, in both urban and rural areas. In fact, without the involvement of landscape professionals, it is hard to see how the vision for rewilded places can be realised. Are there any examples of rewilding projects in the UK? There are several inspiring projects that have been initiated by very different groups of people. For example, Trees

for Life, a grassroots organisation, has, through public subscription, bought a 10,000 acre estate in Scotland and its volunteers have now planted more than a million trees. It has also persuaded some of the neighbouring estates to participate in its rewilding schemes. At the Knepp Castle estate in Sussex, Sir Charlie Burrell has transformed what were once intensively farmed arable fields into an evolving landscape of scrub and trees and rough pasture that now supports some of the UK’s largest populations of turtle doves, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies. The Wandle Trust has transformed the River Wandle from Croydon until it meets the Thames at Wandsworth from a stinking canalised ditch into a thriving chalk stream, supporting wild brown trout. Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST) shows how communities can lead the protection of local habitats for the benefit of everyone, being responsible for the establishment of Scotland’s first No Take Zone in Lamlash Bay.

Landscape Spring 2016 13

Update

Further afield, much larger schemes have been developed. For example, Conservacion Patagonica provides an inspiring example of working with local communities to restore 80,000 hectares of degraded land in Southern Chile. What is next for Rewilding Britain? Like all significant landscape change, rewilding should take place only with the active consent and enthusiastic engagement of local people, and should be debated and broadly accepted at both the national and local level. We want to start the conversation and build understanding and support for rewilding across Britain.

We recognise that the changes we would like to see will be strongly influenced by other policies. First among these are farm subsidies, which currently act as powerful driver of wildlife loss. If farm payments are to continue, which might be an unlikely proposition in this age of austerity, they should surely deliver ecological and social benefits, rather than harm, and they should be restructured to this end. We feel there might be great potential for connecting rewilding approaches with other policies. Sustainable drainage schemes are an obvious example. We would like to see them extended to the upper reaches of

river catchments. One of the weaknesses of flood prevention is that it tends to be concentrated in the floodplains ignoring the rest of the water catchment. A catchment-based approach to flood management would seek the recovery of deep vegetation and soils in the hills where most of our rain falls. We also believe there might also be scope for rewilding in the design of housing estates and large commercial and public developments. We need to think less about putting nature into cities and instead should recognise that cities exist in nature. We want to see real urban jungles.

6 – Helen Meech, director of Rewilding Britain. 7 – The Wandle Trust has restored the River Wandle in south London from a stinking canalised ditch to a thriving chalk stream, supporting brown trout.

Helen Meech joined Rewilding Britain as director in September 2015. Helen has worked in the natural environment policy and campaigns sector for the last 10 years, most recently leading the National Trust’s public engagement on nature, including the award-winning ‘50 things to do before you’re 11 ¾’ campaign. Ian Houlston is a landscape architect and archaeologist at LDA Design where he is responsible for leading strategic environmental planning projects and green infrastructure strategies.

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Image ©: 7 – Ruth Slavid

Peter Shepherd is a partner at BSG Ecology with expertise in landscape-scale habitat planning and creation, and was the principal ecologist working with LDA Design on the creation of the London 2012 Olympic Park. Ian and Peter are exploring the application of rewilding to all scales of project and its role in addressing the key drivers of change through creative landscape planning, design and management.

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Update By Ruth Slavid

21st century Capability This year’s Capability Brown Festival is looking forward as well as back, as the winning entries to a competition demonstrate.

16 Landscape Spring 2016

Brown landscape but to produce a contemporary, multi-functional landscape, inspired by Brown and in harmony with the rich natural and cultural heritage of the site and the surrounding landscape. There were two categories, one for students and one for professionals, and there were two winners in each category.

PROFESSIONAL Matthew Wigan Associates The concept for the design is to provide a framework in which the influences of Capability Brown, of the Picturesque Movement, of the requirements and personal involvement of the Cornewall

family and the historical context of the period can be understood, while creating an attractive landscape for visitors to enjoy, and a woodland pasture habitat which complements and extends the habitat of the adjacent Moccas Park National Nature Reserve. Historic routes and viewpoints are to be recreated, illustrating the routes which were implemented during Brown’s influence on the estate, and the viewpoints which were created overlooking Moccas Court from the brow of Woodbury Hill. New extensions to these routes aim to provide a satisfying and varied landscape experience for visitors, providing a circular walk with extensive views over the Moccas Court

1 – Landscape masterplan by Matthew Wigan Associates

Image ©: 1 – Matthew Wigan Associates

our winners have been announced in the Capability Brown Design Ideas Competition. The competition, hosted by Natural England and run by the Landscape Institute, was organised as part of the run up to this year’s Capability Brown Festival. Entrants were asked to develop contemporary design ideas inspired by Capability Brown’s work and practice, together with thought-provoking ways to engage people with Brown and his landscapes and how and why they were created. The winning designs will be used to inform what is implemented on the ground at a real site – Moccas Registered Park and Garden, with lessons to pass on to other sites. Entrants were encouraged to ‘let their imagination and creativity soar. What kind of landscape would Brown have designed if he were living today? How would you create a contemporary landscape following his design principles and building on what he designed? How can you make Brown and his landscapes meaningful to audiences today?’ They were asked to develop creative ideas for the design and layout of part of Moccas Grade II* Registered Park and Garden near Hereford, a Browninfluenced historic designed landscape, that also incorporates Moccas National Nature Reserve (NNR) and Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The aim was not to create a pastiche

2 – View to the hay bluff by Jen Neal of Colvin and Moggridge

Image ©: 2 – Jen Neal

Estate, and to the surrounding hills – in particular, the Black Mountains to the west of the site. The route would incorporate features of historical interest such as the earthwork stock enclosure, remnant hazel coppice to the south-east of the site, and the Bronze Age barrow. Interpretation boards would be provided to explain key viewpoints, and the site’s ecological, cultural and historical influences. The approach to the planting and conservation management of the site will help contrast the qualities of ‘picturesque’ landscape with ‘the beautiful’ (such as a typical Brownian landscape with smooth grassland and artfully placed trees), and ‘the sublime’ (the ‘savage’ and dramatic Black Mountains viewed to the south-west of the site). In the ‘picturesque’ areas of the site, decaying trees, rougher grassland, and the encouragement of scrub layer developing beneath the trees contrast with an idealised Capability Brown landscape. In terms of enhancing the site’s ecological value as an extension of the Moccas Park National Nature Reserve, a ‘picturesque’ management treatment that allows the development of scrub (particularly with nectar producing species), the retention of deadwood in damaged or dead trees, and variety in the length and degrees of roughness of the grassland, would complement efforts to promote biodiversity.

Deadwood would provide habitat for saproxylic species, and potentially bat roosts. Scrub with flowering native shrubs, and longer grassland with wildlfowers would provide nectar for insects. The judges describe this as ‘a very detailed analysis of the historic influences connecting with the concepts of the Beautiful and Picturesque, with practical scope for sensitive wood pasture and habitat creation.’ Colvin and Moggridge This entry sought to link Capability Brown’s naturalistic style with modern ideas of nature conservation. It does this by extending the deer park onto the ridge and encouraging NNR and SSSI habitats to extend, but also including an area for public access for education and enjoyment. In this way, a productive and ecologically rich landscape would be developed that could be managed easily. A route would be developed with nine points of interest on the way that could be explained via an app on mobile phones. These points of interest would be: 1. Veteran treetop walk – at first this would lead visitors through the five veteran coppiced beech and oak trees. Over time, the magnificent habitats that these offer would be extended.

2. A climactic view – this is the view that Capability Brown opened up to Cross End Farm. 3. E xactness of composition – an explanation of just how carefully Capability Brown placed his trees ‘artlessly’ to achieve the ends he wanted. 4. V ariety of experiences – The route passes by a medieval earthenwork stock enclosure close to a natural spring, once used for hefting, and then passes through a section of coppiced hazel with standards. 5. E merge to fantastic views to north and south – simple stone-backed seats provide shelter from the wind. 6. Specific views – A densely planted mostly evergreen walk of yew, holly, beech, pine and larch leads to a view of Moccas Court attributed to Humphry Repton. 7. F olly – there would be a brief for a competition to be run by the RIBA. A new footpath would pass through the ground floor. 8. A sunny food bank and habitat bank designed for people and wildlife – this would be a productive landscape that was resilient to change. 9. Burial mound clearing – a simple stone circle would mark the mounds, with the hilltop managed as an open glade with hawthorn, a connection to Bronze age landscape. The judges described this entry as ‘packed with detailed analysis, backed Landscape Spring 2016 17

Update

STUDENT Jo Phillips and Owen Byrom, MMU Called ‘Moccas Skyscape’, this project uses Brown’s method of drawing the human eye through the landscape by manipulating the scene. Brown punctuated vistas with trees and built elements to create a relationship between the viewer and nature; a visitor to his landscapes was skilfully located in an apparently natural world which was entirely pleasing to the viewer. Specimen trees were allowed to develop their full character whilst smoothed contours and reflective pools permitted a feeling of stillness, ease and control over the landscape. The new design enables visitors to achieve states of reverie by locating them within the wide skies of Woodbury Hill. It offers opportunities simply to

18 Landscape Spring 2016

view, gaze and reflect, day and night. It does not feed information to the visitor, but rather uses Brown’s ways of seeing to draw them in, to play with experience and perceptions of wild and tame nature. It celebrates the ever-changing skies by simply allowing time and space for viewing. Habitat creation through renewed wood pasture is at the heart of this proposal, which seeks to tread lightly on the land and allow layers of past and present use to co-exist. Extensive tree planting will reduce run-off and soil erosion, sequester carbon and provide dead-wood habitat in the long term. Use of tree seed and root suckers from Moccas Park should maximise tree survival. Wood and stone for the build and maintenance of the design could be sourced from the site itself, as modes of production are resurrected, connecting the place with its past. The judges described this as ‘a striking concept that connects people

with trees and the sky. A design with a strong spatial structure which optimises the emotional effect of openness and enclosure and takes advantage of the available views.’

3 – The ‘Moccas Skyscape’ submission by Jo Phillips

Leopold Taylor and Naomi Rubbra, ECA This proposal seeks to integrate Capability Brown’s revolutionary idea of ‘a journey through landscape’ with the contemporary needs of society, the local community and habitat restoration. The pair have reinterpreted many aspects of Brown’s landscape, looking closely at the successes and failures. They then adopted and interpreted some of the characteristics of his work, such as the idea of the ‘framed view’ and of having a number of different paths to reach the same destination. Their proposals included meandering timber walkways, subtle meadow trails and designed vistas. The site would participate fully in the Capability Brown

Image ©: 3 – Jo Phillips

up by an array of design ideas to complement this site and inspire others’.

4, 5 – The judges were particularly impressed by the presentation methods that Leopold Taylor and Naomi Rubbra used.

Image ©: 4, 5 – Leopold Taylor and Naomi Rubbra

Festival. After the festival, there would be a variety of activities, many of them ecologically focused. The aim is to make a stimulating, educationally and ecologically vibrant park that would cater for all visitors from holidaymakers to the local community. The judges described this scheme as ‘work of a very high quality, full of interest and invention and beautifully presented in a style redolent of the 18th century... an enchanting masterplan which reflects the hand of the contemporary Brown’. Honourable Mentions In addition to the winners, there were three honourable mentions. ACL Paysages, Matt Machouki and a team comprising Harrie Carr, Emma Henderson, Emma Thompson and Kit Bowen.

Landscape Spring 2016 19

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Update By Ruth Slavid

GI and resilience Imaginative entries to the Design for Life competition demonstrate how we can make the areas we live in both more enjoyable and more resilient to climate change. 1 – Dora Papp’s winning design replaces sterile areas of grass with a multi-functional landscape, as well as greening the buildings.

Image ©: 1 – Dora Papp

u ngarian landscape architect Dora Papp has won the Design for Life competition with her entry ‘A good base for a smart city’, designed for the neighbourhood of Jósaváros in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. The competition, organised by Groundwork London and Hammersmith & Fulham Council, in association with the National Housing Federation and the Landscape Institute, invited ideas about how green infrastructure (GI) could be retrofitted in a neighbourhood to make it more resilient to climate change. Dora Papp’s innovative design is an exciting plan to regroup existing green spaces into new green chains that would run along the inside of the estate.

The flat roofs of apartment blocks, shops, garages and community centre will be opened up and converted into green roofs growing food and for recreational use. The green roofs would provide social, economic and environmental benefits with residents only having to step out their door to begin gardening and to connect with nature. Along with green roofs, beehives will be installed with bug hotels, ensuring biodiversity. Natural green walls would be established on walls without windows. This is particularly important, Dora explained, because the estate, built in the 1970s, becomes intolerably hot in the summer temperatures of Hungary’s continental climate. Although in theory there are plenty

of green spaces, they tend to be of neglected grass with compacted soil beneath paths and cycle routes. Dora’s proposal would improve the environment and the temperatures, as well as increasing the ability to store storm water. LI President Noel Farrer, who was one of the judges, said, ‘The winner’s design solves the ubiquitous challenge around the world of blocks in medium to high density layouts where people’s relationship to the ground has been lost. It reconnects them through the re-imagining of land and water and is a fresh, bold and all encompassing project that tackles the challenges of climate change and biodiversity head on. This is a project that will invite Landscape Spring 2016 21

Update

2 – Dora Papp’s design replaces bare ground with swales that collect rainwater from the surrounding buildings. 3, 4 – Iain Glover of Plan Projects and Luke Greysmith Associates submitted a proposal that integrated SuDS into play areas.

22 Landscape Spring 2016

Image ©: 2 – Dora Papp 3, 4 – Iain Glover

people to enjoy the landscape and strengthen community involvement.’ There were also two runners-up in the competition. ‘SuDS for play areas’, by Iain Glover of Plan Projects and Luke Greysmith Associates, looks in particular at Tylney House in Whitechapel, east London. It focuses on introducing SuDS systems to the residential housing estates of London which often have high potential in terms of useable space but are lacking in the correct infrastructure to adapt to more sustainable systems. Adapting these spaces with sustainable drainage systems would introduce multifunctional uses and purposes to the spaces. Accommodating play within the sustainable drainage system would create a visual and interactive story about the journey of water. It would also be a cost-effective way to retrofit play areas across the city, introducing wildlife and biodiversity to spaces which are all too often sterile, uninspiring hard-surfaced areas. Matt Parsonage, also a Design for Life judge and head of neighbourhood investment at Affinity Sutton, called

5 – Bio-retention gardens at the Height Weavers community green space. 6 – Regenerated woodland. 7 – Community garden at Height Weavers, a proposal by Liz Ackerley.

the proposal, ‘an innovative playful scheme, integrating water into a play site with audacity. Children will get enormous enjoyment and education about water and the scheme will bring people together as a force for good.’ ‘The Height Weavers community green space’ by Liz Ackerley of Poppyhead Consultancy tackles a series of disconnected spaces, bordering residential properties. The plan is for green spaces to be linked together to form multifunctional green infrastructure for use across the area. The community will help in the design of green walls; rain gardens and green roofs, all of which will incorporate recycled materials such as scaffolding

Image ©: 5, 6, 7 – Liz Ackerley

Landscape Spring 2016 23

Update

poles, reclaimed wood and materials derived from the existing space. Steve Cole, a Design for Life judge and policy leader at the National Housing Federation, said, ‘This project takes a thorough, place-specific big picture approach, which renders complex issues

presented by the housing estates in a simple and effective manner. We have no doubt it would become a place that would be well loved. It is all about making spaces through sensitive and considerate integration, balancing place making and environmental

sensitivity; it puts people at the heart of the vision.’ Two entries were commended: ‘Off G.R.I.D.’ by Laura Barrett and Nicole Rebeck, and ‘Enlightening the splash’ by Kamila Lejman, Veronika Kunclova and Katarzyna Starzycka.

8 – Enlightening the splash. 9 – Off G.R.I.D

Design for Life judges Christine Walker – environmental services manager, Halton Housing Trust Mathew Frith – director of conservation, London Wildlife Trust Matthew Parsonage – head of neighbourhood investment, Affinity Sutton Noel Farrer – President, Landscape Institute Sarah Reece-Mills – head of partnerships and programmes, Groundwork UK Steve Cole – policy leader, National Housing Federation Sue Forsyth – IMPROVE project manager, Peabody

24 Landscape Spring 2016

Image ©: 8 – Kamila Lejman 9 – Laura Barrett and Nicole Rebeck

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Feature

Learning in 1

26 Landscape Spring 2016

1 – Masterplan for Sheffield University 2 – Inhabiting a bench 3 – A student project in collaboration with practice 4 – Podium gardening

Image ©: 1 – Grant Associates 2 – Nigel Dunnett 3 – Sheffield University 4 – Esther Johnson

On 3 and 4 March the Landscape Institute will hold a conference at the University of Sheffield, a reintroduction of its annual members’conference. The landscape department at Sheffield has a fantastic reputation and so it is appropriate that the conference will look at beauty, function and sustainability in the age of austerity. As part of this it will also examine the relationship between research and practice. To celebrate this, this issue of Landscape has a special focus on the department and its research. We start by looking at the public realm masterplan for the university campus and then focus on the teaching and some specific research projects.

Sheffield BY RUTH SLAVID

Landscape Spring 2016 27

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University challenge Grant Associates is now delivering Stage 1 of the masterplan that will pull Sheffield’s main university campus into a coherent and greener whole. 1 – The approach to the arts tower will be transformed – once the car parking has been removed!

HOW

o you make a university into a d better piece of city? This was one of the challenges facing the University of Sheffield when it commissioned a masterplan to turn its 19th and 20th century assembly of buildings into a university fit for the 21st century.

‘The client group was composed mostly of representatives from the university but also from the city council,’ explained Keith French, director of Grant Associates. ‘This was unique and quite enlightened. The university recognised that it was an important part of the city.’

It did this through collaboration, not only by having the design team working closely with the client, but with near seamless collaboration within the design team and also on the client side, where the university and the city have worked closely together.

On its part, Grant Associates worked seamlessly with architect Feilden Clegg Bradley, a practice with which it has co-operated frequently before. ‘We went in on a total 50-50 relationship,’ Keith said. ‘We were jointly commissioned. This was not

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Image ©: 2 – Grant Associates

university had excelled, becoming the Times Higher Education university of the year in 2011/12, commended particularly for its research and for the way that it is focused on the local community. In 2014 it was voted number one in the THE Student Experience Survey, taking top places for its facilities, accommodation and students’ union. Nevertheless, the university was aware that it could do better. The lack of connectivity and of green space became of increasing importance as the rise in interdisciplinary working meant that students needed to move across the campus frequently and effectively. Students paying high fees have high expectations, and more informal and mobile ways of working mean that outdoor space can play an increasingly important role.

2 – Approach to the new University Square 3 – Map of the city, showing how the university (in turquoise) straddles the ring road. 4 – Masterplan concept showing the new connections.

just about buildings or landscape but about the integrated improvement of the public realm.’ This approach was vital because of the unusual setting of the main campus of the university. It has a long thin footprint and, vitally, straddles the main ring road around the city, which effectively cuts it in half. The result was that communication within the campus was far from ideal and also, although there were some fine buildings, there was no coherent sense of place.

Image ©: 3, 4 – Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios / Google Maps

This was not the first investment that the university had made. Previous masterplans had focused on the built environment, with some well-regarded buildings resulting, but relatively little attention to the public realm. In terms of education, the

Sheffield is one of the greenest cities in the UK, with more than 150 woodlands and 50 parks within its boundaries. (On another criterion, local paper the Star reported in March 2014 that Sheffield had been recognised as the greenest city in the world because it sent the lowest proportion of waste to landfill). So it was ironic that the university’s main campus should be so resolutely non green.

With all this in mind, the university set out four objectives for its masterplan. These were: • to manage growth within the university; • t o radically improve the public realm and the civic spaces within the built environment; • t o develop an integrative transport strategy which improves safety and enjoyment of our campus, whether walking, cycling or using public transport; • a nd, to make a positive contribution to the challenge of building, working and living in an environment which is more sustainable and has the least possible impact on the world’s finite resources. 4 Landscape Spring 2016 29

Because so much of the scheme involved dealing with traffic, the team also worked with the traffic division of AECOM on the masterplan. The practice provided and analysed data to show that although the changes would slow the traffic down, they would not cause major hold-ups.

30 Landscape Spring 2016

One of the main aims is to implement the travel plan that the university approved in 2013, to reduce its dependence on the car and to create a ‘modal shift’ towards other more sustainable means of transport. While this is exactly what one would have expected an intelligent masterplan to suggest, having the commitment already in place certainly smoothed the way.

5 – Design of LeavyGreave Road, which is currently very unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists.

Equally important is the creation of a new square that will be both a heart for the university and a new civic square for the city, largely surrounded by planned new university buildings. Other main thrusts of the masterplan included the planting of forest-scale trees and the introduction of a SuDS approach, including linear channels and some urban rain gardens. More ambitious elements, such as storage ponds, are not included as there was not the space within the university’s curtilage

Image ©: 5 – Grant Associates

The task was made more complex not only by the roads that were cutting through the campus, but also because much of the space between the buildings was occupied by car parking. The arts tower in particular, which had recently been refurbished and which houses both architecture and landscape architecture students, sat among a sea of cars. It would be necessary to build new car parks and this has had an effect on the phasing of the project.

6 – The planted tables that are being built as part of phase 1.

for them. The university is also, Keith explained, putting in place a process of reviewing its planting and including some food plants in the mix. There was already a target for green roofs, but the proportion of these will be increased on the new buildings. They will, of course, feed into the SuDS strategy. ‘At the heart of the masterplan,’ Keith French said, ‘is the commitment to improving and linking the public realm from east to west and creating improved streets and gardens, and helping to define the identity of the whole university quarter. At the moment you can be in the university quarter but you don’t really know it. The diversity of the buildings means that they don’t define the place, so you have to do it through the public realm.’

Image ©: 6 – Grant Associates

Grant Associates is now implementing the first phase of the masterplan, which is tackling the barrier of the ring road and introducing some shared space for cyclists and pedestrians. There will be three controlled crossings, all at grade, and the space for cars has been narrowed. There had to be some compromises. The mature street trees included in the centre of the road on the masterplan proved too difficult to introduce. This road also has a tram line running beneath it, and the services were just too complex to deal with.

This phase will also mark the beginning of the extension of Sheffield’s ‘gold route’ which connects key public spaces and squares within the city. It will now run through the campus and on to Weston Park, a large park and museum on the edge of the city. This part of the work deals with the route running towards the arts tower but does not quite reach it – the arts tower surroundings cannot be tackled until the new multi-storey car park has been built and the parking removed. There is a hierarchy of paving which runs throughout the project, which is largely stone, and Grant Associates has raised planting by designing long concrete planting tables, in association with local artist David Appleyard. Planting in this and further phases will benefit from the work that Grant Associates is doing, looking at the adaptability of plants in the face of climate change – at those that can cope with alterations not just in the range of temperatures but also in the pattern of rainfall. The practice is also selecting trees that are not subject to the panoply of diseases that are currently rife. When you look at the masterplan that Grant Associates, FCB and AECOM have produced for the university the first impression is that it is all rather ... sensible. Anybody with an iota of sense would have shared the ambitions that this enshrines – greater connectivity, more green space, less dependence on the car, SuDS. It couldn’t be further from the grandstanding of Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, for which the practice is still best known, or for the quieter but exquisitely considered landscapes of the Arcadia development in Cambridge.

6 Landscape Spring 2016 31

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The achievement at Sheffield is less obvious, but it certainly is an achievement. There is a world of difference between knowing in broad terms what needs to be done, and actually achieving it. And, despite the fact that the first phase of development is not yet complete, there is a timescale and a commitment to realising this. That in itself is admirable since too many masterplans prove to be paper projects, gathering dust on a shelf.

This quiet project will see a university that currently has a great reputation despite its public realm, transform into a greener more vibrant place that will both have its own strong identity and be an important and enjoyable part of the city. Lucky Sheffield.

Keith French said, ‘Some projects are about careful surgical interventions which are more understated but they just feel right. The real essence of this will come through in the detail, at the macro level. What is the form of the gulley? What is the stone? What are the seats made from?

Terry Croft, director of operations Andy Clayden, Department of Landscape Eckart Lange, Department of Landscape James Hitchmough, Department of Landscape Fionn Stevenson, School of Architecture Abdi Suleiman, former Students’ Union president Alasdair Buckle, former Students’ Union president Keith Lilley, director of estates and facilities management Andy Fallon, head of estates development Kay Green, space and strategy manager David Caulfield, director of regeneration and development services Sheffield City Council

32 Landscape Spring 2016

Members of the University Masterplan Working Group

Image ©: 7 – Grant Associates

‘We and FCB are very proud of the work. At a strategic level it works very well. We have for instance got the university and the city council to commit to quality standards. We enjoy working with FCB because they are very collaborative and have an empathy with the public realm.’

7 – View along Leavygreave Road, as it will be.

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Feature

Education for all With an unusually close relationship between teaching, research and practice, Sheffield is an ideal place to consider how these elements can work together for mutual benefit. could not be a more appropriate place than the University of Sheffield to discuss the relationship between academia and practice. Every practitioner must be aware of the university’s teaching – it was rated top in the National Student Survey of 2015, with 100% of students agreeing that ‘overall I am satisfied with the quality of the course’. It also came top in the government’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

THERE

James Hitchmough, the head of department, said that Sheffield is one of few (and perhaps the only) landscape departments in the world where every member of academic staff is required by contract to be a publishing, grant-writing researcher, as well as a teacher, and, in some cases, a practitioner. ‘This research focus ensures,’ he said, ‘that what we are teaching students is always fresh, and focused on improving and developing the discipline and practice.’

34 Landscape Spring 2016

More than 2000 students have graduated from the various courses since the department was set up in 1969. It has two high-profile visiting professors, Andrew Grant and Piet Oudolf as well as a number of academic visitors. It divides its research into four key areas (see box). And much of its work is outward facing, with the highest profile being the work done by James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett, professor of planting design and vegetation technology. They have applied their theoretical findings to live projects, most notably the planting at the Olympic Park for the 2012 Olympics, and through this and other work have had an impact on planting throughout the country. There is ideally a three-way relationship between research, teaching and practice. Students should benefit from being taught by both researchers and practitioners. Their education should fit them for their future working lives, whether in practice or research or ideally both. And there should be an enriching exchange between researchers and practitioners.

Images ©: – University of Sheffield

The photos on these pages all relate to the student exercise carried out over three days looking at possibilities for the town of Hathersage. See case study starting on page 36

Asked whether education should prepare students for practice, James Hitchmough answered, ‘I cannot imagine a landscape architecture department that does not try to do this. We do however need to recognise that some skills required in practice are difficult to replicate in university contexts, and that we also need to teach skills, and inculcate values that may not always be seen as central to practice at that moment in time.’ In terms of the tools that he believes universities should give their students, he said, ‘Clearly there are a whole range of understandings and technical skills such as how to use design software etc., that everyone teaches. In addition to these I think it’s really important to encourage students to challenge orthodoxy, be iconoclastic, and able to think outside the box rather than just be accepting of how landscape architecture is. We all know that the world places limitations on what is possible in practice but understanding of this needs to co-exist with high levels of ambition. Understanding the bigger picture, being able to interrogate and assess information and value positions, and then evaluate these understandings is key.’ He added, ‘Practitioners currently make a huge contribution to both staff and students on our

courses, through sharing their experiences of what they do and in particular providing insight into the practice zeitgeist. This happens on our courses through the large number of studio tutors, over and above our permanent team, that we employ from practice, our relationships with practices who run events with us, and also through our visiting professors from practice, for example Andrew Grant of Grant Associates. We also have a constant stream of practitioners giving lectures on issues of import from practice. An example of this is the Arup/HS2 team that will be visiting soon.’ Research, he says, ‘is important because it facilitates a deeper understanding of phenomena relevant to landscape architecture, be they social, ecological or cultural. This allows landscape architects to make better decisions by understanding more, or in many cases taking more risks with design because of greater clarity about what is most likely to happen. As an example, current environmental psychology research in the department of landscape by Dr Helen Hoyle

Landscape Spring 2016 35

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Working together A student collaboration with practice If you lived in the picturesque Yorkshire town of Hathersage you might have been surprised one autumn day last year to see a trainload of young people arrive, all go to the church hall and then spend time poking around some of the less prepossessing parts of the town, taking photos. On the other hand you may have become used to that sort of attention, so subtly different from the behaviour of tourists, because you would previously have had landscape architects in the town. Those original practitioners were from Ares Landscape Architects, a Sheffield practice that in 2011 produced A Heart for Hathersage, a strategy for the town’s public realm. Because they knew the place so well, it was an obvious choice when they decided to run a three-day exercise across the three undergraduate years and the first year of the masters course during the students’ study week. Although participation was voluntary, take-up was fantastic, with 120 out of a potential 200 taking part. Ares had around 10 people working on the exercise which sounds an incredible commitment for a practice of only 15 but Ricardo Ares, one half of the husband and wife team that set up the practice four years ago, said that in fact this is easier to schedule and manage than ad hoc lecturing which means that work has to be made up afterwards on pressurised schedules. ‘We find it very frustrating,’ he said, ‘as we would like to support the university more. But they typically need a long-term commitment. Then this opportunity came up.’ Hathersage was a good subject for study, Ricardo said, because although it attracts tourists it lacks a true centre. ‘You drive through it before you realise you are there,’ he said. Ares Landscape Architects’ work is addressing this problem, in particular creating a new town square, and the student exercise was to study the area of the masterplan and adjacent areas. The students were all given a briefing together, and then allocated to one of four projects. On each project they were divided into groups of

36 Landscape Spring 2016

five or six, coming from different years so that people who did not usually work together would cooperate. International students were also mixed up with students from the UK. They carried out investigations by walking around Hathersage, then went back to the university on the second day and worked together on a proposal. Ares carried out surgery sessions with the students on that day. On the third and final day, all the groups presented their ideas. The exercise was, said Andy Clayden, senior lecturer in the department, a huge success. ‘It was really positive for them to be mixed up with people from other years and to work in such a short time frame to produce a concept and a series of ideas. This showed just what the students can generate so quickly and communicate to people outside. And once the students know each other, they are more likely to support each other.’ As a reward, the best group on each project is going to be given some time (up to a day) at the Ares practice to become involved with some real work. This is a big commitment on the part of the practice but it is not entirely disinterested. ‘There is a clear commercial benefit here for us,’ Ricardo Ares said. ‘We are half a mile from the university and 90 per cent of our staff are graduates from there. Before the recession and again now practices have had a huge problem recruiting strong staff. This way we can look at the graduates who are coming out – many practices are competing to attract the best staff.’ This then is a virtuous circle – practice giving back to students and students learning about a practice where they may like to work in the future. If that sounds too pious, it is evident from the work that came out and the photos of the activity that everybody had tremendous fun.

The photos on these pages all relate to the student exercise carried out over three days looking at possibilities for the town of Hathersage. See case study opposite.

It is easier now than ever before for practitioners (in fact for anybody) to access the findings of research, because open access rules mean that published academic research can be downloaded for free, although evidently this does require a certain amount of application. But this is far better than the situation in the past, when academic publishing was scarcely accessible outside universities.

is advancing our understanding about how people respond to different plant communities in public landscapes and the different types of psychological benefit they provide. These detailed understandings are invaluable in public space design where it is largely impossible to know the values and meanings held by your clients.’

Of course the outside world has an important input into research. This is partly by necessity since research has to be funded, whether through research councils or other bodies. This makes academic life more difficult, not least in the number and complexity of grant applications, but it also has advantages, James believes. ‘Working with stakeholders and end users also ensures that research is fine tuned to address social, environmental and cultural issues,’ he said, ‘and enables co-production – the sharing of research tasks and understandings with them – to improve the research findings and outcomes.’

Images ©: – University of Sheffield

There are other more worldly advantages as well, in terms of the standing of the profession and of organisations within it. ‘There is no doubt,’ James said, ‘that having a research core gives credibility to a discipline, to clients, the political-policy world and other disciplines. Research can give you a critical competitive edge in some situations.’

Landscape Spring 2016 37

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Sometimes the university collaborates directly with commercial organisations but these are not, James said, landscape architecture practices, although he would like them to be. The door is open at Sheffield and is swinging in both directions, to allow the outside world in and to send its information and students out to them. Sheffield is one of the Victorian redbrick universities and although the landscape department is housed in a more recent tower, there is not a hint of ivory about it.

Main research areas in landscape at Sheffield

Planning and management of rural and peri-urban landscapes The use of advanced virtual landscape visualisations and modelling to explore human reaction to ways in which landscape and environmental planning can influence and direct anthropogenic landscape change; environmental impact assessments (landscape and visual impacts); participatory methods and planning and design communication; rural cultural landscapes and landscape regeneration; landscape character assessment; sustainable landscape planning and management; drivers of future landscape change; role of urban green infrastructure in urban regeneration. (Core group members: Eckart Lange, Paul Selman, Carys Swanwick)

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Human interaction with landscapes Landscape perspectives and experience in relation to cultural background and personal circumstance; holistic and environmentally friendly approaches to planning and designing urban space green structure; urban `wildscapes´ and their acceptability; landscape expectations and experiences of migrants in multicultural urban communities; designing urban landscapes to meet the needs of young people; social factors in strategic approaches to the design and management of open spaces. (Core group members: Anna Jorgensen, Clare Rishbeth, Helen Woolley)

The photos on these pages all relate to the student exercise carried out over three days looking at possibilities for the town of Hathersage. See case study starting on page 36.

Landscape architecture design theory Interface between fine art and visual practice; philosophy, culture and pedagogy of environmentally oriented landscape architecture; application of contemporary design theory to designed landscapes from the Medieval to the present; restoration of historic landscapes; experiential landscape analysis and design; philosophical and theoretical context of people-place-space relations. (Core group members: Catherine Dee, Kevin Thwaites, Jan Woudstra)

Images ©: – University of Sheffield

Urban ecological landscape design and management This group is concerned with the application of ecological theory to landscape practice to improve sustainability whilst meeting human aesthetic and functional needs. Aspects include: the role and nature of sustainable planting design in urban environments; green roof ecology and technology, especially the integration of aesthetic and cultural needs with the ecological function of green roofs at a variety of scales; landscapes of mortality, especially natural burial and grave re-use; the application of sustainability to urban design. (Core group members: Andy Clayden, Nigel Dunnett, James Hitchmough)

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Seeds of change The research that gave us the Olympic meadows is now spreading across the globe.

40 Landscape Spring 2016

However ‘naturalistic’ we think his style of planting may be, because it is urban and in relatively small areas we want it to do an awful lot. James says, ‘Much of my planting design research has addressed the conundrum of how it is possible to create contemporary urban planting that is taxonomically and spatially complex, highly attractive to the average Joe, yet manageable at low resource levels with limited maintenance skill levels. This complexity is useful as a means of firstly providing a long season of seasonal “events”, and secondly maximizing the capacity of that vegetation to support a diversity of animal life. Much of traditional mainstream landscape architectural planting design does not do this very well.’

1 – The department of landscape field station in Kaixian, Western China, road testing designed drainage swale and drier herbaceous vegetation.

Image ©: 1 – James Hitchmough

want to know anything about working with seeds, then James Hitchmough is your man. He explains on his university research page ‘Since returning to the UK in 1993 after ten years of working in Australia, I have focused my research on how to create and manage flower (and species) rich naturalistic herbaceous plant communities for use in urban greenspace.’ Now, in a delightful irony he is taking that research back to Australia again, working on the development of ‘woody meadows’ a type of planting particularly suited to the Australian climate.

IF YOU

2 – This vegetation gives a sense of how an Australian woody meadow might look.

His research has focused chiefly on using seed that is sown in situ to achieve these objectives but, he says, ‘whether employing seeding or planting the research questions are broadly the same; what are the consequences of placing many different species very close together in terms of long term persistence, and how can design and management be used to positively influence these ecological processes? Competition for light is the factor that ultimately determines the outcome of nearly all of these interactions.’ In the UK, he says, ‘my research has provided “good enough” answers to many of these questions, and there is now a canon of my vegetation in public landscapes in the UK, from the Olympic Park to the pocket park scale, for example, the Oxford Botanical Gardens.’ Now he is applying this approach in other countries. The ‘woody meadow’ in Melbourne, Australia is a research project co-ordinated by Dr Audrey Gerber of the University of Sheffield and supported financially by the city of Melbourne, with research collaboration with the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Botanic Garden. The aim is to design and road test long-flowering, multi-species shrubby vegetation for urban spaces, which should be sustainable virtually forever if the canopy is coppiced every three years. This requires the use of shrubs that are designed biologically to sprout again after the canopy has been removed, a category known as ‘post fire re-sprouters’.

This unusual trait has evolved in around 30% of native Australian shrub species in response to fire. The other 70% are killed by fire (or by coppicing at ground level) and are known as ‘post fire re-seeders’. ‘Most Australian landscape plantings,’ James said, ‘are dominated by post fire re-seeding species, and cannot be regenerated by severe pruning, leading to endless cycles of replacement, but most importantly also to ever more senescent, and unattractive looking urban vegetation. Fire ecosystem Mediterranean shrubs are most attractive generally in the first five years after a fire event, so the challenge is how to capture this appearance in designed plantings more or less in perpertuity.’ The team has now evaluated the thousands of species that make up the shrub flora of Southern Australia for these traits and has identified the post fire re-sprouting species with which it wishes to work. ‘We are,’ James said, ‘about to contract grow the thousands of plants that we need to set up three large landscape experiments in the public green space of Melbourne to explore how plant density and diversity determine both the visual and functional success of these designed communities.’ ‘The species are arranged in three layers (all on top of one another): a low, less than 300mm tall base layer (the most species diverse), a less than 1000mm emergent bump layer, at much, much lower density, and an occasional taller emergent layer. This vegetation is radically different to the monocultural shrub massing spawned by modernism.’

Image ©: 2 – James Hitchmough

The experiments will be planted in July 2016 with data recording (of what the species and the communities do, and what greenspace users think of these) undertaken by the University of Melbourne over the next five years. At the end the work will be published in the prestigious academic journal Landscape and Urban Planning, but also in professional journals.

Landscape Spring 2016 41

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The aim is to extend this planting design research to other Mediterranean and near-Mediterranean parts of the world. Currently Sheffield is in discussion with universities in Cape Town, and this will be followed by California and southern Europe. And this is not all. James is also undertaking research in China, to develop native herbaceous plants as urban designed plant communities. ‘In Western China,’ he said, ‘we have a research contract with Kaixian, a city near Chongqing, and in northeast China a collaborative research project with Shenyang Architectural University and the Liaoning Province Transportation Authority.’

form the basis of a native seed and plant nursery industry which will allow these plants to be available to more sustainable Chinese landscape architecture practices. This is work on a hugely ambitious scale, but how can it be extended more widely, since it requires more than a single practitioner to carry out the large number of projects that are desirable and desired? And is the very precise work that James Hitchmough undertakes just too difficult for most landscape architects?

42 Landscape Spring 2016

He doesn’t think so. He says, ‘The role of my research is not to make things more complex for practitioners, but rather through understanding the process really well to be able to simplify as much as possible. Complexity for its own sake is a nonsense, and just leads to un-reflective practice.’

3 – The conditions that the post-fire resprouters have evolved to survive. 4 – Tagging Chinese meadow species for future seed collection at Diaobing Shan, Liaoning Province, North East China

In order to help the dissemination of knowledge, he has written a book, out shortly, on the interface between his research and practice. It is aimed at a non-academic audience and he has, he says ‘tried to make it possible for any average person to use the methods and techniques I have developed through research to create designed sown vegetation that is as successful as the understandings and skills of that person allows.’ Research will always be at the forefront when developing new approaches he believes, because practice ‘rarely involves what ifs (research is full of what ifs) and tends to restrict how far you dare push the boat out. Practice can only know what happens, and rarely in ecological areas why something happens; research is better at that.’

Image ©: 3 – Nelly Sabitova 4 – James Hitchmough

Both projects involve the construction of large field stations to test native and non-native species and develop novel, sustainable, designed communities. They also require the collection of seed from wild populations of species that are not currently in cultivation (the case with most species) to provide the building blocks for these communities, and to

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Feature

Greening the city centre Nigel Dunnettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work at the Barbican in central London is a culmination of his interest in green roofs and sustainable planting.

44 Landscape Spring 2016

Dunnett undoubtedly has the highest public profile of any of the academics at Sheffield. He is scarcely an international superstar but he is the person most likely to be recognised. Google him and you will find more than 90,000 results. (James Hitchmough, by contrast, with whom he works closely, had just under 12,000 when I looked.)

NIGEL

The two collaborated on the Olympic Park, but Nigel also has his own design area, having designed several show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show which is firmly in the public domain. His job title at Sheffield is probably unique – professor of planting design and vegetation technology. He is also director of the university’s Green Roof Centre.

1, 2 – The new planting at The Barbican is designed as an attractive steppe meadow that needs little irrigation. 3 – The planting before reroofing

Whereas the Olympic Park was virtually a new site, since all its history had been obliterated in the restoration and clean up, he is now working in a very different environment, The Barbican in central London. This is a housing development built in the 1960s and 1970s, with a later (and listed) arts centre added. It seems as if half of London’s architects live there, so the stakes are high.

Image ©: 1, 2, 3 – Nigel Dunnett

Nigel Dunnett describes his work as follows: The transformation project at The Barbican is a pioneering example of climate-change adaptation in central London. It is a practical application of research programmes that I have undertaken in the department of landscape at the University of Sheffield for the past 15 years.

These have focused on developing innovative green infrastructure for high-density urban development that integrates exciting and dramatic landscape planting that is cost-effective and multi-beneficial. As well as undertaking the fundamental research, my main activity concerns the promotion of the uptake of the results of that research. Much of my work is collaborative, with architects, landscape architects, local authorities, artists, and developers. Achieving real outcomes is not only very satisfying, but the collaborative approach is a fundamental part of my research process itself – in fact I have learnt far more about how to make these innovative approaches work through the interaction with real projects, than through the original experimental work. For me, this is a circular process: the original research and its application to practice through collaboration and the establishment of real projects, is just the starting point. The real projects become objects of research in themselves – not just from a scientific viewpoint, but because they are in the public realm there is a wealth of social information too. The uptake of these techniques has two major implications: a) a transformation in the appearance of many typical urban public realm contexts from resource-intensive vegetation to a sustainable alternative, with a radically different aesthetic appearance. The focus of my work is on urban podium landscapes and ‘landscapes above structure’ (extremely common in major cities: landscapes above structures e.g underground car parks;

Landscape Spring 2016 45

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4 – The architecture of The Barbican is a great foil to the exuberance of the planting.

The site of The Barbican transformation project is an urban podium landscape. It is a public space, used by visitors to what is Europe’s largest cultural and arts centre. But it is also the everyday landscape of the 4000 residents of the Barbican Estate. In 2015, as a result of the need to re-waterproof the roof gardens, all of the existing planting was removed from the area. Previously, the landscape consisted of typical ‘municipal’ plantings of lawns, bedding plants, landscape shrubs and trees. However, because of a desire by the City of London Corporation to reduce or eliminate the need for automatic irrigation with potable water of the roof landscape, a completely different approach to the replanting was adopted. The new plantings consisted of a designed form of ‘steppe meadow’, which require very little in the way of irrigation, and which produces year-round visual interest, and greatly increased benefit to pollinating insects.

46 Landscape Spring 2016

The project is directly linked to the research work I have undertaken on plant selection for green roofs and roof gardens. This work led to the establishment of ‘The Green Roof Centre’ at the University of Sheffield, and The Barbican plantings arose partly from the extensive trials and research work undertaken at the University of Sheffield, and partly as a result of experience from other applied projects. The planting style is very much in line with that which we used in the London Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. One of my wider objectives is to get the message out as widely as possible about the creative and aesthetic potential of ecologically inspired landscape design, that meets the twin challenges of climate change and increasing urbanisation. To that effect I have exhibited three Chelsea Flower Show gardens, all using this theme, and in 2015 I was invited by the BBC and the RHS to stage their flagship ‘Greening Grey Britain’ garden at the RHS Hampton Court Show. Alongside the fundamental research, and the collaborative work on real projects, this wider communication of these ideas to the public in general, forms an increasingly large part of my work.

Image ©: 4 – Nigel Dunnett

virtually all new London developments; “intensive green roofs’/roof gardens)” and b) implementation of green streets, rain gardens and other ‘ blue-green infrastructure’ applications – new-build and retro-fit – again with focus on the urban core.

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Feature

In keeping Nicola Dempsey’s work on place keeping addresses one of the most important issues for the profession

public sector and the loss of skills. This takes several forms. There is the loss of landscape professionals within local authorities and other public bodies, both affecting employment and meaning that there is a reduction in skills among clients. There is the loss of a skilled workforce with an increasing move to outsourcing. And, in parallel to this but not necessarily the same thing, there are the cuts that local authorities are forced to make due to government spending restrictions.

48 Landscape Spring 2016

As a result the profession is seriously worried, and correctly, about the long-term maintenance of parks and other open spaces. And while there have been some excellent reports, in particular the Heritage Lottery Fund’s ‘State of British Parks’ that have looked at the problem and at potential solutions, there is relatively little understanding of what this all means on a detailed level. How timely then to have an academic such as Nicola Dempsey, a senior lecturer at Sheffield, whose research has focused so much on this area, on ‘place keeping’. Although Nicola’s role is within the department of landscape architecture, this is not her academic discipline. She brings a wider view and one that is very valuable to the profession.

Image ©: 1 – Nicola Dempsey

f the biggest concerns of the landscape ONE oprofession at present is to do with the

1 – A park in southeast Sheffield, where Nicola Dempsey has studied the detailed place keeping 2 – Park mowing in east Sheffield 3, 4 – bushes that have been trimmed over-zealously

Having originally specialised in urban tourism, Nicola later took a PhD in the department of architecture at Oxford Brookes, but looking very much at urban planning and urban design. As she puts it, ‘My work spans a number of academic subjects, including sociology, wellbeing, urban design and planning. It was therefore logical that I found a welcome home within the inclusive discipline of landscape architecture.’ She now teaches planning at Sheffield, not in terms of the details of legislation but using techniques such as Lego on giant boards to help students appreciate the larger scale and the relationship between planning and design. In her research she is currently involved in a project with partners in universities in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, led by Aalborg University in Denmark. This aims to find out to what extent local authorities are contracting out the management of green space, and what the implications are. The other countries are particularly interested in what is happening in the UK, as in many ways they see it as ahead in the process.

Nicola sent out a questionnaire to all the local authorities in England, asking them both about their spending and about the drivers for change and the barriers to change. The drivers to change included items such as ‘to test and benchmark prices’ and ‘to comply with internal political aims’ whereas the barriers included ‘national political aims and priorities’ and ‘lack of experience/ knowledge’. In each case the authority was asked to rate each factor on a scale from one to ten. The results are still being analysed and authorities have been asked if they would be willing to take part in in-depth case studies.

The aim of the research, as well as comparing practices in the different countries, is to see what impact austerity measures are having, and what the motives are that are driving authorities towards outsourcing. ‘In Norway in particular,’ Nicola said, ‘it is about carrying out tasks that the municipality can no longer do’. The UK has, she says, much more experience of social enterprises, such as Sheffield’s own Green Estate, and of friends’ groups playing a major part.

Landscape Spring 2016 49

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will become deskilled. She thinks this is a particular concern as skills are lost from councils so that there are fewer people able to educate or to direct work.

Nicola has worked in Sheffield for a number of years, looking at friends’ groups and at how they maintain their relationships. ‘It is good to keep a long-term look at how things are working,’ she said. This work has been funded by a variety of sources over the years, and the university is also applying for a grant to set up a network to look at how information can be shared between research and practice. In terms of the friends’ groups in Sheffield, Nicola is interested to examine concerns that outsourcing may lower the level of professionalism in terms particularly of pruning, and that maintenance

50 Landscape Spring 2016

As a result of this work, the place keeping group at the university produced a partnership handbook. ‘A lot of our findings were about relationships about improving spaces – about how partnerships and individuals work together. How will knowledge be passed on if skills are lost from local authorities? This work is much more more about people and partnerships than about pure landscape,’ Nicola said. And, as such, is of enormous value to the landscape profession.

At the turn of the millennium Nicola and colleagues made an evaluation of the green space improvements that were made in the area of Southey Owlerton in Sheffield, originally funded by the Liveability Fund from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. ‘We looked at how the environment affected people’s everyday lives,’ she said. ‘We found that partnership didn’t work as well as expected.’ This she thought was because so much money was being made available that people couldn’t see why they needed to pitch in and help. ‘Then partnership was a buzz word. Now it is a reality.’

5 – Graffiti is rife in Cookson Park, Sheffield, although some may argue that in this case it is an enhancement not a problem 6 – Mowing has been kept to the minimum in this park in southeast Sheffield

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Feature

Benchmark for inclusion An appealing film and a hard-hitting manifesto highlight the important of benches for the wellbeing of all members of society. 1

he other parties in the project were; Radhika Byron of The Young Foundation, Esther Johnson of Sheffield Hallam University (the film maker), Ben Rogaly, professor of human geography at Sussex University, and Jasber Singh of the Greenwich Inclusion Project (one of the benches is in the London Borough of Greenwich).

52 Landscape Spring 2016

This may be largely a piece of academic research, but the outcomes could not be more accessible. The film is 15 minutes long and, although it is easy to1 see that it has lessons about social inclusion, it is not preachy. Instead it is beautifully made and very watchable, using the voices of a wide range of people. It focuses on two benches, or at least on two places to sit, both in London. General Gordon Square in Woolwich, southeast London, is an urban square that has been revitalised by a design by Gustafson Porter that includes long stone benches, edges to the grass that can be sat on, a water feature and a giant television screen. It has important routes passing through it and is most definitely a square and not a park. Woolwich has a large Nepalese population. Large groups of elderly women and, separately, men gather and sit side by side in the square. The women wear brightly coloured costumes and chatter and sing, regretting that they cannot communicate outside their group because they

m ight expect a project based around two benches to point up the differences between them – especially when one is in an award-winning development designed by Gustafson Porter, and the other is standard issue and rather worse for wear, set on a scruffy piece of open ground. But this is not the outcome defined in the Bench Project, a piece of collaborative work in which Clare Rishbeth of Sheffield University was one of the major participants. Instead, the work, and particularly the resulting film, called ‘Alone Together – the social life of benches’ highlights just how important they are to a wide range of people and that design, if not irrelevant, is certainly not the only important factor.

YOU

1 – An afternoon in General Gordon Square, Woolwich 2 – Philip Coates and dog on a bench in St Helier Open Space. You couldn’t do this in a library.

don’t speak English. The long bench seems to work well for them, although you wish they could gather in more of a group. Other users of the square include teenagers who gather from a wide area to meet their friends and watch what is going on, Lauren who describes herself as ‘Woolwich Albanian’ and spends up to four hours a day there with her dogs which other passers-by enjoy petting, and Michael, of Jamaican origin, who lost all his money decades ago and spends the time working out lottery numbers. 2

The other bench is on the St Helier Open Space in Sutton, Surrey. This is a large space of grass set between housing, busy roads and a major hospital. It hasn’t had any of the love and attention that is apparent in Woolwich, but it does have a structure designed for stunt cycling, a young people’s shelter and... a couple of benches. What is striking is how much people appreciate this space. Interviewees include a man with bipolar disorder who says that just five minutes sitting on the bench can make him feel better, a woman with an autistic daughter who says how much happier the girl is when she is out of doors, and an elderly woman who has lived in the area for years and says that she always believed that the space would be built on and how happy she is that it was not. The lesson from the film is that these are spaces for everybody, and that being out of doors is important to them. It is surprising how much time some people

spend there – longer one suspects than the designers or council managers ever believed that they would. These really are spaces for everybody. As Claire Rishbeth said, libraries are also considered as inclusive spaces – but you can’t drink or smoke there, or take your pets. This is the first point in the publication that Clare produced with Radhika Byron, ‘Benches for everyone: Solitude in public, sociability for free’. This is built round a six-point ‘Manifesto for a good bench’ of which the first point is ‘Benches are valued as public, egalitarian and free.’ Several things struck Clare during the research. One was how much people talked about the impact that open space and benches had on their mental health. Another was how often they referred to places as ‘peaceful’ even though, by any objective

Manifesto for the Good Bench Benches are valued as public, egalitarian and free. Bench-space allows people to loosely belong within the flow of city life, to see and be seen. Solitude and conversation are equally acceptable. Sitting on benches supports healthy everyday routines by enabling people to spend longer outside. These opportunities to rest can be restorative for mental health and support local walking when personal mobility is limited. Benches function as a social resource – they are flexible places to spend time at no cost. This is appreciated by many, and especially vital for people who are largely marginalised from other collective environments such as work, cafes, educational or leisure facilities.

They are contrasted positively with crowded, lonely or boring home situations. Design of benches and of sittable public space is important. Comfort and accessibility are basic requirements. Clustering of benches and co-location with a range of facilities provides interest and gives legitimacy to hanging out. The ability to gather in larger groups is valued by many. People need to feel safe. Frequently used, visible spaces with a choice of where to sit can support this. A mix of short and long stay bench users supports informal safety in numbers. Quality of materials, attractive planting, and cleanliness of public space seem to increase individual tolerance for the proximity of strangers and diverse ways of enjoying public space.

Landscape Spring 2016 53

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measure they were busy and, in the case of St Helier in particular, noisy. She is also aware of the importance of the design of benches themselves. Those in Gordon Square are elegant but cold, with the Nepalese women bringing cushions to sit on. The fact that the benches are built into landform means that they can’t be removed. The bench at St Helier, with no back, is not idea for long sitting or for people with certain types of disability.

are to real people – it brings constructs such as ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘mental welfare’ to life. Watch this film and I am sure that you will never look at a bench in the same way again.

3 – Nepalese women spend hours in General Gordon Square, Woolwich – and bring cushions to make themselves more comfortable.

www.the-bench-project.weebly.com

At the launch of the film, at Marshall’s showroom in London, Clare talked briefly about the importance of bench design, with backs and arms and a suitable height, and about the importance of ‘frequency’ which allows the elderly and infirm to plot a journey from bench to bench. But what the film shows is that even benches that are not ideal can be extremely important. There is much in this work that may seem obvious to many landscape architects, but it has been aimed at a wider audience. And the film in particular makes it clear just how important these benches

Making benches better: points for action

Formal and incidental public space should be maximised as a local social resource by clustering of benches and co-location with leisure facilities and local services. Design of public spaces should increase the quantity and diversity of non-commercial seating, and introduce natural elements and planting wherever possible. The traditional two-seater bench may have had its day: longer benches and larger seating structures are more adaptable in supporting fluid social networks. Benches need to be comfortable as well as robust. ‘Hostile architecture’ approaches have led to a reduction of bench provision and the specification of deliberately uncomfortable seating in some places. Thermal comfort, height, backs and arms of benches need to be

54 Landscape Spring 2016

human friendly. Research and innovation in product design and landscape architecture are needed. Management of public spaces should ensure hanging out is legitimised as a non-criminal activity: balancing safety agendas with a meaningful inclusivity of diverse people and activities. In busy urban places the role of uniformed wardens is largely welcomed in maintaining acceptable communal behaviour as long as this is exercised with a light touch. Minimise potential conflict to reduce reliance on explicit security measures. ‘Anti-social behaviour’ is often simply differentlysocial. While violent or hate crime should be actively addressed, this should not be at the expense of bench provision or the quality of the public space. People should be encouraged to use benches through integrated planning, design and management. Key aims should be to support high pedestrian movement through open space networks, maintain good visibility, zone quieter and noisier areas and give options of where to sit.

Benches should be recognised and promoted as a social good, core to supporting mental health and active lifestyles policies. Local strategies should address inequality in quantity and quality of benches in urban locations, and these should reflect the access and wellbeing requirements of different users of benches.

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Landscape Spring 2015 55

Practice By Simon Brown

Rural manifesto Practising in a multi-disciplinary rural practice could be the way to start changing the world for the better.

I spent last year on a rollercoaster of an adventure working with a group of committed individuals in the process of prototyping a user-generated design service – ‘Landstory’. It is a new story of people and place, its purpose being the regeneration and revitalization of landscape resources for future generations. Landstory is a response to the 56 Landscape Spring 2016

critical state of the living systems on which we depend. We acknowledge the interconnectedness of life, and recognise that the health of the biosphere and of all living organisms is linked to our own health and that of future generations; thus our responsibility is to work towards the regeneration of these systems. We aim to work with landowners and local authorities to cultivate abundance through landscape-led development. Our belief is that in order to sustain life on earth we must reimagine the rural and tell a new story of our land. Were we not promised that industrial agriculture would feed the world; that GM food would end starvation and the risk of pests; that mechanisation would give us more time and higher yields? Can we acknowledge that these methods are failing us – our soils have become so thin that some estimate only another 50 harvests are left; our rivers so polluted that we cannot drink from them nor can they sustain once diverse ecosystems; our forests so decimated that they are a fragment of what they once were; our livestock so ill-treated having become nothing more than commodities, reflected in spread sheets and slaughtered on conveyor belts. Who knows that half of the nitrates applied on fields silently pollute, leaching 25% into the air and 25% into the water? Can we not understand or feel what we are doing to our beautiful lands? If our health is linked to that of living systems, then beyond doubt it is time to try something different. Thus we must consider the rural. Not only must there be a shift in current agricultural practices towards methods

1 – The lively town of Frome 2 – Experiencing life with the Masai

which are more diverse, productive and sustainable that already exist; but also a re-ruralisation, or appropriate rural development which is landscapeled and driven by community. Many believe we have a global crisis of overpopulation but consider the fact that only 1% of the global population is engaged with agriculture. Imagine if it was more like 30%. I have long believed that redeveloping an intimate working relationship with nature is key to a future in which land-based enterprises can offer meaningful work, build community and local resilience whilst regenerating our land in a new and ancient story. My interest in the rural is linked to the global, shaped by the experiences of my 29 years of life. Studying for a degree in archaeology and anthropology in Bristol shaped my world view. It illuminated the effects of the global forces fragmenting and breaking local and indigenous cultures in pursuit of economic growth, political agendas or resource extraction. I even had first hand experience of

y wife and I recently relocated to Frome in Somerset in pursuit of a dream. We moved to embrace a vibrant and supportive local community and a peaceful way of life, far from the growing intensity and strain of London. We decided to move to Frome, which is an interesting town with a rich culture and heritage. It has, over the years, attracted a large number of creative and progressive thinkers and doers. The town council is run by a group of independent councillors who have the town’s best interests at heart and seek to employ a true democracy to support its future. As a result of this supportive local political system, Frome is a mélange of innovation, excitement and initiatives that seek to empower local people, build local resilience, create meaningful work and build a town for the future.

3 – A tea break while working at the Druk White Lotus School in Ladakh

this, spending time in Kenya with the Maasai looking at the commoditisation of culture. It was a fascinating degree but my calling came several years later when I was questioning my way forward in life, in search of new fields into which I could focus my energies. I discovered the landscape profession. To me, it seemed unique, inspiring and well placed to work towards a common goal of simply a better world. I enrolled on the postgraduate and masters programme at Greenwich and remember devouring the work of the early visionaries Jellicoe and McHarg, whose visions for the profession and state of the world were enough to affirm my choice and stir my blood. I split the summer between programmes into an internship at a prestigious London practice and furthering my education with a permaculture design course. It was a distinct and abrupt shock going straight from an organic smallholding in the depths of Cornwall with themes of local materials, biodiversity and

There has, in recent years, been a growing recognition of the power of story to frame how we understand the world around us and our place within it. Jonathan Dawson, The Ecologist

resilient design, to the City of London and paving detailing using Chinese granite. This harsh contrast was formative and I finished my masters with a scheme to design a rural Mediterranean smallholding that aimed at being economically, environmentally and socially resilient. Shortly before finishing I was given an opportunity of a lifetime, to go to Ladakh in the Indian Himalaya and work on the design and delivery of a landscape vision for the Druk White Lotus School (DWLS). This proved to be a deeply influential experience for

me as I was to learn so much from the beautiful people of Ladakh. Ladakh, the land of the high passes, lies within the state of Jammu and Kashmir, isolated by the Zanskar, Ladakh and Karakoram mountain ranges. It is a mythical and ancient kingdom once accessed only by mountain pass. Classified as a high altitude desert, summer temperatures can be above 30C and winter temperatures below -30C whilst rainfall is almost non-existent; an unforgiving climate indeed. The Ladakhi people – closer to Tibetan both physiologically, culturally and spiritually – have, despite these extreme conditions; created a paradise, a 2000 year old Buddhist kingdom that was prosperous, abundant and peaceful. Ladakh, thanks to its inaccessible location, was isolated from the rest of the world until 1976. Today it remains inaccessible by road for six months of the year due to the high mountain passes. As a result of this and of the underlying strength of kinship structures, the culture of Ladakh has

Landscape Spring 2016 57

Practice

4 – Plant nursery at the Druk White Lotus School in Ladakh 5 – Planting a shelter belt

58 Landscape Spring 2016

The Ladakhi’s remarkable contentedness is the product of close and intimate connections to other people and the land. Helena Norberg-Hodge

the Western culture and monetary economy brought an influx of goods, pressures for economic growth, unemployment and conflict where there had once been none. Agriculture, the basis of the traditional society, began to break down due to cashcropping, subsidies and agrochemicals. These threaten regional food security and the once local resilience through increasing dependency, loss of biodiversity and soil fertility. For example, a bag of flour that had been transported thousands of miles became cheaper than flour from the local mill, and local mud-brick became more costly than cement imported from the other side of the Himalayas. Worse still is that those who do still farm now believe it is a primitive occupation and can no longer depend on their neighbours for support – the culture moved from a history

of cooperation to the present of competition and exclusion. The work I carried out at the school attempts to provide children with a landscape with which they can still have a working relationship, bound within a masterplan and vision ‘To create a unique living and learning environment through a productive and sustainable landscape that will be resilient in the face of climate change and a model for landscape and education in Ladakh’ The work continues today. Returning to London, I managed to get a job working for Farrer Huxley Associates where I stayed for a short but happy year. I was lucky to work on

remained remarkably strong. As I began to research the landscape work for DWLS I started looking for plants, inspiration and local knowledge. At that time I also read a seminal piece of work by anthropologist Helena Norberg Hodge, Ancient Futures, which documented the rapid change that came to Ladakh since the road opened in 1976. In the book she portrays a portrait of Ladakh – of a people’s rich existence with an ecological balance and social harmony. Ladakh was a psychologically balanced society with no depression, crime or homelessness, where society was based on reciprocity and cooperative value. There was no money, no concept of waste and everything had a purpose or place. The people’s working relationship with the land meant that they did not exceed its carrying capacity. As I read this work I experienced first hand the sheer joy and utter generosity of these beautiful people, where old lived with young and young with old, each and all helped with the harvests and the land based-activities; yet despite the workload there always appeared to be time to relax, take tea, laugh, and share in the joy of life. It was a truly beautiful experience to be welcomed into this humbling culture. The change that came after the roads were built began to fragment social and kinship structures as

6 – Simon Brown with masons in Ladakh 7 – The landscape masterplan for the school 8 – Design of the nursery

the development of Bicester EcoTown, a dream job for a young landscape architect. Yet if truth be told it was one of the reasons why I left the position. Exposure to the apparent lack of commitment of developers to be truly innovative and create a place for the future, to me amounted to an old story that serves nether people or place. Since leaving London and stepping into the unknown and building a business I have been supporting myself with freelance work with a local practice called Roundfield who have a keen interest in the rural landscape. I have also been fortunate enough to have won two collaborative competitions with an artist colleague friend. We have worked in France and in Bristol

on a school’s roof garden aimed at growing food and ecology. These are good but temporary measures as Landstory, despite aiming for powerful social and environmental impact, has ambitions to become a strong design network with a clear business model. This is grounded in the belief that appropriate investment in productive landscapes will have long-term financial gain in addition to stimulating rural economies and building local resilience. We assume most landowners lack the resource to implement a landscape strategy so our design service will tailor investment packages bound within the strategy to take to our network of social investors or alternatively look to collaborative funding. The intention is to imagine a future where pension funds or even the global funds that are currently divesting from the hydrocarbon market could have viable and long-term investment alternatives that are ethical, regenerative, local in scale and land-based.

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Practice

This is just the beginning of a long road for us. We hope to work on projects all across the world in due course. We have a diverse network including – event producers, software wizards, landscape architects, finance gurus, designers, planning consultants, communication strategists and more – so we aim to be able to respond to multiple briefs, whilst at all times sharing learning and resources through open source toolkits. I recently became the licentiate representative on the LI advisory council. This is an attempt to understand the profession and organisation better, to connect with other professionals and experts, to find those who know that things can 60 Landscape Spring 2016

9 – Design for a roof garden in Bristol 10 – The high mountains still isolate Ladakh for half the year 11 – Collecting apricot seedlings in Ladakh

be much better and want to work together towards just that. I would also like the LI to have a voice, to make a stance, be political, stick its multifunctional head above the parapet and ruffle some feathers and perhaps that is the way to a more active membership. My hopes for the future are simply for a better world or, as a colleague puts it, the desire to tell meaningful stories to our children. I would like to imagine a world where collective and public pensions are spent on building a commonwealth, on services that can greatly enhance our lives – sustainable and affordable housing, transport and connectivity, renewable energy, forestry, farming and abundant multifunctional

landscapes. I hope that young and old may once again live and play together, that the old do not die alone, that we may have more time to love laugh and live. Ultimately design can have a huge part to play in all of this, in creating the places of the future, so let us design intelligently with and for nature and for our children. The landscape profession is needed now more than ever in this volatile, uncertain and complex world. We, as designers of the interface between humans and living systems, will play a vital role in the shaping of this world in the coming years as we transition and adapt to an emerging culture of cooperation and collaboration.

At Landstory we are currently in the building and prototyping phase. We have one client lined up and future possibilities in the pipeline. Our pilot project – a 900 acre organic farm in Oxfordshire – is an ideal scenario in that the challenges are great and resources limited, but critically there is a client who has vision and needs no convincing of the great importance of enhanced land use and the need to look towards the future. Of course a major constraint here is planning, yet the legislative framework for a paradigm planning shift exists; through the Localism Act and Community Right to Build Orders. Despite very few examples of successful projects in the UK, this represents a huge opportunity to address major issues such as the housing crisis and grossly inflated house and land prices, by empowering citizens to self/custom or co-build. Landstory, combining an event-led participatory design process with a cohesive landscape strategy, aims to leverage these opportunities and in theory overcome rural planning constraints.

Culture By Alastair McCapra

1 – The garden of Voltaire’s chateau at Ferney

We must cultivate our garden Voltaire is still revered as a writer, historian and philosopher, but his role as a gardener has almost slipped from view. Yet we can learn a lot by seeing how, like Candide, he cultivated his garden.

h en I visited Voltaire’s house at Ferney in eastern France, the guided tour of the garden was an optional extra, and although it was free, I was the only one who took it. The other visitors wandered off, none the wiser about the fascinating story of how, over twenty years, Voltaire worked on the grounds that he loved so much. I was lucky to visit when I did, because all tours stopped just a few days later and the house is now closed for an extensive, three-year conservation project. Already, efforts are being made to recreate the gardens on which he lavished so much attention. Research has been done into the varieties of fruit tree which existed in Voltaire’s time, and there is a plan to replant his orchards. The beehives are already back. The conservation project will hopefully allow us to recover a much clearer idea of the landscape that Voltaire created. Like the visitors who only came for the house, many people

‘I have done one sensible thing in my life – to cultivate the ground. He who clears a field renders a better service to humankind than all the scribblers of Europe’. Voltaire

seem uninterested in Voltaire’s horticultural endeavours. Indeed it did not take long after his death for mistaken ideas about the garden to start circulating. An accurate view was commissioned by Catherine the Great, who wanted a ‘detailed and geometric plan’ of the Ferney estate, but that was kept in Russia, together with the exact scale model of the house which she also ordered.

After Voltaire’s death few people made the long journey to Ferney, and representations of the gardens became gradually less realistic. They tended to represent the terrace behind the house as much longer than it actually was. At the same time, knowing that the gardens lay between the Jura to the north and the Alps to the south, some artistic renditions of the site both stretched the terrace and enclosed it with fairly dramatic-looking mountain slopes. These do not in fact exist, although one of Voltaire’s pleasures, while working in his pavilion, was to look south over the lake at the distant prospect of Mont Blanc. So what was the real landscape, and what was it about? Voltaire’s gardens were much more than just a place for developing ideas – they were part of an aesthetic, productive and social landscape which he devoted many years to designing and cultivating. Having bought the Ferney estate in Landscape Spring 2016 61

Culture

1758, he demolished the existing house and built a completely new one (he tried demolishing the parish church which stood within his grounds, right in front of his main entrance, but that was one battle that the Catholic Church won). Thereafter he left the interior decoration of the house to his niece, Mme Denis, who was by that time perhaps no longer his lover and merely his companion. He, meanwhile, devoted himself, when he was not working on his writing, entirely to his grounds, where he often liked to work inside a pavilion rather than confined to his study.

2 – Voltaire enjoyed the distant view of Mont Blanc 3 – Jean Huber’s painting of Voltaire narrating a fable

Nobody really knows how many trees Voltaire planted, but he loved planting, and seems to have done it, for long periods, as part of his daily routine. During his twenty years in exile at Ferney he drank endless cups of coffee, wrote 15,000 letters (or rather, that many are still extant), ran social justice campaigns, composed plays, pamphlets and other works, and received so many guests that he described himself as ‘the innkeeper of Europe’. If his planting was on the same scale as his other activities, he personally transformed the landscape of his estate at Ferney in a way no-one before or

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since has ever attempted. Voltaire’s friend, the artist Jean Huber, produced a series of humorous views of the great man’s regular routines, and his depiction highlights Voltaire’s relationship with his landscape very powerfully. One shows him, with two gardeners in attendance, occupied with planting. Since we lack detailed records of his efforts it is hard to know which of the trees at Ferney today were seedlings he planted, but it is certain that of the surviving trees, he at least planted the ‘Charmille’ – the long avenue of hornbeams which he trained to grow into arches, providing a shady walkway for his daily meditations. The aesthetics of his gardens mattered greatly to Voltaire. Having spent time in England in the 1720s, he had fallen in love with English gardens, and wanted to create a ‘jardin anglais’. He disliked the formal, geometric layout of standard French gardens (he described Versailles as a ‘masterpiece of bad taste and magnificence’) He built a terrace behind the house at Ferney, with a maze to one side. To his many English visitors, he proudly announced this as his ‘jardin anglais’, but while he certainly created something more free and less forced in design than most French gardens, none of his many English visitors judged it to be English either. Making the estate productive made good financial sense, and also satisfied

4 – Jean Huber’s panting of Voltaire planting trees

his wish to make of Ferney a small, self-contained world, unconcerned by the troubles of lands beyond. Voltaire planted orchards and vegetable gardens, raised pigeons and kept bees. He created a carp pond and an icehouse, and was proud to serve his innumerable guests meals cooked largely from the produce he himself had grown. In around 1770 he decided to experiment with silk-weaving, converting his theatre into a nursery for the silkworms, and planting mulberries to raise them on. He also grew his own grapevines. In 1770, the arrival of numerous refugees from over the border in the Republic of Geneva gave him an opportunity to set up an international watchmaking business in his grounds, which he did with great commercial enthusiasm. Voltaire’s garden was not a retreat from the world – it was very much a social space. (Another of Huber’s illustrations shows him ‘narrating a fable’ to local villagers). In his gardens he built his theatre, where local actors performed his plays for the benefit of local people; this was later turned into the silkworm factory. Here he could play chess with his longterm Jesuit

I find much greater pleasure in labouring – sowing planting and harvesting, than in writing tragedies, or acting them

Voltaire

companion, Father Adam. There were picnics and walks where local friends and his innumerable visitors could eat, talk, explore and enjoy themselves. His gardens were also, in his later years, a form of personal theatre in which Voltaire could perform antics for his own amusement. There are accounts of impressionable young ladies being conducted to his garden to be presented to him and recoiling in horror as the cadaverous old hypochondriac lurched towards them,

in his grimy gardener’s outfit, wailing ‘Madam, you have raised me from my grave!’. Some did not seek admission to his house or grounds, but would come to see him, pressing their faces between the bars of the railings which bounded his gardens. On one occasion he decided to stomp out and put on a show, giving them a twirl in his dressing gown and cutting a few capers before vanishing back into his house. He then sent his servant out to collect six sous from each of them, on the grounds that seeing him perform must be worth at least as much as seeing the animals at the circus. In February 1778, at the age of 83, Voltaire’s exile ended. He left his house at Ferney with Mme Denis and went to Paris, from which he had been banned in 1754. In May that year he died (his final days and burial arrangements were his last great joke at the expense of the Catholic Church, involving friends

dressing his body up and smuggling him out of the house, followed by a high-speed coffin chase across the country, but that is another story entirely). Mme Denis was thrilled to be back in Paris and never returned to Ferney. She quickly sold Voltaire’s library to Catherine the Great, his furniture and other possessions to ready buyers, and the estate itself to a new owner. Ferney went into decline, and was largely left untended for many years. Surprisingly, the estate was only acquired by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux in 1999. Voltaire’s life and legacy are full of amusing paradoxes. One is that a man so prolific in his writings should be most famous for something he never said – ‘I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. Voltaire was by no means what we would call a ‘free speech advocate’, and he would probably have had huge Landscape Spring 2016 63

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direct his readers away from idle philosophising and speculative thinking, urging them to find something useful and practical to do to make their own immediate environment a better place. If they could not think of anything else to do, Voltaire wanted them, literally, to roll up their sleeves and start digging.

Alastair McCapra is a former chief executive of the Landscape Institute. He is now chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

5 – View of the chateau from the garden 6 – Drawings show the terrace as longer than it actually was

fun ridiculing anyone who had said this in his hearing. Another paradox is that the activity which occupied so much of his daily life for twenty years has been largely forgotten, although it is clearly such an important part of his world view and helps us to understand much of what he did actually say. The famous last words of ‘Candide’ – ‘we must cultivate our garden’ are not metaphorical; they tell us much about what Voltaire considered important. Cultivation – of land, of skills, of tastes, and of relationships, was core to his notion of the good life. This idea of cultivation stood in opposition to the idealisation of nature advocated by his enemy Jean-Jacques Rousseau and later, by the Romantics. Instead of venerating the child as some kind of primordial innocent, Voltaire argued for the steady nurturing and development of taste, experience and reflection. Inherent in the phrase ‘we must cultivate our garden’ is the notion of proprietorship – of taking responsibility of that part of the world over which one is some kind of seigneur. It contains no notion of altruism, guerrilla gardening or seedbombing. Above all he meant to

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A Word By Tim Waterman

‘Profession’ t he middle of the 17th century, at the dawn of modernity, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, described human relations as bellum omnium contra omnes – a war of all against all – an idea which subsequently came to underpin dog-eat-dog conceptions of social Darwinism, and which characterises the mindset that made possible the transatlantic slave trade and the enclosures and clearances in early capitalism. Contrasted to this are the premodern commons, those shared lands and practices that were the basis for communal well-being and wealth, unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno – all for one and one for all. The dogeating dogs continue to consume each other and to enclose the commons globally, and the ideology that allows it still echoes Hobbes. It is known as competitive individualism and it is the foundation for neoliberalism, the ideology under which we have seen governments everywhere become more authoritarian and market-driven. It is commonly assumed that the commons are historic conditions, but people still work together everywhere for mutual advantage, and we might even regard professions as types of commons. What does a profession do and how does it function? It consists of a variety of interlinked supports and guarantees: it ensures trust both internally and externally by providing the certification of the group and adherence to a robust code of ethics; it provides support for students and young professionals through education, training, and/or apprenticeships; it provides promotion, advocacy, and communications; it lobbies in government; it provides statutory protection for the work of its professionals. Last but not least, it provides for togetherness and sharing of ideas, friendship, and the common good. Professions thus have great importance both for their members and as models of what society can and should be. Professions and institutions of all sorts are now increasingly under threat from competitive individualism, however. The relentless intensity of

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our working lives makes it ever more difficult for us to make time for togetherness and sharing. Downward pressure on professional wages in many sectors makes long periods of time and quantities of money spent on education and qualification seem wasteful instead of the vital structure of our mutual guarantee. Finally, and probably not only, our perception of society as composed of disconnected individuals means that we are putting greater trust in crowd-sourced certification (Trip Advisor springs to mind, with its five-star ratings for popular but unexciting restaurants) rather than expert or institutional judgment. Competitive individualism complicates professions even further. We tend to see achievements as the work of disconnected and miraculously inspired individuals – this is evident in the trend toward starchitecture – rather than as the work of professions and the sharing and supporting networks engendered by them, from education to practice. We have come to see value as being created by the lone genius rather than by a great collective work over many years. It may be that the multiple threats which professions face, as they are presently constituted, and in a winner-takes-all world, will be enough to overwhelm them completely. Or they may change and adapt to new forms that we cannot yet predict. Or finally we may decide that we need to make a case for the continued survival of professions and stand stalwart together in defence of the idea of mutual aid. As for me, I know I’m one for all.

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