Landscape Journal - Summer 2019: The LI90 Edition by Landscape, the journal of the Landscape Institute

Issue 3 – 2019

Transforming landscape – challenging boundaries Celebrating the Landscape Institute’s 90th Birthday

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PUBLISHER Darkhorse Design Ltd T (0)20 7323 1931 darkhorsedesign.co.uk tim@darkhorsedesign.co.uk EDITORIAL ADVISORY PANEL Eleanor Trenfield CMLI, Landscape Planner, ETLA and Honorary Editor. Dr. David Buck AMLI, Senior Lecturer in Landscape, University of Gloucestershire. Amanda McDermott CMLI, Landscape Architect, 2B Landscape Consultancy Ltd. Peter Sheard CMLI, Landscape Architect. John Stuart-Murray FLI, Landscape Architect. Jo Watkins PPLI, Landscape Architect. Jenifer White CMLI, National Landscape Adviser, Historic England. Rosie Wicheloe, Landscape Ecologist, London Wildlife Trust. Holly Birtles CMLI, Associate Landscape Architect B|D. Jaideep Warya CMLI, Landscape Architect,The Landscape Partnership. Lily Bakratsa, Landscape Architect, Architect and Design Educator. LANDSCAPE INSTITUTE Commissioning Editor: Paul Lincoln, Executive Director Creative Projects and Publishing paul.lincoln@landscapeinstitute.org Copy Editor: Jill White President: Adam White CEO: Daniel Cook Landscapeinstitute.org @talklandscape landscapeinstitute landscapeinstituteUK Advertising enquiries Sam Hodgson, Cabbells, 020 3603 7934 sam@cabbells.co.uk Subscription and membership enquiries membership@landscapeinstitute.org

The Landscape Institute is the Royal Chartered body for landscape architects. We are a professional organisation and educational charity who work with our members to protect, conserve and enhance the natural and built environment for the public benefit.

Landscape is printed on paper sourced from EMAS (Environmental Management and Audit Scheme) certified manufacturers to ensure responsible printing. 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.

Happy Birthday to us Birthdays are often opportunities to reflect on past achievements. The Landscape Institute celebrates its 90th Birthday this year (‘LI90’), and in this edition, we look back at the past 90 years, profiling influential people (page 6 and page 50), landscapes (page 38) and publications (page 32) from the past 90 years, set within the context of the major changes in society during this time. A huge thank you to all our members who contributed to this important edition with their ideas and articles. To mark the fact that the LI was formed in 1929 at what is now the Chelsea Flower Show, the LI returned to Chelsea to kick off its anniversary celebrations (page 20). LI members have had great successes at Chelsea, including our president Adam White, who has been enthusiastically representing us and raising the profile of our profession through his collaboration on the ‘Back to Nature’ Garden jointly designed with Andree Davies and HRH The Duchess of Cambridge. Other LI90 celebrations have been taking place across the country, the highlight of which was the Festival of Ideas at the Olympic Park in June (page 22), where hundreds of our members met up for 2 days to explore, discuss and reflect in this hugely relevant setting. A wonderful place already established for the London Olympics and now undergoing further transformation

as it becomes a new home for a range of arts and educational organisations to be known as East Bank – telling a story of landscape creativity looking back and forward. There is so much to reflect on when looking back, but it raises the obvious question, what next? You will all no doubt be aware that the LI has recently declared a Climate Emergency (page 65), and was one of the first professional membership organisations to do so. What does the climate emergency mean for society, and for us as individuals and as professionals? It is only appropriate that in the next edition of the journal which will look largely to the future, climate change will be the key topic under consideration.

Eleanor Trenfield CMLI Director, ETLA Honorary Editor of Landscape

Contents BRIEFING

LI 90

We asked some of our leading members to recall the people who have had a significant influence on their life, work or practice.

Johanna Gibbons on Dame Sylvia Crowe

Midway through the LI’s birthday celebrations, we highlight a number of key events.

20 Chelsea

In his opening speech at the Festival of Ideas Adam White highlighted some of the key events in the life of the Landscape Institute.

A detailed time line will be published in the autumn.

Annabel Downs on Geoffrey Jellicoe

First edition of the Journ Founding at Chelsea of the Institute of Landscape Architects as the British Association of Garden Architects

21 Bristol

Jo Watkins on Charles Rennie-Mackintosh and Will Alsop

Opening of the M1 offers the profession a wide range of new opportuities and public sector contracts

Brian Clouston on Jane Wood

Alan Tate on Brian Clouston and Geoffrey Jellicoe

1957

Celebrating the birthday Jellicoe’s ‘Motopia’ a glass city with of the Landscape cars on Institute. the roof

22 Festival

Taking the birthday message reaches to Bristol and the SouthILA West. c.1400 members

1959

1969

Speakers and Workshop Facilitators www.liconferences.org

David Barrie David Barrie is a TV producer and director who designs, develops and manages urban renewal and public projects. He specialises in local involvement, government engagement, partnership development, stakeholder relations, project and design management. His work has included The Castleford Project, a £13 million programme of public realm renewal in the former coalfields town of Castleford, the story of which will be broadcast on Channel 4 in 2008. David is currently leading a climate change and food systems project in Middlesbrough.

2007

of ideas

Malcolm Barton Malcolm Barton has recently returned to consultancy following a two-year appointment as Regional Director in Yorkshire and the Humber for the environmental charity Groundwork. Previously he worked as a consultant advising on a wide range of matters relating to the natural and built environment. From 1996 to 2001 he was involved in the delivery of Groundwork’s £58 million ‘Changing Places’ programme.

Sarah Gaventa Sarah Gaventa joined CABE in 2006 as director of CABE Space, the specialist unit that aims to bring excellence to the design, management and maintenance of parks and public space in our towns and cities. She is the author of Concrete Design and New Public Spaces and has also written features for national newspapers and specialist magazines on contemporary design, as well as contributing to Radio 4’s Front Row and The Culture Show. She is a founding committee member for the London Architecture Biennale and a member of the City Architecture Forum.

Carole-Anne Davies Professor John Handley OBE Founding chief executive of the Design John Handley is director of the Centre for Commission for Wales, Carole-Anne Davies Urban and Regional Ecology, based in the has worked with architects, artists, design School of Environment and Development and construction teams, communities at the University of Manchester. CURE was and individuals on public art, infrastructure established to address the new research development and regeneration projects in the agendas of regionalism, sustainability and private and public sectors. She was a member the rebuilding of environmental capital. John of CABE’s advisory panel for PROJECT, has Handley rejoined academic life in 1994 as contributed to professional and post-graduate Groundwork Professor of Land Restoration training and education in Lisbon and Barcelona and Management. His current research and was awarded the Welsh Woman of the interests are focused on landscape dynamics Year for Arts and Media in 2005. and the management of change, ecologically informed and participative approaches to resource management and the development of adaptation strategies for climate change impacts.

Luke Engleback, MLI Luke has 25 years experience in both private and municipal offices in Britain and abroad, working at all scales of landscape planning and Dominic Cole, MLI design. His special interest is multi-functional Dominic Cole is principal at Land Use landscape design and adaptation to climate Consultants and the lead landscape designer change and seeking low carbon solutions. and master planner for the award-winning He founded Studio Engleback in 1996. All Eden Project. He is currently visiting critic projects consider climate change as well as for Leeds Metropolitan University graduate local character, and people informed by natural diploma in landscape design and has held processes and ecology. design workshops at Greenwich University Knut Felberg and the University of Arts in Vienna. He is Knut Felberg is currently planning director CABE Space enabler specialising in landscape at the Norwegian Directorate of Public design advice. Dominic was a LI Council Construction and Planning. He has 22 member up to 2006. years of experience with regional, urban Ian Collingwood and environmental planning and analysis Ian Collingwood works in the regeneration in Norway and abroad. He has special department of Middlesbrough Council and competence on strategic planning, urban has led the authority’s involvement in the and regional development, planning and Middlesbrough urban farming project. development processes, land use issues, impact assessments, planning policy issues Annie Coombs, FLI and instruments and cultural planning. Annie Coombs is a charted landscape architect, Fellow of the Landscape Institute and has a postgraduate planning qualification. She spent 15 years in Asia as a managing director of an environmental practice and was responsible for a wide range of landscape implementation, master planning and policy work. She is now a CABE Space enabler and is also involved in brief-writing for London’s Olympic Parklands and Public Realm. Annie is a past member and Chair of the LI Technical and Environment Committee.

First major careers campaign – I want to be a landscape architect

Richard Copas, MLI Richard Copas specialises in large-scale environmental planning associated with major watercourses. His expertise lies in the fields of communication, open space planning, environmental and ecological enhancement, river restoration, partnership working and community collaboration.

Francis Hesketh, MLI Francis Hesketh is a founding partner of TEP, an environmental consultancy. He has worked with the Forestry Commission, Community Forests, Groundwork Trusts, North West Development Agency and English Partnerships dealing with regeneration programmes, green infrastructure, and site ecological and environmental issues, woodland matters and providing evidence at public enquiries. He has a deep understanding of the role of regeneration and the importance of the partnerships which are needed to attain improvement.

Martin Kelly, FLI Martin Kelly is a landscape architect and urban designer and is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute and the Institute of Highways and Transportation. He joined Derek Lovejoy Partnership (now Lovejoy) in 1979, where Deborah Fox he is now managing director. He has Deborah Fox is a head of service at CABE specialised in environmental land planning Space. She recently wrote CABE Space’s for major landmark projects on behalf of ‘It’s our space: a guide for community public and private sector promoters in the groups working to improve public space’. UK and overseas. He places environmental Her background spans management in sustainability and the importance of the public local government and non-governmental realm at the top of the regeneration agenda. organisations and includes regional campaigning for Friends of the Earth. She is a board member and judge in the Green Flag Award scheme, the national standard for parks and open spaces. Deborah has an honours degree in Botany and a Master of Arts degree in Medieval History. This combines her love of plants with an interest in how the landscape is portrayed in literature, from medieval to modern, and which helps to inspire her writing today.

Tony Kendle Dr Tony Kendle is foundation director for Eden Project in Cornwall, coordinating research and scientific development, horticulture and education. He has been involved with the Eden Project since 1995, and has played various roles from site restoration through exhibit and programme development and to developing the operational and business model. He was previously a lecturer in Horticulture and Landscape Management at the University of Reading, with research interests in conservation and restoring value to degraded land.

Andy Middleton Andy Middleton is an adventurer and ecoentrepreneur. He has worked as a gold miner, adventure guide and then business director. Andy works to help organisations change inside out; by working with sustainability and climate programmes with Business in the Community, the Welsh Assembly and Chinese government are providing lots of learning right now. Andy is a board member of the Association of Sustainability Practitioners and Cynnal Cymru-Sustain Wales.

Mary Nightingale Mary Nightingale is co-presenter of the ITV Jane Knight, MLI Evening News and has twice been named Jane Knight is the Eden Project’s in-house Newscaster of the Year by the Television and landscape architect and responsible for the Radio Industries Club. She joined ITV in 2001 landscape development of the Eden Project and has since presented many of ITV’s special including the newly proposed ‘Edge’; a place to programmes, including the General Election explore the challenge of living within limits. She night broadcast and ITV’s flagship holiday is also involved in projects to promote natural programme, Wish You Were Here. play including Eden’s out-reach projects such Dr. Henry Oakeley as a Peace Park in Kosova, a botanic garden Dr Henry Oakeley is a retired psychiatrist in northern Chile and vegetable gardens at whose interest in plants began in 1950. He is Dartmoor Prison. After gaining an MLA from a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians Cornell University in the USA she worked in the of London and for the past two years has Boston area for five years. Jane spent seven been the Garden Fellow at the College, with years in Hong Kong at the time of the handover responsibility for the new Medicinal Garden development boom and was responsible for there, making a photographic archive and the landscape design and implementation documenting the plants throughout the of the road and rail links to the (then) new seasons. international airport as well as the landscape Ian Phillips planning of new towns. Ian Phillips is a chartered landscape architect Professor Tim Lang and town planner with considerable Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at experience in both public and private sectors. City University’s Centre for Food Policy in This has included planning of a major new London. He is Natural Resources and Land settlement; landscape character analysis and Use Commissioner on the UK Government’s environmental policy development. He serves Sustainable Development Commission, as Chair of the LI Technical and Environment is a regular advisor to the World Health Committee and as a Member of the LI Council. Organisation and has been a special advisor He is also a member of the BSI Panel on Trees to House of Commons Select Committee and CABE Space’s Standards and Best inquiries. He was an advisor to the Foresight Practice sub-group and is a CABE Space Obesity programme, and since 2005 has been facilitator. a member of the Royal Institute of International Graham Pockett, MLI Affairs’ ‘Food Supply in the 21st Century’ Graham Pockett is a freelance landscape Working Party. He chaired the Scottish NHS architect who has also lectured in garden Executive’s Scottish Diet Action Plan Review and is a vice president of the Chartered Institute design. Graham specialises in landscape construction, mainly lecturing on hard of Environmental Health and a Fellow of the landscape detailing and materials, as well Faculty of Public Health. as traditional graphics. He has also written Jon Lovell, MLI many technical articles for the Garden Design Jon Lovell is head of sustainability at Drivers Journal. Graham is currently involved in Jonas. Prior to that he headed up the Biota!, a landmark aquarium near the Thames Sustainable Development Team at the North Barrier, where he is researching and designing West Regional Assembly, where he played a the internal Amazonian rainforest and British leading role in the development of a regional Isles zones. Climate Change Action Plan. He also led the environmental regeneration sector of environmental planning consultancy TEP, sat on the LI Technical and Environment Committee and has been vice-chair of the English Regions Network Sustainable Development Group, a board member of the Northwest Energy Council and a member of the DEFRA Roundtable on Shaping Government Leadership on Natural Resource Protection.

Jeff Stevenson, MLI Jeff Stevenson is director of Jeffrey Stevenson Associates. He was vice-chairman of the LI Technical and Environment Committee and a member of the Core Group of the Royal Town Planning Institute’s newly formed Rural Planning Network. He was also one of the co-authors of the Guidelines for Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment (2002) and has extensive experience of wind farm planning, and design and assessment of their visual and landscape effects.

First winner of the LI President’s Award is Eden Project, Cornwall

Nigel Thorne, FLI, president of the Landscape Institute Nigel Thorne became President of the Landscape Institute in 2006. He was a member of Council which secured a Royal Charter for the Institute in 1997. He lectures on professional practice at the University of Reading’s BSc Landscape Management course. Nigel Thorne’s early career involved several years working in the Middle East and he later covered the whole of the Mediterranean and Middle East regions for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission having spent two years based in Israel and Cyprus. Sebastian Tombs Sebastian Tombs is chief executive of Architecture and Design Scotland, an organisation which champions good architecture and urban design. He was chief executive of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland from 1995 to 2005, having run the practice arm of its activities from 1986 to 1994. He is founder and a previous chair of the Scottish Ecological Design Association and the Association of Planning Supervisors (now the Association for Project Safety).

2006

Professor Robert Tregay, FLI Robert Tregay is senior partner at LDA Design and an honorary Professor at the University of Wales. He has 32 years professional experience and focuses primarily on the masterplanning and delivery of major new developments and also green infrastructure planning and sustainable development issues throughout the UK. Kim Wilkie, MLI FRIBA Having studied History at Oxford and Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, Kim Wilkie set up his practice in London in 1989. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2002. He continues to teach at Berkeley and is also a member of a number of national committees on landscape and environmental policy in the UK. Recent projects include the Victoria and Albert Museum garden, the Thames Landscape strategy and Floodscape projects and landscape sculptures at Heveningham Hall and Broughton Park.

Conflict in landscape Looking to the future of the profession in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

2002

The challenge for landscape architecture

For regular Conference updates visit www.liconferences.org To book a place or for any queries please contact Sabina Mohideen on 020 7299 4514 or email events@landscapeinstitute.org

Capability Brown Festival

2012

24 LI Timeline

CABE Space established

Landscape Institute Annual Conference 01– 02 November 2007

Opening of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

2010

ILA be Lands

1975

Conference, position paper and journal on climate change

Kathryn Moore on Geoffrey Jellicoe

1951

Ian McHargh’s Design with Nature published – which reassesses the role of the profession

Joe Kerr looks at the arguments that have raged over nearly a century

Major role for landscape architects at the Festival of Britain

Sylvia Crowe becomes president

1959

Nigel Thorne on Peter Youngman

1929

President Adam White highlights the best of the last 90 years.

#choo launch Presid

2016

FEATURES

Nine books for ninety years

With only nine choices, Jo Phillips decides on the best.

A century of landscape design

The Twentieth Century Society, the champion for the architecture of the last century, now looks at the challenges of preserving the landscapes of this important period.

Nine decades, nine inspiring women in landscape architecture

Karen Fitzsimon inspires the next generation.

Visions of landscape from afar

The evolving relationship between landscape practice and urban design Paul Reynolds, honorary secretary of The Urban Design Group celebrates 40 years.

Will Jennings looks back from the future.

LI LIFE

change and 65 Climate biological diversity

Landscape 68 Scottish Alliance launch

and 69 Events training

The LI has declared a Climate Emergency. We explain what this will mean for the organisation and for members.

The LI in Scotland has been coordinating a major new piece of work.

Find out about the LIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on demand training portal and book your next CPDÂ training course.

We asked some of our leading members to recall the people who have had a significant influence on their life, work or practice.

Johanna Gibbons on

Dame Sylvia Crowe

I first met Dame Sylvia in Oxfordshire in 1977. She already knew my grandfather, Sir Basil Spence, as they had enjoyed many creative collaborations, including the design for the setting of Trawsfynydd Power Station and my father was working with her on the redesign of a private estate at the time. Hearing that I was considering landscape as a career, the client took me under his wing and invited me for a weekend with Dame Sylvia at his house. Aged just 17, I was certainly not going to pass up the opportunity, although the prospect of two full days together was quite daunting. At that time Dame Sylvia was 76 years old. Her modest disposition belied a formidable international reputation held by few other professionals in the field, then or since. A distinguished landscape architect, former President of the Landscape Institute and former Secretary General of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). Her diminutive figure, neat and practical dress and quiet infectious enthusiasm for the landscape impressed me enormously as we took walks together through the landscape. At the time, there were not many women who’d independently forged such a successful professional career, who could be looked up to 6

as a role model. She advised me there was only one person to train under in her opinion and that was Professor David Skinner at Edinburgh College of Art, a former student of Ian McHarg, who had recently set up an undergraduate course. Through my student days in Edinburgh I had the privilege of meeting Dame Sylvia several times. In London, I’d occasionally pick her up from her flat in Notting Hill Gate in my beaten-up MG and she would relish the journey to site or through London’s back streets to Islington to my grandfather and father’s office. At university, I was asked to accompany her up a Scottish hillside while on a field trip, so she could point out to the assembled group how to read the landscape. I’ll not forget holding an umbrella firmly in the wind over this frail but determined woman while she described the view which no one could see clearly through driving rain. She knew the landscape like

the back of her hand, so despite the weather and the cataracts that she suffered from in both eyes, we learnt of the multi-functional forestry practice she pioneered through her unique and celebrated role as the first landscape advisor to the Forestry Commission. My most vivid memory was Dame Sylvia recollecting the early meetings in founding IFLA, which were convened in a Swiss meadow. This struck me as the most civilised way of conducting business, an inspiring image that has remained with me ever since. Some 40 years later we have convened a meeting of great minds in the arts and natural sciences in a Norwegian meadow, which coincides with the next IFLA conference in Oslo. This is part of our work with the New Munch Museum. Gathering together in amongst the wildflowers of the Oslofjord this September will be, for me, carried out in honour of Dame Sylvia Crowe.

Johanna Gibbons is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute and founding member of J & L Gibbons LLP established in 1986 and founding Director of Landscape Learn. Johanna is a member of advisory panels including Historic England’s Urban Panel, HS2’s Design Panel and the Forestry Commission’s Forestry and Woodland Advisory Panel. She is currently External Examiner at Edinburgh University / Edinburgh College of Art.

1. Dame Sylvia Crowe. © MERL/Landscape Institute Collection

BRIEFING

Annabel Downs on

Geoffrey Jellicoe 1. Geoffrey Jellicoe. © MERL/Landscape Institute Collection

Having been involved in the landscape profession for over three decades, and like others on voluntary committees, I have been fortunate to encounter many talented and generous landscape architects who have influenced the way I think, see or operate.

My first boss was Peter Shepheard, his practice at SEH was forward looking, cultural, interested in its staff and a fun place to be. He was a talented and engaging designer and he definitely shaped me, so it may seem quirky to identify someone else whom I scarcely knew but who changed my life in an entirely unanticipated way. As part of his move from Highpoint in London, to Devon, Geoffrey Jellicoe had arranged with Sheila Harvey, the LI librarian, for her to take a stack of books as well as his plan chest of drawings. The early ILA (Institite of Landscape Architects) Constitution’s aims of those first members (of whom

Jellicoe was one), was to establish an archive of books and lantern slides; the former for its members, the latter to explain to other professions and the public what their work was about. It took years for the library to be established, but when Jellicoe handed over his drawings in 1994 the most exciting part of the LI archive had just begun. Sheila invited me to volunteer to catalogue the drawings. We both assumed this was a discrete collection and a short term role, but it seems that Jellicoe knew exactly what he was doing and following a visit to the RIBA about conservation methods and their archive (which then had 600,000 drawings), it became obvious that this was the beginning of something much bigger for the LI. And so it was that the archive expanded and within 13 years it had become the largest collection of twentieth century landscape drawings and papers in the UK, rich in information on design, designers, ideas, techniques and individual sites, providing an invaluable resource for academics, students, practitioners, other professions and government agencies. Although the LI archive has

now been transferred to the MERL, University of Reading, the archive still needs to be kept alive and growing with a range of new projects, including digital material. Do bear this in mind when your most favourite commissions reach the end of their liability period, or you downsize your office, and please contact FOLAR in the first instance. Considering the range of work the archive spanned, it surprised me that the most requested project from our archive was Jellicoe’s Kennedy Memorial. In comparison with other schemes, we had hardly anything on this apart from Susan Jellicoe’s brilliant photos and Jellicoe’s writings. A few years ago I was asked by the Landscape Design Trust to write a piece about the design of the Kennedy Memorial as part of a HLF project engaging children with designed landscapes. I thought it would be a couple of paragraphs but I have carried out my own research and found a hoard of papers across many archives and am hoping to publish the full story of this project and Jellicoe’s remarkable contribution next year, coinciding with the long-overdue exhibition on Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe.

Annabel Downs CMLI FSGD. LI archivist 1995–2009. Editor of Peter Shepheard LDT monograph, winner of LI research award (2006). Chair of FOLAR (friends of Landscape Library and Archive at Reading).Member of LI Plant Health and Biosecurity Group.

BRIEFING

Jo Watkins on

Charles Rennie-Mackintosh and Will Alsop

There was never any single influence on my professional life. Magpie-like I hoarded information for reuse at some later undetermined time. There were tutors who taught me the elegance of a beautifully drawn line or who expressed delight in cultural references as diverse as the development of cities, or the first source of Bluebeat records in Britain (it was in Brixton). I discovered Hoskins. I was urged to learn my craft and to write with brevity. As students we were rapacious, exploring all things landscape and many things that were not. As young professionals we began to formulate our own tentative philosophies and learnt how to apply all this stuff. Yet it wasn’t until I went to Glasgow for my year-out that things took a twist as I discovered the extraordinary world of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style. Through his work and that of his contemporaries who were working in metal, printing and ceramics I found I was able to make sense of this cultural soup which I had been force-fed and began to understand the relationship 8

between time, art and the built form. Mackintosh is not to everyone’s taste and these days is perhaps a little passé, but I was gob smacked. I loved his drawings, his use of colour, the fact that he painted, and above all that he paid great attention to detail. It all made sense. The way he designed everything for his clients, right down to the cutlery. His paintings of the south of France are worthy additions to any gallery. His motto (actually J D Sedding’s) “There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist” has followed me wherever I have worked or taught. I have tried my best to pass it on to anyone who was polite enough to listen. I also liked the fact that because

The Glasgow Style wasn’t fashionable in 1983, you could find second hand books with covers designed by Talwyn Morris for about two quid. And then years later, as something of an antidote to the Glaswegians, I stumbled across the work of Will Alsop. I was at a lecture at The Bartlett where Alsop chain-smoked throughout while discussing what, at the time, was probably his highest profile building, the Cardiff Bay Visitor Centre. He described this lovely spaceship-like structure in great detail until finally, towards the end of his talk, he lit one last cigarette and offered up as his main point of influence for Cardiff– a classic elliptical Bic lighter. Simple, elegant, adaptable and probably cheap– a quantity surveyor’s dream. The lesson of course was that the richness of fine art is one thing and the beauty of simplicity another. Both invaluable. Like Mackintosh, Alsop painted – there may be a connection. By the way, if ever you want to see an early Alsop, pop in to the Eagle in Farringdon Road where you will find a metal staircase he designed.

Jo Watkins is a chartered landscape architect and Past President of the Landscape Institute. He is a member of the LI Awards committee and Editorial Advisory Panel. He has taught at the University of Greenwich, London Metropolitan University and at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Jo sits on the Advisory Board to the Dean of the school of Architecture, Design and Construction at the University of Greenwich.

1. Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. © Shutterstock

BRIEFING

Nigel Thorne on

Peter Youngman 1. Peter Youngman’s vision for Milton Keynes has left a benign legacy. © Roland Jeffery

One of the very first senior members of the Landscape Institute I was lucky enough to meet in my early years was Peter Youngman. The impression that he made on me was almost instantaneous and ever-lasting. To this day I can never quite say why that was but there were a variety of things about this extraordinary man that has helped underpin how I view the profession of landscape architecture and its importance in everyone’s lives. We met when he was in his early eighties and yet he exuded the passion, dedication and enthusiasm for the profession of someone in his twenties. This continued up to his death at the age of 93. As his obituary in the Guardian stated, “his critical approach was masterly and practical… Youngman’s concern was with the details.” It concluded that he “was an extremely rational and kindly man”. Peter was the consummate professional, a past president of what was then called the Institute of Landscape Architects, he was way ahead of his time in his thinking and judgement. As the Guardian suggested, without his input in the master-planning of the new town of Milton Keynes

(together with Richard LlewelynDavies) “it would be a much harsher place”. It was Peter’s insistence that architecture and landscape should be contextualised and complementary that has influenced and confirmed my way of thinking throughout my career. In meetings, where so many would be all-consumed with the need to define the world of landscape architecture, he was always much more concerned with what we, as professionals achieved; how we went about it and the benefits to society at large. When so many were focussed on pigeonholing new members into divisions, in themselves limited to only three main categories, it was Peter who was the first to point out how “divisive” this approach was (and still

is) and how it failed to achieve the LI’s stated goals of inclusiveness and a “broad church” of professionals. He was never afraid to challenge the rather staid and “gentleman’slearned-society” approach that certain LI members were apt to yearn for; he was a breath of fresh air in his openness and invention. It also says a great deal about the man (and the true professional that he was) that in my search for his photograph online I discovered not one! No matter, he will always be the most significant individual who helped – and continues to help – me dedicate my professional life to landscape architecture and the Landscape Institute. His name, thankfully, lives on not only in his legacy of professional work across the nation and globe but also via the LI’s prestigious ‘Peter Youngman Award’ that is given to an individual or project that’s made an outstanding contribution to the environment.

His critical approach was masterly and practical… Youngman’s concern was with the details.

Nigel Thorne is a chartered landscape architect, Fellow – and Past President – of the Landscape Institute, and the Chair of Parks for London. Nigel also sits on the board of the Architect’s Benevolent Society and the London Advisory Committee of Historic England.

BRIEFING

Brian Clouston on

Jane Wood I was born in 1935 in South Liverpool. The city fathers invested wisely in magnificent civic buildings, libraries, art galleries, concert halls, museums and public parks. My home was close to two of the finest of these parks, Princes Park designed by Joseph Paxton who also designed Birkenhead Park, the worlds first public park; and Sefton Park which was designed by Edouard Andre of Paris and Lewis Hornblower.

It would be 22 years before I realised there was a landscape profession and that I wanted to be a part of it. On leaving school at fifteen I joined Liverpool’s Parks department as a student gardener. My career plan was to become a parks manager. Early in 1956 I applied to take advanced horticultural training at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. At the end of my first year Jane Wood, a practicing landscape architect delivered a non curricular lecture. Jane’s presentation was a revelation. I had worked in some of Liverpool’s finest Parks and visited numerous important

gardens but had given little thought as to how they were designed and built. By the end of Jane’s lecture I was convinced I wanted to become a landscape designer. Jane explained that to enter the landscape design profession I would need to train at one of the established post graduate courses, Durham [Kings College Newcastle ] or Edinburgh. I chose Durham. The University informed me I would need a National Diploma in Horticulture and a degree equivalent qualification in addition to my RBG Edinburgh Diploma in order to gain entry. Jane Wood was enthusiastic and supportive. She introduced me to Edinburgh architect Alan Riach. Alan agreed to allow me to design his garden as a set piece for the ILA Intermediate Examination which they felt I should take as a failsafe in the event of my not gaining a place in Durham University. Alan was delighted with the design I prepared for his garden and asked me with a crew of RBG students to construct it. News of my planned change in career was leaked. Dr Harold Fletcher then Director of the RBG, was furious. He opposed my decision, threatening to throw me off the RBG course if the pursuit of my career

change reduced the level of course work grades. This did not happen. I left RBG with a National Diploma in Horticulture, a Diploma in Parks and recreation Administration and the ILA intermediate examination. Other members of the RBG staff were remarkably supportive. The curator of RBG, Eddie Kemp, helped me a great deal. He retired from RBG and created a new botanic garden for Dundee University. The garden was hugely innovative. He worked as an independent consultant and later assisted me in writing a feasibility study for the creation of botanic garden in Jeddah. In the early 1980s he worked with my practice in selecting and sourcing plant material for Britain’s first Garden Festival in Liverpool. Jane Wood continued to advise me. She helped me in my election to the ILA Council and later supported me in my appointment as Honorary Librarian, a post I held for eight years. Her support was invaluable, I remain deeply grateful for her kindness in steering my career through its embryo stage, without her vision I would not have joined the ranks of the ILA in its most formative years. During these years on Council it was my privilege to work alongside Geoffrey Jellicoe, Sylvia Crowe, Brenda Colvin and Peter Youngman, some pioneer founders of the LI. I have always tried to follow Jane’s example in helping others join the profession. Brian Clouston OBE is a landscape architect, and founder of Brian Clouston and Partners. Brian is a past President of the Landscape Institute. The practice undertook large scale coal mine pit heap and derelict land reclamation projects in England in the 1960s and 1970s culminating in work on the reclamation of the Liverpool International Garden Festival.

1. Liverpool International Garden Festival ’84 guide, designed and produced by Brunswick Publishing.

BRIEFING

Alan Tate on

Brian Clouston and Geoffrey Jellicoe 1. The Kennedy Memorial by Jellicoe. © MERL/Landscape Institute Collection

It is, of course, an invidious task to select a single significant predecessor who has had a major impact on one’s career. I could select one of my educators at the University of Manchester – Ian Laurie, Tom Howcroft and Allan Ruff. Ian argued that good design can benefit the poor as well as the rich. Tom impressed on me something that I still tell students – “every project involves keeping things, improving things and adding things”. And Allan introduced us to ecological design way before its contemporary currency. Then there was my first boss – John Kelsey in Clouston’s London office, with his dictum that professional practice (and life, for that matter) consists of “filling what’s empty, emptying what’s full, and scratching what itches”. And that brings me to Brian Clouston (PPLI) himself – a business owner with a singular ability to trust and support younger practitioners and allow them to run his offices their way. That led to me running the Clouston Hong Kong office from 1979, at the tender age of twenty-eight. Our work in Hong Kong kickstarted a career-long interest in the design, construction and management of public parks. As an academic in the twenty-first century, I have written

about them in two editions of the book Great City Parks. I took over the Hong Kong office from Henry Steed and subsequently helped Harry and Jenny to establish our Singapore office – where, with his passion for plants and seductive settings, he continues to promote the importance of human immersion in the landscape. In that respect he is a successor to Geoffrey Jellicoe (PPLI), with whom I was fortunate to have a long conversation on 12 March 1986. When I asked Sir Geoffrey about his idea of the perfect public park he suggested the journey through (the “wilderness” of) Highgate Woods to the (Repton-inspired) parkland of Kenwood and into the Adam-designed

building (particularly the library) and the fine art of the Iveagh Bequest. And that, of course, is comparable to his account (see The Guelph Lectures) of the pilgrimage to the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede. Before leaving London for the University of Manitoba in 1998, I worked for a number of years with the gone-too-soon John Hopkins. It was a complementary working relationship – although I still find his appointment for the Olympics (a position for which I also applied) vexing … but the boy done good. And he tolerated my term as President of the Institute (199597) and its cost to our business. My mentor for the presidency was the admirably pithy Michael Ellison (who once described talking to a mutual acquaintance as being like a walk along the edge of a high cliff – “the view can be wonderful but you never know whether you’re going to be pushed off”). My move to Manitoba was prompted by marriage to then PhD student (in landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art), my subsequent mentor and co-author Marcella Eaton. I admire and thank them all. Professor Alan Tate is a Fellow and Past President of the Landscape Institute and a registered Landscape Architect in Manitoba. He spent nine years running the Clouston landscape consultancy in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia before returning to Europe to lead the landscape design team for EuroDisneyland. Alan then spent nine years based in London before moving to Canada to take up a teaching position at the University of Manitoba.

BRIEFING

Professor Kathryn Moore on

Geoffrey Jellicoe

Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe has had and continues to have a profound influence on my life. He was a beacon of sensibility in a world obsessed with quantification, the concept of objective neutrality and a penchant for simplistic reduction– an approach that remains all too evident in towns, cities and rural areas around the world. Jellicoe had a far more holistic approach to design. A polymath, he knew that to design well required not only technical knowledge, but also seeing the bigger picture, bringing in ideas, concepts, culture and philosophy to shape the materiality of the discipline; the quality of the experience of place. He knew that the art of design was not purely dependent on the size of a client’s budget, more than simply a matter of expedience. To Jellicoe it was much more than that. His understanding of the scope of landscape architecture, analysed so brilliantly in “The Landscape of Man” (1975) is still without parallel. In its introduction “Landscape and Civilisation” he anticipates that “the world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognised as the most comprehensive of the arts”. Over half a century ago he recognised that in its capacity to straddle the silos of art and science, landscape design has the agency to 12

deal with the complexity and scale of the global challenges we now face. I visited him as a student in the 1980s, determined to find out more about the art of design. I was awestruck by the paintings and drawings by Sutherland, Hepworth, Nicholson and Klee hanging on the walls of his home in Grove Terrace, but I was most impressed by the man himself, by the impression that I was meeting the éminence grise of our profession. After several years in practice at Salford City Council, frustrated with the lacklustre and limited profile of landscape architecture and acutely aware of the negligible attention given to teaching the design process, I moved from leading a 24 strong landscape practice group to put my money where my mouth was – into education. This seemed to be the only way to challenge the boundaries of the discipline and the profession and move it away from the mundane to what Jellicoe saw as “the mother of the arts”. I had a welcome

if totally unexpected response to my first article “Towards Creative Design” published in Landscape Design in 1991. Sir Geoffrey wrote that, “it was such a gigantic step forward for the art of landscape”, he wanted to come and see the next stage, translating the abstract into reality – “almighty difficult in landscape”. It caused great excitement at Birmingham City University. He came to see what my students were up to and we were all enthralled to see the great man critiquing the work. After that, every time I published an article he offered encouragement, advice and criticism, just as he did in our conversations over the years including an interview in 1995. His niece, Anne Jellicoe Mayne asked me to speak at his memorial service in the Royal Society of Arts, this lead to an invitation from then president of the LI, Alan Tate, to stand for Council. Subsequently, as President of the LI (2004–6) and as President of International Federation of Landscape Architects (2014–2018), Jellicoe’s artistic, critical design expertise, together with his vision and ambition to develop the education and practice of the discipline across the world, has sustained me. I will always value his council and inspiration.

Kathryn Moore is President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and Professor of Landscape Architecture at Birmingham City University and a former President of the Landscape Institute. She has published extensively on design quality, theory, education and practice. Her book Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design (2010) provides the basis for critical, artistic discourse.

1. Water Gardens at Hemel Hempstead designed by Jellicoe and restored by HTA. © Nick Harrison/HTA

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BRIEFING By Joe Kerr

Conflict in landscape Joe Kerr explores some of the arguments around landscape that faced the Institute when it was created, and then considers what lessons we can draw from these issues as we face them today

iven the uniquely British obsession with landscape, our reaction to this ninetieth birthday celebration for the Landscape Institute should perhaps be tinged with surprise at its relative youth, rather than admiration at its maturity. Depending on one’s particular viewpoint we’ve been improving and reshaping the landscape for at least three centuries, or mutilating and destroying it. But of course what marks out the 1929 foundation of this august body, and makes its activities distinct from the work of predecessors, was its ambition to professionalise the work of its members: to place them on a par with architects and planners. This really only became a possibility once landscape practitioners had leapt the private garden fence and taken their place in the public and commercial realms, an ambition that was largely achieved in the twentieth century. Indeed in retrospect, the Institute has proved remarkably successful in elevating the status and influence of landscape practitioners, to the point where what were once ideals of landscape have become embedded in our physical environments. Without them it’s difficult to conceive that the

protection and support now in place for our most valued environments, and the degree of access provided to them that we now all enjoy, would have been remotely possible. So it’s clear that congratulations are in order as the Landscape Institute enters its tenth decade, and studying the timeline of achievements and events that it has been associated with, one can read a narrative of steady progress: from an uncertain world in which nature was vulnerable and undervalued and unmanaged, through a near century of campaigning, activism and legislation, to the point where our landscape is safely and lovingly deposited in professional hands. But this widely accepted narrative of steady upward progress – however reassuring, might be outdated. Just as

we no longer believe that, say, public health, housing or education have travelled on an unbroken path of enlightened reform and improvement to the present day (as many of us were once taught) we should not make the same assumption about our attitudes to the landscape. Indeed, I would argue it is the central paradox of our love affair with the British landscape that in reality we have never, ever been able to agree on any single or universal aspect of the subject: we do not cease to argue about such fundamentals as what function it should serve, who should own it, who should have access to it, who is qualified to an opinion about it, or even where it should be located! It is not within the scope of this brief essay to discuss every dispute on

1. Kinder Scout Mass Trespass 1932. © Courtesy of Chorley Historical and Archaelogical Society

2. ‘Hiking’ 1936, James Walker Tucker. © Tyne and Wear Museum, Bridgman Images

“a demonstration for the rights of ordinary people to walk on land stolen from them in earlier times”

landscape over the last ninety years, but by considering some of the significant debates and events that were raging at the time of the Institute’s inception, and then to assess where things stand today, it is possible to tease out the importance of conflict and disagreement in shaping our policies and our feelings towards landscape, one that challenges any sense of a seamless and harmonious progress and development. At the heart of all these disputes lie those two most intractable of conundrums, namely the manageable and sustainable relationship between city and country, and the right of access to those landscapes. The Landscape Institute was born exactly midway between the two world wars, themselves inevitably crucial in shaping contemporary attitudes to landscape, but it was in the two decades in between that so many important debates about the land and its uses were played out, with viewpoints becoming ever more polarised. Thus whilst the horror of the

Great War, and its haunting images of nightmarish landscapes, stimulated a new concern for the countryside and its restorative properties, the interwar years heralded unprecedented threats to our rural environments. In particular, landscape became one of the crucial battlegrounds between modernist ideologies of science and objectivity, and romantic and nostalgic narratives of pastoral innocence. If we consider some specific battles that helped to shape both public and professional attitudes to landscape in the inter-war years, and which remain contentious to this day, we start to raise pertinent questions about the status of landscape in contemporary society. So what kind of arguments ranged around the issue of landscape when the Institute was created, and how do we experience them now? The first and most familiar of these concerns the “right” to the countryside. The phenomenal growth in such health-giving outdoor pursuits as hiking entailed unprecedented numbers of people seeking access to beautiful

but vulnerable landscapes, aided and abetted by the railway and bus companies, and by motoring organisations, with their numerous maps and guides. The conflicting responses to this weekend urban exodus echoed in a modest way the contemporary international arguments about trade and tariffs; on the one hand there was a desire to limit access, especially for those judged not to be worthy of the experience, or even outright exclusion through asserting property rights; on the other hand was the great campaign, quasi-religious in its fervour to gain access for all. It culminated in the Mass Trespass of 1932, “a demonstration for the rights of ordinary people to walk on land stolen from them in earlier times”, as one of its Manchester leaders claimed at his trial. This fundamental and class-based conflict concerning access and ownership lies at the heart of the progressive narrative, because of course it was eventually to lead to the formation of the National Parks, thus affirming the landscape as part of our 15

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BRIEFING

3 3. Southern Railway Poster. © MERL Archive

The greatest threat to the landscape arose from the unprecedented encroachment of cities upon the countryside, ‘like the spreading tentacles of an octopus’.

common democratic heritage. However, the increasing precariousness of those constitutional settlements today suggests that they might prove to be temporary victories at most, as increasing exclusion and inequality threaten to roll back all of those mid-century aspirations. But the greatest threat to the landscape, and the most intractable arguments concerning it, arose from the unprecedented encroachment of cities upon the countryside; it is sobering to realise that London actually doubled in physical size between the wars through unchecked speculative housebuilding, or to borrow Clough Williams-Ellis’s memorable image: like the spreading tentacles of an octopus. It is easy in retrospect to condemn this unplanned encroachment, but if there was one idea that had widespread currency in early twentieth century planning debates, it was that that the

Victorian cities we had inherited were wholly awful and unsuitable for human life, although there was little consensus about how to deal with this perceived evil. On the one hand the Garden City Movement, which first flourished before the Great War but whose most significant influence fell in the 1920s, believed that our existing cities were beyond redemption and that the only recourse was to build new communities away from existing urban formations to provide a healthful life through the provision of low-density housing set within the landscape, at least for a privileged few. In many ways, the speculative housebuilders were merely following their lead as they ploughed up the fields of Middlesex to plant their housing developments, but neither the pioneers of Letchworth or Welwyn nor their commercial imitators, proposed solutions for the great mass of humanity trapped within the urban realm. On the other hand, the radical new architectural and planning ideas of the Modern Movement, which were filtering into this country from continental Europe as the Landscape Institute was born, proposed a total inversion of these ideas. In particular Le Corbusier proposed what today we might term a re-greening of the city: a city in which its citizens would live in modern apartment blocks set in verdant parkland that flowed continuously around and under the architecture. This seductive vision remained largely unbuilt in this country, but there were a very few exemplary fragments constructed of this theoretical future, most notably the Highpoint apartment buildings designed by the Russian émigré Berthold Lubetkin. Here Corbusian inspired housing units float above a lush landscape, which whilst resolutely conventional in its design, is more than sufficient to evoke Le Corbusier’s vision of the “tower in the park”. But whilst these two opposing sets of ideas offered either a town in the country or a city in the park, the built reality lay somewhere in between: a low-density suburban realm that was neither city nor country. One other polarised dispute over the British landscape, one that pitted

amateur enthusiasm against professional expertise, has proved surprisingly enduring despite its apparently peripheral concerns. In 1921 the brewer and amateur polymath Alfred Watkins experienced a Damascene encounter with the landscape on a hill in his native Herefordshire: the apparent discovery of what became known as Ley lines, the pathways on which he believed ancient monuments and natural topography aligned with arrow-straight precision. This esoteric “discovery” gave birth to a popular movement of devotees and a pastime that offered the same health-giving exercise as the contemporaneous rambling movement, but without the ethical underpinning. Unsurprisingly, archaeologists largely rejected and ignored this popular movement, creating an enduring split between professional and amateur interest in the origins of the landscape. So in the first decade of the Institute’s life debates raged about who could access the landscape, how we might live in it, and what we might uncover if we dug into its history: all fundamental questions on which we might imagine a consensus view could be formed. In the aftermath of the Second World war, it seemed that many of these questions had found answers, as the welfare state era ushered in both unprecedented consensus about what constituted public good and then crucially the legislation to enforce the necessary protections for our countryside and to enshrine our right of access to them. Indeed, the protection of the landscape was promoted in wartime propaganda campaigns as one of the key justifications for why we were fighting. Those great landmark Acts of the first postwar decade that established the Green Belts girdling our great cities, and threw a protective ring around the first of our national parks, spoke of preserving landscapes “for posterity”, and even “in perpetuity”, inducing the sense that final victory in these historic battles had been won. Our cities were greened as never before, as planners insisted upon a specific percentage of urban environments be given up to parkland, something easily achieved amongst our bomb sites; and of course,

5. Fracking campaign. © Shutterstock

those environments themselves were transformed into valued assets with the establishment of new kinds of children’s playgrounds. New mass housing schemes utilised high-rise solutions in order to situate their striking modernist monuments within generous allocations of open parkland. Most of us have grown up with the consequences of those victories, and have enjoyed their fruits as of right, in realisation of the dreams of those intrepid pioneers of 90 years ago. But in retrospect we now have to ask whether we have just been privileged to live in a unique era in which our landscapes enjoyed precious but ultimately fragile protections, in which the expertise and ambition of landscape professionals was listened to and acted upon, as more and more of those permanent victories now seems to be under sustained threat. For we now live in a society where the notion of public good or cultural value are not sufficient justifications on their own to cocoon potentially exploitable environments from those who perceive them as essentially unproductive. If we now review those battles of the interwar years, then it is impossible to avoid a sense of increasing foreboding for the future of our open spaces. Ironically so many of our most cherished environments are as much the victims of their own success as those mass trespassers who first pushed open the gate to the wilderness, and those progressive legislators who enshrined our national 18

parks in law, failed to appreciate that it is the very access that they fought for that is now proving so potentially damaging to fragile ecologies. Furthermore, the current controversy surrounding fracking and other forms of resource exploitation may only be a foretaste of the threats yet to come to even our most protected environments, as worrying developments in America now illustrate. As for the perennial question of the proper, sustainable relationship between city and country, the postwar consensus that restrained urban growth in favour of protecting our open spaces, that is now more fractious than ever, with significant and sustained encroachment on the Green Belt a reality with much more to follow. This is now a new threat to the kinds of open space that modernist architects and planners had designed into their mass housing schemes; the new phenomenon of “densification’ has placed many housing blocks, including some of immense architectural significance, under threat of demolition in order to enable a private land grab of the open and publicly accessible parkland within which they sit. So what are we to learn from this? Firstly, that those battles that were won many decades ago were not permanent and irreversible victories, and that these disputes are destined to be played out in recurrent cycles, with each generation charged with maintaining vigilance in defence of the landscape. Secondly, that the opposition

between city and country remains as intractable as ever, but with the stakes getting ever higher, new and radical ideas are desperately needed. Thirdly, that the old model of professionalism that has undoubtedly achieved so much in the past ninety years, cannot be guaranteed to offer the same into the future; the old demarcations between experts and amateurs are not just meaningless but are increasingly counterproductive in facing the battles of the very near future. And so whilst we celebrate this impressive anniversary of the Landscape Institute, we must simultaneously prepare ourselves for new conflicts that require new tactics and modes of organisation in order to meet challenges greater than anything faced by our predecessors.

Joe Kerr is a historian, writer and broadcaster who divides his time between the city and the country. He is currently working on a project to celebrate the centenary in 2021 of Alfred Watkins’s controversial “discovery” of Ley lines.

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Chelsea

The Landscape Institute returned to RHS Chelsea to kick off its anniversary celebrations. The Landscape Institute (LI) formed in 1929 at what is now the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. For nine decades, the organisation has supported its members through often seismic environmental, social and economic changes, to which it has also had to adapt. Fittingly, LI returned to RHS Chelsea on Friday 24 May

to mark this important milestone. Landscape leaders past and present joined with partners and collaborators from across the built and natural environment. The LI also welcomed senior members from the Norwegian Landscape Association, who share the LI’s landmark 90th anniversary. The event took place on Main Avenue in the RHS Back to Nature Garden. Co-designed by HRH The Duchess of Cambridge with landscape

architects Andrèe Davies and Adam White PLI. The garden aims to connect communities with nature and promote the health benefits of spending time outdoors. ‘During its lifetime the LI has seen many changes in the world,’ Adam said. ‘Each decade has seen great social change, from the aftermath of the First World War, the creation of the first council housing and the growth of the suburbs to the creation of the welfare state, new towns, the impact of major planning legislation and the growing awareness of climate change. ‘That’s why it’s important we look back at the previous nine decades. Many of these changes have affected not only how we live our lives, how we work, where we go to school and how we stay healthy, but also on the way we design, plan and manage our landscapes. ‘But while it’s important for us to look back and celebrate the great strides we have made; we need to remember that we live in challenging times. We’re facing rapid change to our natural environment, increased urbanisation and the mounting pressures of living in the heart of a modern city. That’s why LI90 will also be about looking to the future, and examining how in particular our profession can help meet the needs of our changing world.’

1. Andree Davies and Adam White explain the design of the Back to Nature Garden at Chelsea. © Nick Harrison

2. Arit Anderson, BBC Gardeners’ World presenter talked about the way in which Chelsea had become ‘greener’ this year. © Nick Harrison

3. Johanna Gibbons talked about her inspiring meeting with Sylvia Crowe. 4. Adam White FLI and Hal Moggridge cut the #LI90 birthday cake! © Nick Harrison

Bristol profession; work with people and professions from different backgrounds and actively collaborate and build a temporary installation.

1. Festival of Nature. © Chris Wilkins Photography

2. Shape My City young people on site at the Festival of Nature.

The first of the CPD workshops was called: People at the heart of placemaking at which urban designer Noha Nasser shared her experiences of immersive engagement practices in diverse communities. Attendees were asked to brainstorm perceived barriers in community engagement and codevelop an effective ‘elevator pitch’, highlighting the value and impact of community engagement to potential clients and developers.

3. Andrew Grant speaks about Gardens by the Bay at the Arnolfini. © Chris Wilkins Photography

Green Horizons: next generation livebuild Bringing together diverse young people from the Architecture Centre’s Shape My City project, university students from UWE and the University of Gloucestershire, architects, landscape architects and young engineers, the 2019 livebuild project included:

Bristol and the South West branch have been celebrating the LI’s 90th birthday in style. Events included: –– A talk from Andrew Grant of Grant Associates on ‘Gardens by the Bay’ at the Arnolfini for professionals and the public; to raise awareness and value of the profession and the Institute to a wider audience and press. –– A series of Continuing Professional Develop (CPD) workshops for landscape professionals focused on community engagement and co-design, led by professionals from diverse backgrounds and exploring: designing for diverse communities; co-design of streets and digital engagement tools, with the aim of upskilling landscape professionals,

developing skills and confidence and increase business and career opportunities within the profession. –– An education/careers workshops and ‘livebuild’ project for young people from BAME backgrounds as part of the ‘Shape my City’ programme to create an installation at the Festival of Nature; inspire people to join and increase the BAME diversity of the landscape

–– A series of careers workshops promoting the LI’s #chooselandscape campaign –– A live design and build project to create a temporary structure and public engagement activities for the 2019 Festival of Nature (7-9 June) on the Bristol Harbourside. The installation included a bamboo constructed ‘burrow’ and natural structure made from cuttings to form a ‘nest’ while ‘hive’ activities included drawings, writing and thoughts about people, nature and place.

Landscape Institute South West are grateful to the Architecture Centre, Buro Happold and the University of the West of England all of whom made a massive contribution to these events. Follow this link to find out more: https://bit.ly/2ZUdUHY

By Tahlia McKinnon

Festival of Ideas, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Part of the London Festival of Architecture, the Landscape Institute held a two-day Festival of Ideas with a focus on overcoming boundaries and landscape transformation

e live in complicated times. As we face rapid change to the natural environment and increased urbanisation, now more than ever, landscape professionals will play a crucial part in meeting these challenges head on. In its 90th year, the LI is 22

determined to reflect on the theme of transformation and examine the changing world of landscape. What have we gained over the last 90 years? What have we lost? And most importantly, how should the profession prepare for the future? Themed around ‘overcoming boundaries’, the LI Festival of Ideas

set out to provide a stimulus for these conversations – centred on the profession, professional life, and the landscape itself. With a series of workshops, walking tours and expert-led talks, we aimed to bring to life the stories of the practitioners and projects that work to transform and connect people, place and nature.

1. Adam White welcomes guests to the Last Drop Pavilion at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. © Paul Upward

2, 3, 4. Speakers at the opening event included Ruth Holmes, Maria AdebowaleSchwarte and Rainer Stange. © Paul Upward

5. Clare Risbeth addresses guests in the Park. © Paul Upward

6. Andrew Harland sets the scene for the next generation of Olympic Park developments. © Paul Upward

Setting the scene

A multitude of tests face the professionals of today. From cultural and political barriers, to social and emotional challenges and the tangible and physical boundaries, how do we continue to make nature work for people and places? Our celebrations began on the Friday evening at an LI Member reception, where President Adam White opened proceedings, presenting a timeline of the Institute’s key achievements over the past ninety years (pages 24-25). Ruth Holmes, Design Principal for Landscape and Public Realm for Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and LLDC Developments, followed with a warm welcome to a part of London which started life as desolate site dominated by a fridge mountain, became a venue for the London Olympics; then a Park for the East London communities of Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest; and is now expanding to also become the home to the new London Arts, Culture and Innovation quarter – the East Bank. Leading on the project, Maria Adebowale-Schwarte, Executive Director of the Foundation for the Future of London, reflected on the

challenges and goals facing urban placemaking as the Foundation prepares to implement these plans. ‘The mission of the Foundation is to connect the communities and our partners with the scale and resources needed to ensure the East Bank is London’s must-visit destination,’ she explained. ‘While developing skills, generating jobs and strengthening

relationships to produce a resilient, thriving, world-class neighbourhood.’ Rainer Stange, President of the Norwegian Landscape Association invited delegates to attend the IFLA World Congress taking place in September. Kickstarting the Saturday morning and preparing delegates for their guided walks across the Park, Neil Davidson (Continued on page 26)

In his opening speech at the Festival of Ideas Adam White highlighted some of the key events in the life of the Landscape Institute. A detailed time line will be published in the autumn. Founding at Chelsea of the Institute of Landscape Architects as the British Association of Garden Architects

1929

Opening of the M1 offers the profession a wide range of new opportuities and public sector contracts Sylvia Crowe becomes president

1959

1957

Ian McHargh’s Design with Nature published – which reassesses the role of the profession

Jellicoe’s ‘Motopia’ a glass city with cars on the roof

1959

ILA reaches c.1400 members

1969

1975

First winner of the LI President’s Award is Eden Project, Cornwall

Conference, position paper and journal on climate change Speakers and Workshop Facilitators www.liconferences.org

2007

campaigning for Friends of the Earth. She is a board member and judge in the Green Flag Award scheme, the national standard for parks and open spaces. Deborah has an honours degree in Botany and a Master of Arts degree in Medieval History. This combines her love of plants with an interest in how the landscape is portrayed in literature, from medieval to modern, and which helps to inspire her writing today.

Landscape Institute Annual Conference 01– 02 November 2007

2006

The challenge for landscape architecture

For regular Conference updates visit www.liconferences.org To book a place or for any queries please contact Sabina Mohideen on 020 7299 4514 or email events@landscapeinstitute.org

Capability Brown Festival

Opening of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

2010

Carole-Anne Davies Founding chief executive of the Design Commission for Wales, Carole-Anne Davies has worked with architects, artists, design and construction teams, communities and individuals on public art, infrastructure development and regeneration projects in the private and public sectors. She was a member of CABE’s advisory panel for PROJECT, has contributed to professional and post-graduate training and education in Lisbon and Barcelona and was awarded the Welsh Woman of the Year for Arts and Media in 2005.

Professor John Handley OBE John Handley is director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology, based in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. CURE was established to address the new research Malcolm Barton agendas of regionalism, sustainability and Malcolm Barton has recently returned to the rebuilding of environmental capital. John consultancy following a two-year appointment Handley rejoined academic life in 1994 as as Regional Director in Yorkshire and the Groundwork Professor of Land Restoration Humber for the environmental charity and Management. His current research Groundwork. Previously he worked as a interests are focused on landscape dynamics consultant advising on a wide range of matters and the management of change, ecologically relating to the natural and built environment. informed and participative approaches to Luke Engleback, MLI From 1996 to 2001 he was involved in resource management and the development Luke has 25 years experience in both private the delivery of Groundwork’s £58 million of adaptation strategies for climate change and municipal offices in Britain and abroad, ‘Changing Places’ programme. working at all scales of landscape planning and impacts. Dominic Cole, MLI design. His special interest is multi-functional Francis Hesketh, MLI Dominic Cole is principal at Land Use landscape design and adaptation to climate Francis Hesketh is a founding partner of Consultants and the lead landscape designer change and seeking low carbon solutions. TEP, an environmental consultancy. He and master planner for the award-winning He founded Studio Engleback in 1996. All has worked with the Forestry Commission, Eden Project. He is currently visiting critic projects consider climate change as well as Community Forests, Groundwork Trusts, for Leeds Metropolitan University graduate local character, and people informed by natural North West Development Agency and English diploma in landscape design and has held processes and ecology. Partnerships dealing with regeneration design workshops at Greenwich University programmes, green infrastructure, and Knut Felberg and the University of Arts in Vienna. He is site ecological and environmental issues, Knut Felberg is currently planning director CABE Space enabler specialising in landscape at the Norwegian Directorate of Public woodland matters and providing evidence at design advice. Dominic was a LI Council public enquiries. He has a deep understanding Construction and Planning. He has 22 member up to 2006. of the role of regeneration and the importance years of experience with regional, urban of the partnerships which are needed to attain Ian Collingwood and environmental planning and analysis improvement. Ian Collingwood works in the regeneration in Norway and abroad. He has special department of Middlesbrough Council and competence on strategic planning, urban Martin Kelly, FLI has led the authority’s involvement in the and regional development, planning and Martin Kelly is a landscape architect and urban Middlesbrough urban farming project. development processes, land use issues, designer and is a Fellow of the Landscape impact assessments, planning policy issues Institute and the Institute of Highways and Annie Coombs, FLI and instruments and cultural planning. Transportation. He joined Derek Lovejoy Annie Coombs is a charted landscape Partnership (now Lovejoy) in 1979, where architect, Fellow of the Landscape Institute Deborah Fox he is now managing director. He has and has a postgraduate planning qualification. Deborah Fox is a head of service at CABE specialised in environmental land planning She spent 15 years in Asia as a managing Space. She recently wrote CABE Space’s for major landmark projects on behalf of director of an environmental practice and was ‘It’s our space: a guide for community public and private sector promoters in the responsible for a wide range of landscape groups working to improve public space’. UK and overseas. He places environmental implementation, master planning and policy Her background spans management in sustainability and the importance of the public work. She is now a CABE Space enabler and local government and non-governmental realm at the top of the regeneration agenda. is also involved in brief-writing for London’s organisations and includes regional Olympic Parklands and Public Realm. Annie is a past member and Chair of the LI Technical and Environment Committee.

First major careers campaign – I want to be a landscape architect

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International Garden Festival in UK

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#chooselandscape launches at the Presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Reception

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Landscape Institute celebrates its 90th birthday at RHS Chelsea

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7. The audience met at the UCL Bartlett Auditorium in the Here East building in the Olympic Park. © Paul Upward

8. The infamous hole, the replacement of which was discussed by Anna Jorgensen green infrastructure initiatives led by Sheffield University and Sheffield Council. © Paul Upward

9. Neil Davidson from J+L Gibbons sets the scene for the Urban Mind research project. © Paul Upward

10. Clare Rishbeth from Sheffield University outlines her work on the Bench and on the needs of refugees. © Paul Upward

(J&L Gibbons) and Clare Rishbeth (University of Sheffield) presented key ideas and themes that would later be addressed in more detail at the afternoon landscape forum. First, a focus on health and wellbeing. Landscape professionals have dedicated much of their work to promoting the benefits of nature, but where are the opportunities for further research? How can we create informed schemes without insight of how users respond to them? Health statistics may speak for themselves, but how can we track how users really feel about their surroundings? Neil introduced Urban Mind; a research project that uses an app to tracks a person’s mood as they move through an outside space – an example of how new technology can monitor our engagement with nature to deliver data that can point to (and inform) a need for greener infrastructure. But monitoring this response isn’t so straightforward, given the diversity of cultural positioning on nature. With ‘The Bench Project’, Clare has researched extensively how experience of place is shaped by 26

personal and community histories of migration, while the social potential of the public realm is in its propensity to support positive intercultural encounters. To continue to create relevant and engaging spaces in

modern society, then, we must place significant emphasis on inclusivity. In summary, landscapes must live to ‘serve’ our diverse communities – so is it a case of ethics versus aesthetics?

11. Anna French argues the case for declaring a climate emergency and shows a film made by her daughter Olivia French. © Paul Upward

12. Bridget Snaith encourages the audience to challenge received wisdom on what people enjoy in a landscape. © Paul Upward

13. Anna Jorgensen from the University of Sheffield presents the grey as well as the green improvements to the centre of the City. © Paul Upward

14. Phil Askew with Andres Harland, Anna French, Bridget Snaith and Anna Jorgensen. © Paul Upward

15. Thamesmead as a semi-rural idyll when first complete. © Peabody Trust

16. Film by Olivia French on climate extinction shown to the audience. © Olivia French

Campaigning for change Landscape is more than a job after all; for most LI members, the decision to train as a landscape practitioner was closely linked to concern about the environment; to a desire to take principled actions about designing and managing the landscape, and from a simple commitment to doing the right thing. It seems fitting, then, that in a day enveloped in talk of challenging boundaries, the first panel of the landscape forum brought expert speakers together to discuss climate change and climate emergency. Phil Askew, Thamesmead Director of Landscape and Placemaking at Peabody, moderated this session and set the tone. As former project sponsor of the 2012 Olympic Park, Phil led on the landscape and public realm transformation into legacy mode, and when comparing plans with Thamesmead only two years later, he wondered if the profession had actually managed to ‘change much’ regarding green infrastructure, as the projects faced ‘many of the same challenges’.

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‘There is no landscape architecture on a dead planet,’ Anna French surmised, illustrating her presentation with a poignant film made by her daughter, Olivia French. Founder of the Landscape Futures movement, Anna implied there is much more landscape professionals can be doing to sustain our ecosystems; from rewilding cities to supporting soil health and reinforcing solar panels. There is undoubtedly a large role for landscape professionals to play in combatting the climate crisis. But equally, much of this call to action rests on inspiring the general public to respond. How can we encourage

communities to care about their wider environment if they are not reflected in the landscape itself? ‘Is a love of the outdoors universal? And what do we mean by “nature” anyway?’ A question posed by Bridget Snaith (University of East London) whose own research debunks Western constructs and challenges the notion that there is a commonlyaccepted concept of landscape. So, what constitutes a truly inclusive green space? One that is ‘viable, healthful, and buzzing with interesting activity’, she explained, subsequently noting the juxtaposition between the wants and needs of white and minority ethnic communities spanning Stratford and Croydon. Given all of this, what is the role of the landscape professional in resolving these conflicts? How can we effectively campaign for change? ‘It’s hard for us to be advocates,’ admitted Anna Jorgensen (University of Sheffield). ‘How do we make change happen in a time of Brexit and austerity? In a world that is constantly changing? And how do we create a vision for the future that will carry people along with us?’ There are actions we can undertake. Where climate change is concerned, landscape professionals can support policy frameworks and feed evidence into the biodiversity net gain debate. The LI itself will be working to facilitate more training around this area (see our Climate Change Policy set out on page 65). Most importantly, we must continue to illustrate the value of landscape, and we can do this by building a new narrative and seizing the opportunity to engage the next generation.

Let’s get digital Much of this value rests on how relevant landscape can be within our modern world and the ways we engage both hard-to-reach communities and youth groups. And how can landscape possibly continue to provide refuge in a world where the screen is most dominant? Accelerating tech progress, which permeates our life, has undoubtedly altered our connection to the natural environment. However, as a digital artist with keen interest in the environment, Kasia Molga believes nature can act as ‘partner and collaborator’ in the technological world; the rise of Virtual and Augmented Reality in practice and the Urban Minds app (as mentioned earlier) all good examples. Professor Pia Fricker (Aalto University, Finland) outlined the ways in which technology can ‘capture and reveal the real sense of a place’ and even ‘apply meaning to that site’. Evidently, digital placemaking ‘need not be confined to the screen’ at all, urged Jo Morrison, Director of Digital Innovation at Calvium, providing real-

world examples, such as the researchled NavSta app – a collaborative project with Transport for London (TfL) and Transport System Catapult. ‘In fact, much of the problem lies not in the image, but our consumption of it’, prompted Vimla Appadoo, Service Designer at FutureGov and Founder of The Northern Collective.

Making specific reference to social media and over-popularised iconography, she asked: ‘Is it just an avocado on toast you’re seeing? Or a symbol of unsustainable food production, pressure on farmers, fragility of inter-market dependency? We must question the bigger picture of our reality.’

17. Vimla Appadoo discusses digital responses to the world. © Paul Upward

18. Kasia Molga moderates the digital session and introduces her work from South Africa. © Paul Upward

19. Professor Pia Fricker from Aalto University in Finland argues for greater digital awareness. © Paul Upward

20. Jo Morrison from Calvium explored digital intetgration. © Paul Upward

21. Understanding the landscape of the Park an explanation from LDA’s Andrew Harland. © Paul Upward

22. Mathew Haslam from Hardscape presenting an LI90 coaster made especially for the occasion, to Rainer Stange. © Paul Upward

Landscape of a changing world With such disparity between image and meaning, how are we to ensure that our designs resonate at all? That the places we make meet the desires and demands of our time? In our rapidly modern and increasingly multicultural cities, are we creating spaces that are, in fact, more divisive than inclusive? ‘We need to literally look at the city through the eyes of local residents,’ urged Will Sandy, Landscape Designer and founder of the Edible Bus Stop initiative. Reflecting on recent project, ‘Reframing Spaces Caracas’ (a collaboration with the British Council) upon researching participatory design schemes to rebuild communities in Venezuela, Will was privy to the unique worldview of the city-dwellers, who highlighted both positive and negative perspectives of their surroundings that were undoubtedly invisible to an outsider. While Professor Rainer Stange, President of the Norwegian Landscape Association, unpacked how parks, specifically, present the ‘perfect opportunity to represent a wider cultural landscape’, through use of local materials, by example.

In this respect, it’s clear that where keeping people, place and nature connected is concerned, co-design and community engagement are key, while pioneering research led by many of the speakers of today, can move us toward a more dynamic, diverse and resilient public realm.

A vision of the future There is a lot to think about as we move forward, with the forum fuelling some difficult debate and raising new dilemmas.

How do we stay relevant and relatable in our changing world? Can we be both climate-conscious and data-driven, given the carbon footprint of the tech industry? How will the role and purpose of the landscape professional change in the wake of the declared climate emergency? And who should step up and lead us through this time of transition? Just a few days after the Festival of Ideas the Landscape Institute Board of Trustees declared a Climate Emergency. Further details are available on page 65.

In our 90th birthday year we are delighted that so may of our supporters have made such a major commitment to our work, to our events, to our celebrations and especially to our training programmes which benefit both current and future members of the profession.

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For further information on our paving products and bespoke seating innovations please visit: www.hardscape.co.uk or telephone: 01204 565 500.

Together we make a difference. Hardscape are proud corporate sponsors of the Landscape Institute and have been working collaboratively with many of the Institute’s members and supportive businesses over the years helping to produce many iconic projects throughout the UK. We would like to wish the Landscape Institute a ‘Happy 90th Birthday’ and offer our continued support in this, our 25th year and beyond. Project: King’s Cross Square, London Client: Network Rail Architects: Stanton Williams Main Contractor: J. Murphy & Sons Ltd Hard landscape and cladding works contractor: Szerelmey Ltd This project formed part of a Landscape Institute CPD Day in March 2017 in which Hardscape collaborated with Stanton Williams Architects to present ‘Design to destination: The journey of Kings Cross Square in materials and milestones’ which 31 included a site tour, to attending delegates.

F E AT U R E By Jo Phillips

Manchester Metropolitan University

Nine books for ninety years A personal take on the best and most relevant books on landscape published over the past ninety years A list like this is bound to create disputes. Of course, any suggestion that all readers of this journal might cherish the same set of favourite books about landscape would be preposterous. Still, my first strategy was to ask around colleagues and peers to see what books they would choose, were they in my position. Nobody agreed. A couple sent me their many choices, which were almost entirely different from each other. Some refused to name a single text that they would recommend. One said that she did not read

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books. In the face of this dearth of help, I decided on strategy number two; to compile a purely personal list, in chronological order, influenced by my experiences and interests, by tutors and students at MMU, and also, I think, by the city I happened to be in at the time of writing (Brasilia). I hope there are some things here that you have read and loved, and others that you will enjoy discovering. Gertrude Jekyll’s Colour Schemes in the Flower Garden  is still relevant to students of the aesthetics of planting design. It first came out in 1908 and has been reprinted throughout the last ninety years. Originally entirely in black and white, this book gives us so much more than pictures. She notices all; the preference for Verbascum in ‘the subdued light of a cloudy morning’, the hue of a scarlet geranium that is ‘pure and brilliant, but not cruel’. She describes her own garden with great care, humbly taking in the harmonious whole and the details of her ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ whilst noting that the ‘desired point always seems to elude attainment’. Jekyll advises us on how to look at plants in context. I find I am happy to be so clearly directed; her way of grouping daffodils is ‘the prettiest way to have them’ and Delphiniums are ‘indispensable for July’. Although it is usefully structured as a practical manual, her writing is all about the subtlety, close observation and artistic judgement of working with plants; ‘The business of a blue garden is to be beautiful as well as to be blue…just as blue as may be consistent with its best possible beauty’. She wants plants to be used with intention, so that ‘gardening may rightly claim to rank as a fine art’. In common with others on this list, her writing expresses a love of process. Her plants are observed and tended through ‘constant change’; she muses on how to make a woodland and a garden ‘join hands’. This book is all about modifying the dynamic relationships between things, and what does a student of landscape need to understand more than this? Written in the 1940s but not published until 1977, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain  is the story

of a whole life lived in the Cairngorms. Her writing is pure energy; the mountain range is ‘a mass of granite thrust up, split, shattered and scoped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water’. She speaks plainly of the ‘lust for a mountain top’ and she is ‘mad to recover the tang of height’. Her experience is truly elemental, and this is a book with plenty of deadly peril, skinny dipping and the ‘horror of walking in mist’. For Nan, it is an entirely mutual relationship and the mountain gives itself to her most completely when she goes out with no destination in mind, but just ‘to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’. It is rich and intense with emotion; fear, delight, contentment, love, triumph, amazement. She describes an ultimate embodied experience, written so that we smell the savour of the pine, feel the mountain air in her lungs and the heather under her bare feet; ‘as I penetrate more deeply in to the mountain’s life I am beyond desire… I’m not out of myself, but in myself, I am’. This is one to be read from start to finish in one sitting, ideally on a mountain top, with feet in an icy burn and warm heather under your back. First published in 1955, The Making of the English Landscape  by historian W.G Hoskins has been published in at least 35 editions. Crucially, mine is the 1988 version with commentary by Christopher Taylor. Hoskins eulogises about the landscape and wants us to appreciate that landscape is woven from many elements and processes in the past. Ironically, he does not approve of any of those processes that have had landscape impacts after the industrial revolution, which he thinks has ‘ravished, poisoned and fouled’ the countryside. Taylor’s extensive annotations are essential, as they are frequently point out that Hoskins’ interpretation of a landscape feature ‘is no longer true’, or even ‘far from the truth’, as he points out the extent of uncertainties about various historical ‘facts’. It could be said that Hoskins is reactionary, conservative, inaccurate and opinionated in his view of the English landscape as having been

‘completed’ before 1914 and only corrupted after, since when ‘every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning’. He is simply wrong in his idea that ‘most of England is a thousand years old’. But still, what a cracking read. If you prefer your history accurate and balanced, you would be better off with Francis Pryor’s The Making of the British Landscape (2010) instead. If, like me, you enjoy an outrageously biased and emotional account, then give this one a chance. Townscape  by Gordon Cullen (1961) is surely one of the less controversial books on this list. It is enticingly simple, with the aim of creating a ‘collective surplus of enjoyment’ in which buildings are brought together and ‘an art other than architecture is made possible’. Only occasionally esoteric, he writes plainly of ‘bigness’, ‘thereness’, and, like Jekyll, the ‘art of relationship’. His proposed ‘serial vision’ of the pedestrian as they weave their way through the city streets has been important in getting us away from visualising everything in terms of a spatial plan, fixed in time. Cullen calls for us to reach out to the public emotionally, with ‘an environment that chats away happily, plain folk talking together’, and his drawings and photographs help to deliver his message with great clarity. You may not agree with him on every point, for example the photo of a small public lavatory does not, for me, ‘sum up the functional vigour of expression’. But you must admire his attention to cathedrals and bollards, cooling towers and slot drains, lighthouses and ‘the dramatic scenery of the floor’. Against boredom, monotony and uniformity of all kinds, he was probably a great guy to talk to at parties. Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities  (1961) is a long book, and brilliantly unillustrated (‘For illustrations, please look closely at real cities’) and still it often crops up in conversation. Its central concern is understanding how citizens create cities, through an essential dynamic web of ‘physical-economic-ethical’ processes. She thinks that good people get caught up in the ways of

thinking encouraged by bad planning systems. She finds the North End of Boston, for example, to be vibrant, healthy, well-kept and cheerful, the epitome of her ideal ‘intricate and close-grained diversity’, but her planner friend calls it a ‘terrible slum’ because of the apparent chaos of the street life. She doesn’t mince her words about Le Corbusier, or about Ebenezer Howard, who ‘proposed really very nice towns if you were docile…and didn’t mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own’. She asks plain questions, like ‘what makes a city street well-used or shunned?’ and, like Cullen, she is concerned about urban monotony. Ahead of its time, the book discusses advances in the understanding of ‘organized complexity’ which she says is the essential nature of the problem of cities. Only when she refers to computers as the ‘new mechanical brains’ am I reminded that this book is nearly sixty years old. Invisible Cities  by Italo Calvino (1972) is, however, perhaps the most ageless book on this list. You are probably familiar with the premise; Kublai Khan, emperor of the Tartars, listens to the young Marco Polo describing the many cities of the Empire that he has visited – or so it seems at first. To Khan, the Empire seems ‘an endless, formless ruin’, which he is desperate to learn of, never having visited these places himself. Some of the cities are desperate and dark, like Zobeida, where men corner fleeing women in the streets. Others are surprising and witty, like Sophronia, where the city is in two sectors. One half, of fairgrounds and circuses, is permanent and the other half, where banks, hospitals and factories are found, is itinerant for months of the year. My own favourite is Octavia, the spiderweb city that hangs by a net over a deep chasm, and where the inhabitants know for certain that the net ‘will only last so long’. It is perhaps best not to hear too much about this incredibly rich and puzzling little book before you read it. It is wonderful while travelling, and you can take what you want from it. Perhaps the most essential book on this list; you need your own copy to dip into whenever feeling uninspired.

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In his preface to the 2016 edition of Landscape and Englishness  (first ed. 1998), written just before the Brexit referendum, David Matless notes the influence of UKIP in ‘trading in Englishness’ and taking it to the political right. He aims to trace the genealogy of ‘liberalism and conservatism, tolerance and anxiety, individualism and patriotism’ through his critique of landscape. It is an incredibly thorough and well-informed chronological account, through music, politics, poetry, television and all manner of other cultural sources, starting long after Hoskins has lost interest. It’s intensely informative, but not without entertainment, for example in describing the promotion of ‘outdoorsy’ health and fitness, exploring the organic movement via the rhetoric of Nazi Germany and a George Formby song about a nudist camp. He mentions the founding of the ‘Institute of Landscape Architects’ in 1929 and refers to Sylvia Crowe’s optimistic definition of our practice as ‘an ordering modernism, resolving any contradictions of the natural and new’. If you are after a wider reading list, then this book should be your first stop; the bibliography runs to over one hundred pages. The Landscape Urbanism  Reader, a collection of essays edited by Charles Waldheim, was published in 2006. I do realise that it is probably not a book that you will be taking to the beach this summer. Based around the concerns of decentralised cities, abandonment of land, de-densification and toxicity, its contributors continue some of the themes of Jacobs and frequently reference Ian McHarg. The first essay in the collection, James Corner’s celebrated Terra Fluxus, focuses on urban infrastructural landscapes and is about designing ‘relationships between dynamic environmental processes and urban form and breaking down the binary oppositions of nature and city. For Corner, the processes of urbanization are much more significant than are the spatial forms, and he aspires to landscape architecture escaping from marginalisation as a mere ‘decorative practice’. Other chapters discuss landscape architecture as

an ‘ecological art of instrumentality’ (Richard Weller), landscape as infrastructure underlying other urban systems (Elizabeth Mossop) and the reuse of ‘Drosscapes’ (Alan Berger). It is an important book, worth wrestling with and impossible to do justice to here. The inclusion of Robert Macfarlane on this list should not come as a surprise to anyone. In The Old Ways: a Journey on Foot  (2013), Macfarlane writes frankly beautiful prose about ‘landscape and the human heart…and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move’. His focus here is paths, which are ‘the habits of landscape acts of consensual making’. He walks the Broomway, a public right of way off the Essex coast which has killed more than a hundred people with quicksand and galloping tides, without a guide. Macfarlane is advised that if it is misty when he turns up at the start of the path he had better not go. It is. He goes anyway, past the sign saying ‘do not approach or touch any object as it may explode and kill you’. As he walks out to sea he finds his body and mind become almost indivisible form the landscape, so that for days afterwards he feels ‘calm, level, shining, sand flat. On the Isle of Lewis he walks barefoot, sometimes finding sphagnum moss and sometimes miniature gorse. He observes seal, terns, golden eagles. He walks with his friend Raja in the West Bank, ‘trying to understand politics by the means of geology’ and on the sacred Minya Konka mountain in Tibet, recalling past episodes of altitude sickness ‘like a pig-iron helmet’. He finishes at Formby Point, a place local to me. Like him, I have been enthralled by the 5000-year-old footprints of people, aurochs, boar and birds in the repeatedly-uncovered strata of silt halfway up the beach and felt the ‘unsettling power’ of these trails, the sense of co-presence, intimacy and remoteness that they bring.

Dr Jo Phillips is Associate Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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F E AT U R E By Catherine Croft and Susannah Charlton

A century of landscape design

he landscapes of the last century tell potent stories about our lives, and the worlds of our parents and grandparents, embodying our shared history and our aspirations for the future. Many of these landscapes were designed with a strong sense of social responsibility, particularly following the Second World War. Pioneering landscape architects saw the opportunity to create a better future for all, by designing a new public realm which took advantage of the perceived opportunities opened up by an era of rapid social and technological change. Whereas famed landscape designers such as Capability Brown and Humphry Repton sculpted the private acres of the wealthy, their twentieth century successors designed public landscapes – for factories, reservoirs, cement works, new towns, bypasses and housing estates – which have shaped our everyday lives. The most distinguished and significant of these landscapes deserve to be understood, appreciated and protected as an important record of British life, just as much as the great estates, garden squares or village greens of earlier centuries. They affect

the quality of the environment for all of us. In many cases, they form part of a complete ensemble with significant post-1914 buildings, either because they were designed at the same time, in collaboration with the architect, or because they constitute an important context for that architecture. In such cases, the Twentieth Century Society is often consulted on them or gets involved in campaigns to save them. What adds to the challenge of preserving these landscapes, is that they are often such a familiar background to our daily lives that they are barely recognised as being designed landscapes at all. The streetscapes and parks, civic buildings and housing estates around us are taken for granted, at best accepted with benign indifference or, at worst, ignored and abused. Public landscapes do not have the protection of a wealthy owner with the long-term vision and resources to help them survive for the future. Townscapes are particularly subject to the relentless pressures of austerity Britain, from council maintenance cuts and privatisation to commercial redevelopment. Even when their significance is recognised, well-meaning incremental changes – intrusive safety rails, excessive signage, inappropriate sculpture or

new planting – can erode the quality of the very design they were supposed to protect or enhance.

Lost landscapes Already many outstanding twentieth century landscapes have been lost or severely compromised. Despite our sustained objections, the beautifully executed essay in modernist landscape that was designed by architects RMJM with planting by Sylvia Crowe for the Commonwealth Institute in London was demolished when the building was redeveloped for the Design Museum. Simple planes of concrete paving, with elegantly thin railings, stepped up from the street to the entrance, which was approached across a pool, its base painted black to more dramatically reflect the borrowed landscape of sky and existing mature trees in Holland Park. All this was swept away for a development of three blocks of flats, designed to make the redevelopment more profitable but jostling impertinently close to the dramatic roof of the Institute building – which is all that remains of the original building. This is not the fault of the Design Museum or their architects but of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and Historic England, who both failed to ensure that the Grade II*

What adds to the challenge of preserving these landscapes, is that they are often such a familiar background to our daily lives that they are barely recognised as being designed landscapes at all.

1. Water Gardens, Hemel Hempstead, drawing by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. © MERL/Landscape Institute Collection

2. Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate Gardens restored by J&L Gibbons. © J&L Gibbons

building and registered landscape had the protection they deserved. Another recent loss is Robin Hood Gardens, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson for a difficult site beside the Blackwall Tunnel in Poplar, East London. This playful landscape of planted and grassed mounds, raised over the rubble of preceding buildings, was designed to create a protected space for residents and their children between the two curved blocks of social housing. Repeated requests to list the building and landscape, most recently in 2015, were turned down by Historic England. Revered by many prominent architects, who actively supported our listing bid, the flats were beset by lack of investment and maintenance and are now being demolished to make way for denser new development, including flats for private sale to pay for the whole thing. The evident need for more housing – particularly social housing – and the extreme pressures on local councils can make it hard to win the argument for conservation.

An accelerating threat As land values rise and conservation budgets are slashed, the speed of demolition increases, putting more outstanding twentieth century buildings and landscapes at risk.

The gardens of Highpoint, Lubetkin’s two Grade I-listed blocks of flats in Highgate, may not themselves be at immediate risk, but the highly-desirable land around them is certainly under pressure for development. This could be hugely damaging to such an important site, described by John Allan, as “the most complete realisation of a particular urban planning model – compact apartments in a recreational landscape offering an idealised vision of modern living”. Similarly the flats at Golden Lane, designed by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon in the City of London and incorporating a sophisticated landscape of gardens, play areas, pools and courts, are being over-shadowed by over-scaled and unsympathetic building around the edges of the site. A vocal and wellorganised campaign by residents has done little to rein in the ambitions of developers or the City of London to wring every drop of profit from the neighbouring site. Sculpture in public landscapes is vulnerable to theft, vandalism and even the avaricious eye of councils, as in the case of ‘Old Flo’, the Henry Moore sculpture which Tower Hamlets tried to sell off in 2012 for an estimated £20m. After a protective sojourn in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, following the demolition of her original home in the Stifford

housing estate in Stepney, she is now back in the East End, though on private land in Canary Wharf rather than on a council estate. Even in well-heeled Dulwich, South London, the Barbara Hepworth sculpture Two Forms (Divided Circle) was stolen from the park in 2011, and the theft of a Henry Moore sculpture from the Glenkiln Sculpture Park, Dumfries, in 2013 led to the removal of all the sculpture from the landscape. That these sculptures were probably stolen just for the value of their metal makes their loss more tragic. Such incidents underline a change in perceptions of public space, and the loss of a sense of communal ownership of landscapes designed for public good, too many of which have been privatised. The threat to natural landscapes by changes required by the pressures of public access and health and safety requirements is widely acknowledged, as in a recent study of Welsh coastline managed by the National Trust. Yet designed landscapes are just as vulnerable to these pressures, and their fragility is not as widely discussed. In 2004 the Twentieth Century Society objected to plans to erect handrails at Portmeirion in Wales, which was designed to resemble an Italianate seaside village, totally counter to the picturesque aesthetic.

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Saved by C20 Society intervention On a more optimistic note, there are many landscapes where intervention or support by the Twentieth Century Society has helped designed landscapes survive. In Guildford, the Diocese wanted to build more than 130 houses on land surrounding the Cathedral Church of the Holy Spirit (designed by Sir Edward Maufe in 1932–3), to help pay for the long-term maintenance of the cathedral. The form and density of the new development would have had a highly damaging impact on short and long distance views of this Grade II* listed cathedral, which sits in a commanding position on top of Stag Hill surrounded by open green space and trees. The Twentieth Century Society’s view was supported by the local community and we were relieved that Guildford Borough Council rejected these plans, following our formal objection to the proposal. The Twentieth Century Society successfully opposed a development at Manor Place, adjoining St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Arne Jacobsen designed the college as a complete piece, including the landscaping, which goes right up to the boundaries of the site. The college is one of the tiny 3

number of post-war buildings listed at Grade I, and the landscape is registered in its own right at Grade II. The proposed development was not of high quality and would have been highly intrusive. Our campaign to save the Surrey headquarters of Ready Mix Concrete started in 2014, when it was threatened with demolition to make way for housing just 25 years after its completion in 1990. Designed by Edward Cullinan, it consisted of a single-storey extension to a listed C18th house, totally integrated with an inventive designed landscape in a historic setting, which created an inspiring place to work. We were delighted when our application to have it listed at Grade II* was accepted, the list description citing the ‘exceptionally accomplished and richly-detailed landscape design combining courtyards and rooftop gardens’. Finally, in 2018, we heard that new owners plan to retain the complex and convert it into a ‘later living village’. Another office headquarters that we put in for listing was the HQ of Pearl Assurance outside Peterborough. In April 2019 we succeeded in getting not just one, but three listings for the site: the building at Grade II, the war memorial at Grade II*, and the 25 acres

3. St Catherine’s College, Oxford. © C20 Society

4. Water Gardens Hemel Hampstead. © Susan Jellicoe

of landscaped grounds registered at Grade II. Landscape designer Professor Arnold Weddle created a highly creative re-working of a familiar formal language which complemented the Post-Modern design of the Pearl Centre. Many of these landscapes are included in our forthcoming book 100 20th Century Gardens and Landscapes, which aims to draw attention to the importance of the designed landscapes of the last 100 years and to inspire people to appreciate and help protect them. Susannah Charlton

Protecting C20th landscapes for the future The protection of the outstanding designed landscapes of the twentieth century calls for the support of both professionals contributing to and maintaining them today and individuals who are prepared to campaign and care for the landscapes in their neighbourhoods. Statutory consultees, like the Twentieth Century Society and the Gardens Trust, can often only intervene to save a landscape at the eleventh hour when it is under imminent threat. Many excellent designed landscapes may not meet the demanding criteria for registration by Historic England, and need protection by other means. Measures such as covenants to protect the landscape, as used at the Span estates or Hampstead Garden Suburb, can work well in maintaining the planting and character of shared green space and streetscapes. Major sites benefit from having a Conservation Management Plan, which should include guidelines for both site managers and residents or

The protection of the outstanding designed landscapes of the twentieth century calls for the support of both professionals ... and individuals

5. Water Gardens bridges.

Susannah Charlton is a publications and communications consultant, specialising in work for landscape, garden and architecture charities. She has an MSc in Architectural History from the Bartlett, University College London. Susannah is coeditor of a series of books for the Twentieth Century Society, including the forthcoming 100 Twentieth Century Gardens and Landscapes.

Catherine Croft is Director of the Twentieth Century Society and Editor of the C20 magazine. She read Architecture at Cambridge University and did an MA in Material Culture & Architectural History in the USA. Author of a book on Concrete Architecture, Catherine lectures internationally and teaches a course on concrete for conservation professionals at West Dean College. Join the C20 Society: www.c20society.org.uk/join Book: 100 Twentieth Century Gardens and Landscapes, Edited by Susannah Charlton and Elain Harwood, will be published by Batsford in Spring 2020, and will be available via www.c20society.org.uk/books/

users. This has been done at the Barbican Centre in London, a landscape which has to accommodate not only residents and workers, but schoolchildren and huge numbers of visitors to the arts centre and restaurants too. Previous books we have published – 100 Buildings, 100 Houses and 100 Churches – have introduced outstanding building designs to a much wider general audience and we very much hope that our forthcoming book will do the same for the gardens and landscapes of the last century. The Twentieth Century Society is a tiny organisation facing growing demands for the conservation advice, research and campaigning that we undertake, as more of the heritage we champion comes under threat. We need your support, so please join the Society, as an individual or corporate member, and enable us to continue protecting outstanding C20th buildings and landscapes. Catherine Croft Director of C20 Society

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Case studies

C20 SOCIETY

The following case studies are taken from: 100 Twentieth Century Gardens and Landscapes, Edited by Susannah Charlton and Elain Harwood, which will be published by Batsford in Spring 2020, and will be available via www.c20society.org.uk/books/

1920s

1928 Great Yarmouth Venetian Waterways, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk by S P Thompson

Land reclaimed by construction of a new sea wall was used for a boating lake in 1926 and the more sinuous Venetian Waterways two years later. Funded by the council, these projects extended tourist attractions north of the resort centre whilst providing relief work for some 292 unemployed men over the winter of 1927–8. The Borough Surveyor’s designs were Venetian only in so far as they resembled a network of canals criss- crossed by bridges. Around the concrete lined channels, imported soil was planted up with drifts of perennials and annuals. Rockeries were another key feature that marked the scheme out as a bold move away from traditional seaside bedding displays. A series of thatched shelters were built among the islands and visitors could ride in electric boats named after Broadland rivers. Much of the original planting was lawned over in the 1980s but in May 2019 the waterways re-opened following a £1.7 million lottery-funded restoration. Kathryn Ferry

1930s

1940s

by Clarence Elliot & Berthold Lubetkin

by Jellicoe, Haywood, Windsor, Jarvis

1938 Highpoint, Highgate, London

1943 Hope Valley Cement Works, Derbyshire Hope Cement Works (now Breedon Group) sits at the heart of the Peak District National Park. Designed for the quarry site in 1943, it was Geoffrey Jellicoe’s first such masterplan and has stood the test of time, despite the increased area devoted to quarrying on the site, well beyond anything predicted. At the time Geoffrey Jellicoe of Jellicoe’s death in 1996 it remained a contained, coherent, industrial scene embedded within one of the finest stretches of upland landscape in the country, a modern variant on the Sublime. Jellicoe’s decision to respect, even aggrandise, the strongly marked valley and hill landscape gave it staying power. He kept the line of the escarpment inviolate, while allowing the quarrying and the accommodation of waste to seep out in a south westerly direction. Around it all, heavy tree planting paid dividends in landscape terms. Above all, the site owners remained faithful to Jellicoe’s radically simple, but bold, designed landscape. Gillian Darley

The international renown of Highpoint has tended to focus on the architecture, distracting attention from the totality of Lubetkin’s composition of buildings and site, which together represent the most complete realisation of a particular urban planning model – compact apartments in a recreational landscape offering an idealised vision of modern living. Just as the two blocks complement each other – Highpoint I a sculpture, Highpoint II an assembly, so do the earlier and later gardens – the first a geometric abstraction, the second a contrived caprice of winding paths and arabesque lawns – the two halves being bound together by the armature of the central walkway. The garage roofs may no longer be used as a raised promenade but their echelon form still provides the perfect architectural attenuation leading to the grand finale of greensward tennis courts and swimming pool. And Lubetkin’s inspiration for this masterclass in modern classicism? Kenwood House half a mile down the road. John Allan

1950s

1952 Cadbury’s Factory-in-a-garden, Moreton, Cheshire by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe When it was decided that chocolate biscuit production was more appropriately located in the cooler and windier climate of the Wirral peninsula, Geoffrey Jellicoe was appointed to deliver the new factory garden and sports fields. He found it a ‘diabolical’ site, ‘dull, severe and intensely primitive’, imagining it a million years before ‘infested with vast prehistoric monsters’. He proposed bunds in the shape of extended serpents, wide shelterbelts and tree planting. But Jellicoe’s most inventive and delightful part of this project is his modernist design of the concrete lined canal along one of the boundaries. It is divided by weirs into ten pools each shaped to exaggerate perspective. It flanks a pedestrian path to Moreton station, from where viewing platforms suspended over the water are accessed. The most exciting thing about the canal at Moreton is that it was the experimental ground and precursor for Jellicoe’s design for the Water Gardens along the River Gade at Hemel Hempstead. Annabel Downs

1960s

1967 University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk

by Brenda Colvin In December 1967 Brenda Colvin submitted her interim landscape report for the new UEA campus, the buildings for which had been designed by Denis Lasdun & Partners. Her thoughtful and original approach has had a long-term influence on the character of the University. For instance at this early date she had written: “Areas of varied ecological interest occur on the site: …all care should be taken to conserve as much as possible of these various natural habitats.” She developed a close relationship with the Vice-Chancellor, Frank Thistlethwaite, to whom in 1968 she wrote a letter for use to promote the landscape, including the words: “I feel that any landowner, more especially a University, has the responsibility of ensuring for the future the benefits (of a landscape) inherited from the past.” Colvin & Moggridge advised on the first years of the creation of UEA, with benefits still enjoyed today. Hal Moggridge

Brenda Colvin

5 44

1970s

1973 Hounslow Civic Centre, Greater London by Preben Jakobsen Jakobsen’s design for this 5-hectare site, completed in 1977, expresses his love for geometry, earthworks and green architecture: modern interpretations of traditional garden elements. Four modernist pavilions, with interior planting by Jakobsen, are linked by courtyard gardens and surrounded by polygonal cells enclosed with yew hedges, each fulfilling a different function. Connecting paths of textured concrete lined in red brick mirror the Centre’s Portland stone and brick façade. The Organic Sculpture Garden flanks the entrance: the rise and fall of green and gold drums of yew create a sense of calm, ordered assurance. The building nestles within Jakobsen’s skilful earthworks, while the terraced Japanese Boulder and Rill Garden, inspired by logarithms, tapers into Lampton Park. Structured terracing is interspersed with water rills with hexagonal concrete stepping stones. Slabs of yew hedging form a backdrop to sculptural perennials, ornamental grasses and shrubs, with gaps offering intriguing glimpses into the spaces beyond. Alas little now survives. Karen Fitzsimon

1980s

1984 Mallard Place Twickenham, Greater London by Eric Lyons/Span Mallard Place was the last project of Span Developments Ltd, a company formed by Eric Lyons, Geoffrey Townsend and Ivor Cunningham in 1956 to create architect-designed ‘housing for ordinary people’ in landscape settings that encouraged the development of community. Constructed on a former industrial site by the River Thames, Mallard Place was completed in 1984 (four years after Lyons’s death) and comprises forty-five houses and fifty-seven flats and maisonettes, their elaborate architectural detailing thought to have been inspired by Lyons’s work at Vilamoura, Portugal. The riverside setting features mature trees, well-designed hard landscaping and lush planting, but unlike in earlier schemes, where the focus for community life is the enclosed green courts and communal spaces, here it is a communal swimming pool. The development of community was encouraged not only by the design layout, but also by mandatory participation in a residents’ association, which managed the communal spaces, and is considered by some to be the greatest achievement of Span. Mallard Place won a Civic Trust Award in 1983 and Housing Design Awards in 1985 and 2005. Barbara Simms

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1990s

1991 Pearl Centre Peterborough, Cambridgeshire by Prof Arnold Weddle

war memorial relocated with the headquarters. Professor Weddles’ carefully integrated design survives almost completely intact, except for the introduction of a maze where the wildflower garden was originally and alterations to the balustrade and parterre planting to accommodate a new entrance. Clare Price

2000s 2012 Queen Elizabeth Park

This is a truly rare thing: a creative landscape designed by an influential twentieth century designer, associated with a listed commercial office building and one that was part of the overall conception of the entire development. The design flows directly from the architecture and is deliberately functional not just aesthetic. Its primary purpose was to provide views and space for lunchtime perambulations for staff who needed convincing that moving from central London was an attractive proposition. It was functional in other ways too: it included lakes stocked with coarse fish for fishing, a parterre for boules and outdoor events, a physic garden and a memorial garden to complement a 9

The Queen Elizabeth Park, built for the 2012 Olympic Games opened to the public in 2014. The Olympics allowed land assembly and reconfiguration of an urban periphery landscape criss-crossed by major infrastructure. It was well-advertised that industry and polluted land were cleared and power lines buried, but less so that valued spaces for allotments, cycling and cooperative housing were also swept away to fuel wider regeneration. Still fragmented, the park is in two parts, North and South Park. Each has a distinct landscape character, and different audiences as a result. South Park, designed by James Corner Field Operations, with Piet Oudolf, retains elements of Sarah Price’s world gardens from 2012. It is a sociable pleasure garden and, on sunny days, is buzzing with East London’s multicultural community. North Park is quieter, with a less diverse user group. Designed by LDA Design and George Hargreaves, with Vogt’s wetlands at its southern end, it is a technically accomplished ecological picturesque landscape, foregrounding sustainability. Bridget Snaith Extracted from 100 Twentieth-Century Gardens and Landscapes by C20 Society, edited by Susannah Charlton and Elain Harwood, to be published by Batsford in Spring 2020.

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F E AT U R E By Paul Reynolds

The evolving relationship between landscape practice and urban design 1

The relationship between urban design and landscape practice has always been close. LI member and Honorary Secretary of the Urban Design Group Paul Reynolds marks two birthdays.

n April 1979 the ‘Institute of Landscape Architects’ was putting the finishing touches to its plans for celebrating its 50th Anniversary. At the same time, a diverse group of professionals from a range of built environment professions, including Landscape Architects, were also preparing for their General Meeting at the Polytechnic of Central London. They had met initially in November 1978 at the RIBA on Portland Place, under the title of Architects in Planning. However, it was quickly recognised that this title did not embrace the wide spectrum of professionals that were involved in the creation of our towns and cities, many of whom were not architects at all. As a result, the main motion for this General Meeting of the group was to formally incorporate as an organisation to be known as the Urban Design Group – a forum for 48

Architects, Landscape Architects and Designers in Planning. It was made clear in the invitation to this first meeting that the intention was not “… to usurp the various professional institutions already concerned with our environment and quality of life (notably the RIBA, RTPI, ILA and ACE), but rather to help close the gaps and take up a sensible, strong, helpful position in the ‘middle ground’ between them.”. This still holds true of the UDG mission today as a membership organisation with more than a thousand members from all professional backgrounds. What has become clear over the past 40 years is that our urban environment is shaped by an even wider group of professionals than just architects, town planners and landscape architects, with, arguably, professionals such as highway engineers having an impact which is often even more significant.

Throughout this time the Urban Design Group has maintained its original ethos by welcoming all into the fold no matter what their professional background. The only requirement for membership is an interest in our towns and cities and how to make them better. However, the relationship between Landscape Architecture and Urban Design has always been particularly closely entwined. Thomas Mawson, the first president of the Institute of Landscape Architects back in 1929,

Urban design, like landscape architecture, operates at all scales from individual streets and spaces to large scale masterplans and development strategies.

was a man whose background was in Garden Design, but he also held the post of President of the Royal Town Planning Institute in 1923, influenced by a period travelling around Canada and North America when he also designed a number of urban plans based on the principles of the City Beautiful movement popularised by architects such as Daniel Burnham in Chicago. This interest in design at the nexus between landscape, architecture and town planning could arguably make him what we would today call an urban designer. My own interest in our urban environments began when I was at university studying as an undergraduate student in Landscape Architecture. Urban design, like landscape architecture, operates at all scales from individual streets and spaces to large scale masterplans and development strategies. I found I was far more interested in the modules that focussed on the relationships between buildings, people and the environment; such as understanding environmental capacity when planning for new housing development or looking at the spaces between buildings and how these should be designed at a human scale which promotes walking 1. “White City” buildings in Chicago, built for the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) widely displayed and inspired the City Beautiful movement, influencing architecture with such Beaux-Arts structures as the Museum of Science and Industry building. © Wikipedia Commons

2. High quality landscape is often a major part of a successful urban design scheme, such as at King’s Cross, London. © Argent St George

and cycling. I remember looking at the work that was completed in city centres such as Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham at that time which was all about landscape architecture as a driver for urban regeneration. This was reflected in the work of the Urban Task Force chaired by Lord Rogers and their ‘Towards an Urban Renaissance’ report struck a chord with me and I decided to continue to pursue my passion in all things urban by taking a Master’s Degree in Urban Design. I quickly discovered that there were many similarities between the two and this is something which is reflected in the work I have been undertaking as a practitioner ever since. The course ran for two years part-time, and much of the first year was teaching the spatial design basics that I had learnt as a landscape architecture student, but then the second year taught me a new range of skills which I hadn’t gained on my undergraduate course. Understanding the relationships between buildings, learning about block sizes and basic development economics are all vital tools in urban design, were not on my curriculum as a student of Landscape Architecture. However, I believe that the basic skills and understanding of people,

movement, nature and unconfined space is something which underpins good urban design and is at the heart of the Landscape Architect’s toolbox. In 2008 I wrote an article about collaboration between the professions and in that I spoke of how I see Urban Design as a common language which is spoken by many people across the built environment professions, but not everybody knows or understands it. I think that this still holds true but going forward there will be greater emphasis on trying to break down any language barriers and deeper co-operation between the professions and between the institutes, as perhaps we see a blurring of the traditional professional disciplines. There are now a significant number of people that see themselves first and foremost as Urban Designers, no matter what their original training. They often struggle to find a home in any of the ‘traditional’ institutes, and there is a clear demand for somewhere they can get the professional recognition and support they need. As somebody that sits in this space between Landscape and Urban Design, I am pleased that we are starting to have conversations about how this demand can be met, and I am sure that in the future the relationship between urban design and landscape architecture, and urban designers and landscape architects, will continue to strengthen. Paul Reynolds is Director of Urben Studio. 49

50 1

F E AT U R E By Karen Fitzsimon CMLI

Nine decades, nine inspiring women in landscape architecture Karen Fitzsimon recalls some of the phenomenal female practitioners who have contributed toÂ the establishment, growth and reputation of the Institute over ninety years.

hoebe Waller-Bridge might be making all the right headlines at the moment with TV dramas such as Killing Eve representing a new wave of British female screen-writers. But in terms of giving women opportunities, the landscape profession seems, outwardly at least, to be ahead of the game. From the current membership there are only 6.84% more men than women and this differential has been reducing broadly each year over the past five. However, as Romy Rawlings CMLI, Chair of the LIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, observes in her response to the LI 2018 State of Landscape practice survey (21 May 2018), although there is no gender

balance inequality at entry level, the gender pay gap at higher salary widens and the number of women represented in the membership at that level diminishes. Only four of the 42 Presidents to date have been women. Brenda Colvin CBE was our first female President in 1951, Dame Sylvia Crowe in 1957 and then 47 years later Professor Kathryn Moore followed by Sue Illman in 2012. It would certainly be great to have more visible senior female role models in the LI makeup and in practices. To inspire us, and in honour of our 90th birthday, here are some of the phenomenal women who have contributed to the establishment, growth and reputation of the Institute over ninety years. 51 2

F E AT U R E

Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood née Gill (1897 – 1976)

Born in Kent she was a social reformer, children’s rights activist and landscape architect. Allen read horticulture at the University of Reading from 1918-20, after which she established herself as a landscape designer-gardener. During a 1921 visit to Rome to see her brother and to explore the city’s gardens, she met conscientious objector and socialist Clifford Allen. They married the same year. In 1930 her innovative and complex Selfridges’ roof garden opened, which she developed with Richard Sudell (1892-1968). The garden attracted thousands of visitors each week and included a pergola, pools, lawn and sculpture. Throughout the 1920s and 30s she wrote articles for the national press on aspects of garden design, horticulture, roof gardens and, presciently, the importance of school gardens and the amenity and community value of allotments. In 1936 she wrote an article on landscape architecture as a career for women. With Richard Sudell and others Allen was a founding member of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1929 and was elected its first Fellow in 1930. In 1948 she initiated the establishment of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). Her activism on behalf of children started during World War II and she was one of those that advocated for 52

what became the Children Act 1948. Initially concerned with the welfare of displaced children, her interests expanded to include nursery provision and play. The latter was prompted by a visit to Denmark where she discovered Professor Sørensen’s ingenious junk playground at Emdrup. It was a lightbulb moment and she realised the opportunity to fuse her welfare campaigning for children with landscape architecture. She went on to champion the development of adventure playgrounds and play provision generally in Britain. With her support, Britain’s first adventure playground opened in 1948. Her books and pamphlets included Adventure Playgrounds (1961). She teamed up with Susan Jellicoe to produce The things we see: gardens (1953), The New Small Garden (1956) and Town Gardens to Live in (1977).

Brenda Colvin CBE PPLI (1897 – 1981)

a founding member of the ILA becoming its President in 1951, the first woman to hold the office and thought to be the first female president of any built-environment body. She was also a founding member of IFLA in 1948. Born in India, her early years exposed her to a diverse range of landscapes, plants and gardens. In 1918 he entered Swanley Horticultural College for Women and was drawn to the landscape design course taught by landscape architect Madeline Agar, who had trained in the USA. When Agar left, Colvin was unhappy with the

quality of the replacement teaching and showed her determined nature by leaving the college, taking some fellow students with her. In 1922 she established her studio in London, later moving to Gloucestershire. Over the ensuing 53 years she worked on 675 projects. She never formally retired and, rather inspiringly, her most creative period was between the ages of 55 and 75. Following the war her projects shifted from private garden design, in the UK and abroad, to larger scale industrial and civic landscapes, such as Aldershot Military Town, where she was landscape consultant for 15 years; Trimpley Reservoir, Rugeley Power Station and the University of East Anglia. Colvin was a skilled plantswoman and had a deep understanding of ecology and landform. She expressed these ideas in her book Land and Landscape (1948), which considered how landscape design can be used to support the British environment in its response to an expanding population and economy. She communicated her vast tree knowledge through her 1947 book Trees for Town and Country which became a standard text. Planning for succession, she invited Hal Moggridge into partnership and in 1969 Colvin Moggridge was born. Colvin bequeathed her Gloucestershire home and studio, Little Peacocks, to the practice ensuring that Colvin’s legacy endures both physically and in spirit.

Dame Sylvia Crowe, PPLI (1901-1997)

was born in Banbury and attended Swanley Horticultural College from 1920-22. She intended joining her father’s fruit farm business in Sussex. However, after a period travelling in Europe, she reverted to a childhood dream of designing gardens and in 1926 apprenticed herself with Milner White. Thirteen years as in-house designer for landscape contractor William Cutbush in Highgate followed, designing mostly private gardens. The company had an almost annual presence at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and Crowe was responsible for the design of a number of their entries, including a 1937 gold medal winning contoured garden with a bluebell wood, stream and pond. In another garden she designed a summerhouse in concrete. It was unpopular with the more conservative RHS crowd, but Geoffrey Jellicoe admired it and encouraged her career. Crowe joined the fledgling ILA in 1934 becoming a Fellow in 1945. Following Colvin’s footsteps she was the second female President, 1957-59, and served on the ILA’s Examination and Education Committees for many years. She too was a founding member of IFLA and held numerous offices from 1949, including President in 1969. Crowe was the recipient of many honours including AJ Woman of the Year 1960; Hon FRIBA 1969, LI Gold Medal 1986 and RHS Victoria Medal 1990. After the war, Crowe established

her own practice which existed from 1945-74. Commissions varied hugely in scale, from intimate gardens to large infrastructure projects for power, including Bradwell station; new towns including Basildon; transport and reservoirs, such as Bewl Water. She thought that such jobs made an important contribution to society. In 1964 Crowe started a 12year appointment with the Forestry Commission as their first landscape consultant. Using ecological and aesthetic principles she provided advice on views, pattern of landform, vegetation, recreational land use and the visual impact of forestry management techniques. She considered it her best and most satisfying type of work. She was also Tree Council Chairman 1974-79. Crowe was an early advocate for projects now taken for granted, such as a Thames path, which she suggested in 1941, or the creative use of demolition spoil, which she used at Harlow new town to create hills between the housing and industrial zones. Crowe was a prolific author and it is through her publications that we best understand her practice. In Tomorrow’s Landscape (1956) she shows how, with sensitivity and good design, large scale projects can be accommodated in the landscape without ruining it. At the opposite end of the scale, Garden Design 1958 reinforces the importance of historical studies and relates them to contemporary design issues for private and public gardens and parks. The Dame Sylvia Crowe Award for Outstanding International Contribution to People, Place and Nature was inaugurated by the LI in 2018.

Lady Susan Jellicoe née Pares (1907 -1986)

is not always acknowledged for her contribution to the profession. She was a linguist, writer, editor, photographer and plants person. Born in Liverpool to an intellectual family, she went to school in London and afterwards spent time in Italy and Austria. This was followed by further studying of languages at the Sorbonne, Paris. In the early 1930s she went to work as a secretary in the London office of Jellicoe, Page and Wilson and married Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1936. From that point she collaborated with Geoffrey on every project, including the establishment of the IFLA. She helped build bridges and mutual understanding by acting as interpreter at its first, post-war gathering. With the guiding hand of Colvin, who was a friend, she developed great skill in planting design, complementing Geoffrey’s lack of interest in that aspect of landscape architecture. Her planting designs include those for Sutton Place, Cliveden, Hemel Hempstead Water Gardens and the Kennedy Memorial in Runnymede. Jellicoe possessed a critical eye and understanding of design which enabled her to photograph landscapes, including those of her husband, with insight. Her collection of over 6000 images of designed, natural and historic landscapes forms a substantial part of the LI Archive at MERL. The scale of the collection and the fact that she took time to mount and catalogue them has made them an invaluable resource to this day for the profession 53

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and historians, especially for those sites where restoration is contemplated. Jellicoe was an honorary associate of the LI and edited and contributed articles to the journal for 20 years from 1955. She also edited the gardening section for the Observer from 1961-65. She co-authored the previously listed books with Marjory Allen, as well as a number of titles with Geoffrey: Modern Private Gardens (1968), Water: Use of water in Landscape Architecture (1971) and The Landscape of Man : Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day (1975), illustrating them with many of her own photographs. Likewise, her images formed the majority of those in the collaborative book, The Gardens of Mughal India: a history and a guide (1972). Her final publication was the indispensable: The Oxford Companion to Gardens (1986) which she edited with Geoffrey, Michael Lancaster and Dr Patrick Goode. In 1985 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature from University of Sheffield.

Sheila Haywood FLI née Cooper (1911-1993)

was born in India. After a childhood abroad, she returned to the UK to study at Architectural Association, graduating in 1934. She was immediately drawn to landscape and completed a number of garden design commissions before WWII. Her training in landscape architecture continued while working as Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s assistant from 1939-49. The position provided 54

experience on all aspects of the modern practice including town plans, housing schemes, quarry sites and heritage landscapes. Haywood established her own practice in 1949 and became consultant landscape architect for Bracknell new town. Like Crowe and Colvin, she worked on large infrastructure projects such as Maple Lodge Disposal Works (1949), Earle’s Cement Works and Thorpe Marsh Power Station. At Westbury Chalk Quarry she skilfully designed the huge quarry’s setting so that it was unobtrusive from the neighbouring heritage site of Bratton Camp and White Horse. She was one of the early identifiers of the recreational potential of extractive industry sites and expressed her theories and practice in a number of publications, including Quarries and the Landscape (1974) and through lectures. She was landscape consultant for Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridgeshire and also for nearby Churchill College. Haywood continued with some architectural work and in the 1950s she co-designed housing schemes in London and Somerset. In 1956 she was one of seven female architects whose work was featured by Ideal Home in their book of plans. Identifying as a modern woman, she designed a house that was for ‘the professional woman who is also a wife and mother.’ In 1967, working with architects Frank Briggs and Peter de Souza, she was landscape architect for award winning and now Grade II listed housing development at Oaklands, Reading. Her 1972 book The Gardens of Mughul India, co-authored with Crowe in collaboration with Susan Jellicoe and Gordon Patterson, was based on their extended field trip to the region.

5. © Paula Laycock. An extraordinary woman: A biography of Sheila Haywood, Landscape Architect, ARIBA, FILA. 6. © Rebecca Rose Cepeda, 2014. https://genusrosa. me/2013/08/

Nan Fairbrother (1913-1971)

was a landscape architect who broke conventions. She was born into poverty in Coventry, but her bright and curious mind secured her a place at Leeds Grammar School from where she went on to read English literature, with a scholarship, at Royal Holloway. She subsequently trained as a physiotherapist, lived unmarried with her future husband, surgeon William McKenzie and retained her maiden name when she eventually married him in 1939. She studied landscape design while her children were young and although she did develop a twoacre garden around her modernist house in Buckinghamshire, designed by her brother Rex Fairbrother, she is mostly known for her contribution to landscape literature. As a child Fairbrother explored the countryside around Leeds and developed an interest in botany. Her first book Children in the House (1954) described her countryside life during the Second World War and enabled her to expand on this knowledge, fusing it with seasonal observations, thoughts on motherhood and children’s response to their environment. The deprivation of her childhood gave Fairbrother a lifelong social conscience and nudged her to consider how inevitable human industrial activity can better embrace landscape. She developed her observations and theories in the seminal text New Lives, New Landscapes. Published in 1970 and written while she was undergoing cancer treatment, it is still a relevant land-use planning guide on how to

create landscapes that sustainably fit a new society into an older setting. The text was illustrated with many of her own photographs and were often of sites demonstrating the best practice of her landscape architectural peers. The book won the 1971 W H Smith Award, which was indicative of its success, influence and popularity beyond the profession. She was a gifted author who wrote in a freeflowing engaging style, with clarity and often with humour. Other publications included Men and Gardens (1956) an eloquent treatise on the history and meaning of gardens, using only literary sources, and The Nature of Landscape Design (1974) published posthumously following her early death. It continues where New Lives, New Landscapes stopped and turns her focus on how to design, build and manage a landscape. While it did not have the popular appeal of New Lives, it is has equally engaging prose with much to offer contemporary landscape practitioners.

Margaret Maxwell MBE née Howell (1924 -2006)

architect, town planner and landscape architect, was born in Kent and orphaned by the age of 14. She had a quiet but important presence in twentieth century landscape architecture. In 1942 she started working as map maker in the newly established Ministry of Town and Country Planning in London. She was inspired by her

architect colleagues, such as Hugh Casson, Patrick Abercrombie and Peter Shepheard, to study architecture by night at Regent Street Polytechnic. In 1945 she secured a scholarship to study full time at Liverpool School of Architecture and where she also completed a diploma in civic design. She worked briefly with architect and town planner Professor William Holford, who was largely responsible for the drafting of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Maxwell met her first husband, Robert Maxwell, also an architect, in Liverpool and by the time she returned with him to London she had an exemplary reputation as a fine draftsperson. She started at Bridgewater Shepheard as architectural assistant in 1950 and further continued her studies by attending night school at University of London to read landscape architecture under Peter Youngman. She worked closely with Shepheard for 17 years, contributing to his major works including at the Festival of Britain, Bunhill Fields, Goldsmiths’ Garden, Cheyne Walk Garden and the now Grade II* listed Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo. In 1966, with Shepheard’s patronage, she launched her own practice, supported by a small team of mostly female assistants. She secured landscape work throughout the UK including at Newcastle Airport, Whipsnade Zoo, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, Milton Keynes, the Giant Steps and Viewing Platform at Greenwich and Warwick University. She also lectured on landscape design at the Royal College of Art with her former colleague, Casson. During this period, she returned to architecture, particularly the conservation and adaptation of historic buildings such as the now demolished, Michael Sobell Pavilion for Apes at London Zoo, which secured a 1973 Civic Trust Award.

Sue Illman née Carter is a Chartered Landscape Architect based in Gloucestershire. She practiced first as a Certified Accountant then retrained in landscape architecture at Cheltenham College of Art and Design, having discovered the profession by chance at a careers guidance office. She later studied Historic Landscape Conservation at the Architectural Association under Ted Fawcett and in 1991 was a founding member of the Gloucestershire Gardens and Landscape Trust. Illman was the fourth and most recent female President of the Landscape Institute, 2012-14. Illman Young Environmental Planning and Landscape Consultancy was established in 1987. Yvonne Young was an experienced architect and fellow student on the landscape course at Cheltenham. Young passed away in 2015, but the practice continues. Significant projects include at Silverstone Circuit and Cheltenham Racecourse. What sets Illman Young apart is their specialist knowledge in Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems: Illman is a SuDS Champion for the Construction Industry Council. Mindful of the 2014 floods, a key objective for her LI presidential role was that the LI embed SuDS in practice by offering training and advocacy at all levels of industry and Government. Illman has delivered much of that training, produced or contributed to various CIRIA guidance manuals and created a fun short animation to explain the concepts behind SuDS, called Let’s Get Nibbling. 55

F E AT U R E

Passionate about professional standards and a former Professional Practice examiner, Illman was instrumental in setting up the Pathway to Chartership introduced in 2006 and previously served on the CPD and Education Committees. She is a dedicated communicator and networker, believing that reaching out across the built environment industry is crucial for the advancement of landscape architecture and for the best environmental solutions. In 2013 she was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Society of the Environment and has been an Honorary Fellow of the University of Gloucestershire since 2014. Sue became an expert advisor to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Excellence in The Built Environment report Living with Water, March 2015. And in 2019 she was installed as the Master of the Company at The Worshipful Company of Paviors, the first female to occupy the office since its earliest records from 1276.

Professor Kathryn Moore is an academic whose teaching and research is grounded by senior experience in practice. As Professor of Landscape Architecture at Birmingham City University, she has actively influenced many generations of UK based landscape architects. As Immediate Past President of IFLA (2014-18) and through her academic research, her influence has been global. Actively involved in the LI, she became

its third female President in 2006. Born in Birmingham she grew up near the coast of South Wales and developed a love for the big picture offered by seascape, horizons and the natural landscape. Following an art Foundation year, she studied geography at University of Manchester. In her second year she stumbled across a well-placed careers leaflet, suggesting that landscape architecture was a suitable subject for someone who loved geography, art and design. She subsequently undertook Manchester’s Postgraduate Diploma in Landscape Architecture. Moore started as a landscape designer with the Derelict Land Reclamation Team at Salford City Council. Within a few years she was Senior Landscape Architect and by 1986 was Group Leader with a team of 26 and generous budgets. Moore’s persuasive, political and diplomatic skills were honed at Salford as she argued to improve the quality of development and ensure that what had been promised was delivered by the local authority and developers. From early on she advocated for interdisciplinary and non-silo practice. Allied with this was the belief that landscape thought should be at the centre of all development, rather than an afterthought, in order to achieve the best results. Together with Peter Bradford, a planner at SCC they secured the 1986 RTPI Strategic Planning Award for Salford City Environmental Strategy. In 1988 she joined the teaching team at Birmingham City University where her research, which underpins all of her teaching, challenges the theory of perception that has been with designers since the seventeenth century. She offers a way to understand the nature of artistic practice, how to teach design more effectively and how to link strategic ideas and policies to real places. Utilising this approach, she is currently developing a programme for regional transformation through the proposal for a West Midlands National Park. Her theories are expanded in her book Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design (2010). In the ilk

of Fairbrother’s New Lives, New Landscapes or Colvin’s Land and Landscape, Moore’s book has become a standard text.

Landscape architecture provided women in the early and mid-twentieth century the possibility of leading independent professional lives. It is somewhat anomalous then that when Colvin established her practice in 1922, it preceded equal votes for all women. What characteristics do these pioneering women share? A determined, energetic nature and a passion for landscape. A forward, internationalist outlook with a desire for team work, including beyond their own profession. An ability to communicate about their work and advancing theories in the written, spoken or audio form. An optimism for the potential of landscape architecture to foster sustainable development. There is one other factor, apart from good clients, that might have assisted their trajectory. Nearly all have had autonomy by running their own practices rather than being employed. My hope is that at the 180th celebrations the LI will have at least 100 times more names in a line-up such as this. Happy Birthday to our LI!

The Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and Susan Jellicoe collections are held as part of the LI Archive at the MERL.

Karen Fitzsimon CMLI is a landscape architect, garden historian and horticulturalist based in London. Her specialist area is the history of designed landscapes of the mid to late twentieth century. She is a trustee of Turn End Trust.

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F E AT U R E By Will Jennings

Visions of landscape from afar Jellicoeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Motopia started life as a way of envisioning a glass-led future for the motor car. Artist and writer Will Jennings looks at this legacy. 58

1. Superstudio: First City: 2.000 Tor City from Superstudio Series 1971. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1975

2. Advertorial designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe for Pilkington Glass published in the Architecture Review 1959. © Architecture Review

n 1516 Thomas More published his imaginary other-world, Utopia. It opened with a map by Ambrosius Holbein, a diagram of the island prefiguring More’s description of the spaces, politics and ethics, beginning a 500-year tradition of visualising ideal futures. It made sense for More to commission the map, his was a time of new spatial understanding. Vespucci and Columbus were charting oceans, while Copernicus was developing heliocentric theories repositioning earth in a wide black sea. Though it was not a map to be read literally so much as a diagram spun from the few geographic references More revealed, at once offering a form for his politics and social satire to shape around and present some essence of possibility. Utopia, though the name derived from Greek οὐ and τόπος, literally “no-place”, wrapped around this diagram to give credence and visual veracity. In 1959, Geoffrey Jellicoe developed More’s Utopia, replacing

“no” with “mo”, with Motopia, the new prefix suggesting the motors his superstructure served as well as a progressive mobility and modernism of the day. A provocative proposal for a new-town theoretically sited north of Staines where complex threads of the River Colne weave through marshes, Motopia was a vast grid of five-story residential blocks with a rotunda at each lattice intersection. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s residential piloti-raised blocks over a continuous landscape, his array was to “lie lightly upon the natural landscape”, itself offering a mix of fertile agriculture, hardwood forests, pleasure parks interspersed with canals, and dotted with schools, clubs and restaurants. Jellicoe had studied at the Architectural Association two years after it moved to its current home, and cited Bedford Square as inspiration for Motopia’s gridded form of apartments with dual-aspect views over his reinterpretation of the Georgian square. However, as Jellicoe always looked to natural and man-made historical

testimony for landscape rationale, so he projected into the future for conceptual reach. The most radical element being to raise all Motopia’s roads above the architecture on a “roof road” grid, a roundabout atop each rotunda smoothing traffic flow with a spiral ramp to car-parking one level lower. This was a modernist system of order designed not to tackle increasing problems of urban congestion but a new model for living on new sites, encapsulating not only utopian physicality but, as with More, also social contracts and ethos of place. Motopia originated as a 1959 advertorial in the pages of Architectural Review, designed by the Glass Age Committee, a pre-war project devised by Pilkington Glass for a panel of designers to “suggest solutions to certain problems of town planning”, using “all the structural and decorative resources of the Glass Age”. Jellicoe joined the 1950s incarnation of the project alongside Edward Mills and Ove Arup, their double-page spreads designed to draw architects’ attention

2 59

F E AT U R E

3, 4, 5. Liquid Kingdom by Smout Allen, a set of speculative design proposals for locations on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary. At the Building Centre, London as part of the Contemporary Cartography Exhibition until 30 August. © Smout Allen

to modern Pilkington products with theoretically possible – but extremely unlikely – fantastical propositions.1 Other playful ideas in the series included: Vauxhall’s Crystal Span habitable bridge; Skyport 1 airport atop three skyscraping tubular shafts; Sea City, a hovercraft-accessed floating mesh of housing and employment anchored off Great Yarmouth, and a 1954–55 scheme for an “economically fruitful” Soho erecting glass residential towers looking down onto a vast concrete “garden level” platform of with glass-bottomed canals dappling light down onto the existent streets at ground level below. The three London projects of Soho, Vauxhall and Motopia most frequently recur in popular media, usually encountered as image and hindsight heavy What London Could Have Been clickbait. But they were never serious proposals, Jellicoe himself asserting Motopia as “diagrammatic only”. His drawings and model photographs acted as twentiethcentury updating of Holbein’s Utopia map, a visual render around which he could wrap thoughts of future responses to political issues of transport and housing. But his visual images linger in a digital world, distance giving a sense of legitimacy to what was really promotional marketing and ironic exuberant fun. A reason Motopia is a prime subject to be read as a nostalgic “near-miss” is in part due to Jellicoe’s mode of presentation. He followed the double-page ad with, Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape 2 2, a book adding context, theory, sections and plans, architectural models and text akin to a formal project. Though, within the words and images Jellicoe laid clues that he saw this as an imaginary scheme with More-esque satirical self-awareness. A fine line exists between utopia and dystopia. More was aware his no-place was not only one which didn’t exist due to its being fiction, but could not exist due to a requirement of non-utopian totalitarian oppression, violence and control. His island was worked by chained slaves, promiscuity

outlawed, bureaucratic population control saw people relocated on a whim, individual rights subjugated to demands of the economic system. In Motopia residents listening to the wireless are instructed to close windows to avoid sound pollution and that the top floor of the town’s tallest block is the “council suite”, watching the city with panoptic gaze, home to the “watchful eye of the traffic administrator” opening and closing roads facilitating smooth mobility. Jellicoe nods towards More’s satire in an imagined interview with a traffic administrator who states bicycles are prohibited from Motopia as “an anachronism in the modern world”. Looking back, other utopian

diagrams of the period are read as the radical manifestos they were, not as serious proposal. With Archigram’s Plug-In City, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon, or Archizoom’s NoStop City, we acknowledge the presentation of conceptual statements. Superstudio’s First (20,000 Ton) City, from their 1971 Twelve Ideal Cities, visually relates to Motopia. A farreaching grid of slender architectural walls forming a vast landscapeenclosing grid, hills and lakes framed rectilinearly. But due to its clearly provocative sci-fi conflation of utopia, dystopia, and irony, framed as a conceptual art project it isn’t perceived with the same “near-miss” nostalgia of Motopia. 61

An equally playful and unrealistic speculation on the future of urban living was Yona Friedman’s 1960 Paris Spatial: A Suggestion. A new urban fabric of structure sitting on stilts above the historic city, the Haussmann plan under a lateral scaffold interchangeably enclosing housing, agriculture, transport and employment. Friedman’s illustrations consisted of sketches over photography, bright orange graphically highlighting his radical proposition. Jellicoe employed the textual and aesthetic approach of a commercial architect, not such pop-art dayglow colourisation. Two years after Jellicoe’s book, Peter Hall’s London 2000 was published. His serious proposition for organising the capital city for the coming four decades, tackling the issues of Abercrombie’s green belt, urban motorways, housing density and the future of work. The dry, architectural imagery Jellicoe employed is much more akin to Hall’s visual language than the exuberance of the subversive utopian radicalism with which it has more in common conceptually. Seductive photo-realism of today’s CGI rendering is now the de facto mode of architectural representation, replacing sketches, models and diagrams in public dissemination of design. Practitioners of every level can produce sublime as-built imagery of any half-baked idea, their function as diagram dissipating as soon as they are coated in a veneer of reality, space for

public interpretation and experiment limited. Our current political and developer-led urban design also employs such imagery, similarly disempowering public imagination. Four decades of neoliberalism have already limited scope for imagined social futures, other than those permitted as by-product of capital, even before developers manipulatively borrow from 500 years of utopian aesthetic to give one-liner marketing images a glow of greenery. In June 2013 The Garden Bridge appeared in the Evening Standard with impressive digital clarity as a fully formed and ready to construct scheme, draped in sunset. Utopian imagery presented not as diagram for debate, but as a fait accompli solution to a problem we never knew existed. Developers have an art in layering speculative projects with biophilic references, suggesting balconies draped in vines, once tarmac streets flooded with nature, glorious hyperrealistic renders of a maintenance-free, eternal-sunset melding of urbanity and nature.3 This image is propelled by Instagram-friendly designers more interested in capturing utopian aesthetic tropes to market luxury, rather than as a considered response to an environmental emergency. This paint-on greenery fuels a market still requiring relentless destruction of the environment and existing urban fabric as it squeezes capital but with vines.

The more that speculative futures such as the Garden Bridge are presented to the public without consultation, presented as polished deliverables rather than starting points for collective discussions and – most critically – as “green” projects when serious ecological action is demanded, the more utopia is diminished to shallow add-on to market a project. I would imagine that if Jellicoe were proposing radical urbanism today, his attention would most likely not focus on traffic management but to our singular pressing issue: climate breakdown. For away from the clickbait images of roof roads and manmade grid superimposed over topology and landscape, there are clues indicating a collaborative approach between landscape and architecture. His approach to “lie lightly above the natural world” is one we must absorb more now than ever, as the consideration of nature and landscape as a ground-level starting point for urban design. If we read Motopia as a diagram, and not as literal proposition, then we can draw from it some of Jellicoe’s serious understanding of how landscape relates to urban functions and form.

Will Jennings is a writer and visual artist interested in connections between culture, politics, history and architecture. His writing and exhibited work can be found online at www.willjennings.info

1 See: Parnell, S., In Praise of Advertising, Architectural Review, 5 February 2014. Available at: www.architecturalreview.com/ essays/in-praise-ofadvertising/8658116. article 2 Jellicoe, G., Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape, London: New Studio Books, 1961. 3 See this recent post by Tim Waterman on a typical clickbait halcyonic image of London’s green future: Waterman, T., What’s Wrong With This Picture:, 24 October 2017. Available at:www. tim-waterman. co.uk/?p=333

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Landscape Journal - Summer 2019: The LI90 Edition

Articles inside

The evolving relationship between landscape practice and urban design

A Century of Landscape Design

Visions from afar

A Festival of Ideas: LI90 Celebrations

Conflict in Landscape

Nine Decades, Nine Inspiring Women in Landscape Architecture

9 Books for 90 Years of Landscape

On Landscape Leaders: Jane Wood

On Landscape Leaders: Peter Youngman

On Landscape Leaders: Charles Rennie-Mackintosh

On Landscape Leaders: Geoffrey Jellicoe

On Landscape Leaders: Dame Sylvia Crowe