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
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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
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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 But this widely accepted narrative of steady upward progress – however reassuring, might be outdated.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
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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
