F E AT U R E By Catherine Croft and Susannah Charlton
A century of landscape design
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T
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
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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.
