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A Century of Landscape Design

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Visions from afar

Visions from afar

The 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.

Water Gardens, Hemel Hempstead, drawing by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe.

© MERL/Landscape Institute Collection

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

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

© J&L Gibbons

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* building and registered landscape had the protection they deserved.

St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

© C20 Society

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.

Water Gardens bridges.

© HTA

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

Commonwealth Institute.

© Clifford Tandy/MERL

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 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 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.

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