The Ground We Stand On The power of a hospitable landscape

from Making it home: Creating a hospitable landscape

by Landscape, the journal of the Landscape Institute

Thermal comfort and its significance for landscape practice

Kampus, Canal Street © Sue Morgan

Landscape Institute CEO Sue Morgan selects some of her most hospitable landscapes and some which offer an essential historical perspective.

Sometimes all we need is a sign or a map, sometimes a building or landmark; sometimes the landscape needs to help us memorialise past trauma and at other times, the job of the landscape is to embrace the citizen, treating us with warmth, respect and serendipity. Here is a selection of images that illustrate recent experience of past projects of hospitable landscapes in the widest sense of that word.

MANCHESTER

Kampus

Last year the LI’s people, place and nature campaign spent a significant time in Manchester. In terms of newly created landscape, the Kampus project on the banks of the Canal, in the centre of the city, offered an inspiring way of creating a comfortable destination. The design from Exterior Architecture creates new communal spaces within lush greenery. The landscape architect tested growing ferns in their own garden to ensure this resilience.

Mayfield

Mayfield Park is Manchester’s first city centre park in nearly 100 years which uses as its inspiration the existing state of post-industrial deterioration with planting having taken over the site. Studio Egret West interpreted this state through the retention of existing structures and through their material choices, detailing and approach to planting design. Water management is fundamental to the design, with the de-culverting of the River Medlock resulting in softened edges forming a ‘wildscape area’ that can accommodate flood water should the river burst its banks. See the last edition of Landscape for details.

**Manchester Northern Quarter**
© Sue Morgan

Manchester meanwhile/ temporary place markers

Wall adornment and public sculptures (concrete cows in Milton Keynes for example) can support our navigation. These are recent examples from Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

LONDON London – Wandle Valley Regional Park

I was responsible for leading the development of the Wandle Valley Regional Park Trust. It comprised a linear park following the route of the Wandle River through the boroughs of Croydon, Sutton, Merton and Wandsworth. A significant project for the Trust was the development of key gateways and wayfinding along the Wandle Trail. This resulted in a series of wayfinding projects, which included consistent materials to distinguish the trail, signage and key gateway markers.

**Wandle Valley Trail, Wandle Valley Regional Park**
© Sue Morgan

BERLIN

Berlin has a number of memorials to the Holocaust. More than 70,000 Stolpersteine or ‘stumbling stones’ have been installed, replacing cobbles and making them the world’s largest decentralised monument to the Holocaust. Each commemorates a victim outside of their former home, a level of almost shocking intimacy that contrasts with the larger-scale memorials with which visitors to Berlin will be familiar.

Equally in need of memorialisation is the site of the Berlin Wall. The time that has now passed since its removal is now longer than the period during which it was dividing Berlin. These images are a powerful way of evoking a past that is fast fading from memory.

**Maurepark, Prenslauerberg Wall Park**
© Sue Morgan

**Stolpersteine ‘stumbling stones’**
© Sue Morgan

**Pasaje Independence Cafe**
© Sue Morgan

PORTUGAL Porto

Praça de Lisboa, Porto, Portugal

Praça de Lisboa is a park that complements an outdoor shopping centre at Passeio dos Clérigos, overlooking the historic Torre dos Clérigos. The old Mercado do Anjo was housed in the square and was considered, crowded, unhygienic and unsafe, even during the day.

It is an astonishing achievement, more than a roof garden, it creates intimacy and an embrace that is truly hospitable.

The scale and shape of the building is humane and the commitment to green infrastructure, impressive.

Lisbon and Porto

The distinctive paving in Lisbon and Porto are used through the city to support navigation for newcomers. The white-and-black paving can be found on all the main thoroughfares to support tourists and newcomers to the cities. Easy to follow and a joy to experience.