Origins

All Europe House, Journal RIBA v 46 1939 p817

Speaker - David Jacques

Other countries (especially the USA) had professional landscape organisations before the UK. The talk will address the consequent desire to found the ILA, the state and status of the profession in the UK, the personalities involved, the decision whether to admit those employed by nurseries, and how Modernism was viewed.

Dr David Jacques OBE is a landscape historian and conservationist. After several years in landscape consultancies, he became Inspector of Historic Parks and Gardens at English Heritage. Afterwards he concentrated upon teaching and writing including a biography of Christopher Tunnard and  Frank Clark in 2009. He was a trustee, sometimes chairman, of the Landscape Design Trust 1994-2018. He was on the ICOMOS panel advising UNESCO over World Heritage Sites in the late 2010s, and co-wrote ‘Teaching Landscape History’ (2024). He was a member of the Historic England Advisory Committee 2024-6. His ‘New Theory in Landscape Aesthetics’ was published in December 2026.