Women crossing boundaries in Landscape - FOLAR and The Gardens Trust

Caroline Southwood Hill’s memorial seat, Mariner’s Hill, Kent. Credit Gillian Darley

Speaker: Gillian Darley

Difficult early years gave both sisters an enduring appetite for the value of freedom and access to open ground, all based on the idea that the urban poor richly deserved access to nature. From this starting point, we can follow the strands that knit together in the Commons and Open Spaces Society, the Kyrle Society, Octavia's pet project the Red Cross Gardens (Southwark) and eventually the National Trust. 

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Gillian Darley’s biography of Octavia Hill was published in 1990 and in a revised edition in 2010. Her first book was Villages of Vision - an account of the planned village, with an emphasis on the utopian. She has also published a biography of John Evelyn (2006) and John Soane (1999). In the mid '90s she was (part time) director of the Landscape Foundation. She was awarded an OBE in 2015 for services to the environment and conservation.