FOLAR
Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

Past Talks

Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

Past Talks

Almost from the outset FOLAR has - with generous permission from our speakers - recorded virtually all the talks we have held at symposia and online.There are currently over 130 recordings available under Past Talks and Specials. The Past Talks section covers topics ranging from the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park, Susan Jellicoe’s photographs, The Open Spaces Society, working on Byker in Newcastle with Ralph Erskine to landscape designs that promote human health and well-being.

There are a number of talks that focus on women landscape designers, from Fanny Wilkinson, Marjory Lady Allen of Hurtwood, Brenda Colvin, and Sylvia Crowe in Bristol, to Elisabeth Beazley, Diana Armstrong Bell and other contemporary landscape architects in the can…

Our speakers include past presidents of the Landscape Institute - Brian Clouston, Hal Moggridge, Tim Gale; landscape academics - Ed Bennis, Jan Woudstra, Alan Powers, Luca Csepely-Knorr, Catharine Ward Thompson; historians - Elain Harwood, John Boughton, Katrina Navikas; practitioners – Annie Coombs; Neil Chapman, Jennette Emery-Wallis, Paul Rabbitts, Ian Baggott,  young researchers – Joy Burgess, Sally Watson, Karen Fitzsimon and many more.

The Specials section includestalks celebrating the life and works of two of the Institute’s significant practitioners – Bran Clouston and Hal Moggridge;  and a series of twenty one talks on the C20 designed landscapes that were added to the Historic England register in 2021.

So how can anybody find anything in all these recordings?  The quickest way is to use the search box – type in a strong and simple key word linked with what you are searching for, eg play, Jellicoe, Sweden, and hopefully you will find something that is useful for you.

 

Jellicoe, the subconscious, serpents and postmodern landscape design

FOLAR was eager to contribute a talk for ‘AniMERL an Autumn of animal events,’ held at and organised by The MERL. We offered a talk on serpents for this series. Farm animals - as it later transpired was the focus. They were a bit reluctant, and now we understand why they described this ‘unfarmy’ imposter having ‘slithered’ into their learned programme of historians and PhD researchers on the subject of heavy horses, fat cows and animal health on the farm. And so we found ourselves wedged between artificial insemination in Swedish dairy farming 1935-1955, and Dipping, dosing, drenching … in the management of unhealthy beasts in British farms.

Presented by Tom Turner, this FOLAR talk is about Geoffrey Jellicoe and his design work at the water gardens at Hemel Hempstead New Town. He introduces the subject with the comment that Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe used to say that he was educated as a classicist and then struck by the dynamic power of Modern Art. Tom’s own view, with which Jellicoe did not disagree, is that his approach was intrinsically Postmodern from the day he enrolled at the Architectural Association. His first serpent [resembling the musical instrument, to describe his proposals for a redesigned River Gade] supports this interpretation. His second serpent [for a more lyrical, slithery even, body of water] takes us beyond Postmodernism and in a most welcome direction.

Tom Turner taught at Greenwich University and invited Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe as a studio critic and guest lecturer for the landscape students in the 1980s. Tom has more recently published some of the lectures that Jellicoe gave to the students and has also written extensively about his work, regarding Jellicoe as ‘the most important landscape architect of the twentieth century.’

Annabel Downs