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.

Five Ways - to interrogate, be inspired and learn from the Landscape Architecture Drawings at the MERL

Edward White’s entry to ILA listing of landscape architects c 1930s, (c) The MERL

FOLAR invited five speakers to present in ten minutes a tantalising insight into the Landscape Institute archive at The MERL, its uses and opportunities, how to dig into it, and how it inspires and informs our work today.

Speakers: Guy Baxter, Associate Director (Archive Services), University of Reading, The MERL; Marylla Hunt, on the restoration of Edward White’s Stoke Poges Gardens of Remembrance; Oliver Rock Senior Associate HTA, on the restoration of the Jellicoe Hemel Water Gardens; Colin Moore landscape architect, on Michael Brown and the Brunel Estate; Karen Fitzsimon, landscape architect, horticulturalist and landscape historian on the work of Preben Jakobsen. The event was chaired by Tony Edwards, FLI, landscape architect, Director of Place Design & Planning.
May 2018 at The University Of Greenwich
[No recording was made]

Annabel Downs19 February 2025