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.

 

WHO CARES - about designed and managed landscapes?

CARE - taking care of rural heritage, the countryside's future, and each other, was The MERL’s theme for 2021. Invited back to contribute to this series, FOLAR wanted to look at who it is that cares for good landscape design, and who enjoys it, and who cares about people having access to public open space and how this is measured, and who cares about future landscapes and what they might be like, and who has cared over the centuries and decades, purposefully or otherwise about how an individual landscape has been owned, shaped and developed and who and how future change is managed.

Dr Phillada Ballard explores the history of Whiteknights: from private landscape park to university campus. The expansion of British Universities in the post war period fuelled the demand for new sites, especially for campus universities. For the University of Reading ‘the acquisition of Whiteknights was the most important single event in the history of the University.’ Much time and energy has been put into the maintenance of the park. The question remains as to how successfully the historic landscape, dating back to the 18th century, has been preserved in the face of the various demands made upon it. Indeed the survival of the park, a mile from the centre of Reading, is a story in itself given that at various times it was widely regarded as one of the most valuable sites in southern England and ‘ripe for development’.

Dr Phillada Ballard is a historical consultant specialising in buildings, landscapes and gardens. Former curator at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, she has had a long involvement with the restoration of Joseph Chamberlain’s Highbury estate in Birmingham. She has written several books on landscapes, gardens and buildings of Birmingham. She lives in Reading and her interest in suburban landscapes led her to research the Whiteknights estate.

Two projects are explored by their landscape designers in Contrasting Fortunes - Two high-value designed landscapes in Reading. Landscape architect Tony Edwards outlines the transformation of 180 acres of a poor quality flood plain into Green Park a business park with international appeal and a variety of awards. His involvement with this project has been for over thirty years with a continuing role in its management and this has been a key factor in its success. How difficult was that to engineer? And how typical is this of his other landscape projects?

Tony Edwards qualified as an architect and worked for Sir Basil Spence on Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks before changing to other practices and undertaking housing design. He qualified as a landscape architect and joined Brian Clouston and Partners where he became a director involved in a variety of schemes including large scale reclamation of steelworks, amenity tips, gas works, new housing and regeneration of housing estates. He is a Fellow of the Landscape Institute.

Having formed new practices after leaving Clouston, Tony has been responsible for further large scale master-planning projects, residential landscape schemes, business parks, schools and commercial schemes. His practice worked with Michael Van Valkenberg from the USA on the white water rafting scheme at the Olympics in 2012. He has appeared as an expert witness at a number of public inquires and his practices have won numerous Civic Trust, Landscape and other awards. He was a Design Review Panel Member for the Design Council/CABE for over a decade and still sits on the DRPs of Merton and Richmond.

Broad Street, Reading was pedestrianised in 1992 and the redesign was constructed in three phases. Colin Moore, of Moore Piet + Brookes Landscape Architects and lead designers for the project, introduces the scheme and considers issues concerning maintenance, funding and changes in city-wide planning decisions that have impacted on this carefully conceived project. The local audience for this talk relished learning about how the design came about, why the presentation drawings – now deposited at The MERL – resembled the Bayeaux Tapestry, and why there was so much brickwork in the design and more. This was a very popular and successful presentation.

Colin Moore is a Landscape Architect and Urban Designer who has recently retired having worked in the landscape industry for 50 years. He was an associate of John Kelsey Associates for 6 years and then senior partner of Moore Piet + Brookes (MP+B) for 20 years before becoming an independent landscape consultant. Colin is well known to many landscape architects for his 35 years teaching for the final professional exam and his expertise in construction and maintenance contracts and the CDM Regulations. He is chair of the JCLI Contracts Forum and secretary of FOLAR.

0.21 Tony Edwards - the development of Green Park Reading
26:56 Colin Moore - Broad Street Reading

In Imagining desirable landscape futures (and sadly the sound quality for this talk is very poor in places) Dr Saratsi invited the audience to select a postcard – an assortment showing famous artists work, photographs of landscape views, and cartoons and everything else in between (postcards are becomingly increasingly harder to find now). we were invited to write on the back what appealed us to the image on the front and what we hoped we would find in a future landscape.

Dr Saratsi observes that we live in a period of rapid environmental change with potentially great impact on the landscapes where people develop their livelihoods, interact, and shape their cultures. Today’s actions to protect the environment are based on perceptions of what could be good or bad in future, beneficial or detrimental, necessary, or excessive. Our visions of future landscapes are inevitably based on past and current experiences, and today’s solutions may not have an enduring effect.

Dr Saratsi is a human geographer with longstanding interests in landscape and environmental studies and works in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading. She has collaborated with colleagues in the UK and internationally to deliver a range of research projects concerned with integrating cultural and social values in landscape management and the role of arts and participatory approaches in environmental decision making and the protection of nature.

The land has a profound impact on who we are, on our health and our wellbeing, but it is valued as though it was a soulless commodity. In The social value of land, the final talk Professor Flora Samuel offers a method for taking the social value of land and its impact on people into account in decisions about land use. She argues for a digital map-based system that allows people to input on a constant basis into decisions about their places. This proposal is based on a series of recent funded research projects based at the University of Reading, Mapping Eco Social Assets, Community Consultation for Quality of Life and the Better Places Toolkit.

Flora Samuel is an architect, author and academic and at this time was Professor of Architecture in the Built Environment at the University of Reading (now Head of Department at Cambridge). Concerned by the seeming inability of the Architecture profession in Britain to convey to the public its value, her work focuses on architects, their skills and how they communicate them to the outside world.

Her particular focus is on homes, housing and neighbourhoods in the UK and beyond. She feels strongly that a new model of architectural education is needed in order that the profession becomes more relevant. Her new model encompasses research, collaboration and business skills allied to creativity, design and social responsibility. She was appointed as the first RIBA Vice President for Research in 2018 and leads the Community Consultation for Quality of Life, an AHRC funded project aiming to produce a Code of Conduct for Consultation across the four nations.