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.

 

Heroines in Landscape Architecture - Fanny Wilkinson, Sylvia Crowe and Sheila Haywood

Continuing FOLAR’s series focusing on women in landscape architecture, we have three speakers here who have undertaken detailed research on the lives of these notable women. Historian and specialist on the women’s suffrage movement, Elizabeth Crawford became aware of Fanny Wilkinson through her circle of influential friends including Octavia and Miranda Hill, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and sisters, and Millicent Fawcett. She was probably the first trained female landscape architect in the UK, and who charged proper fees for her work. She was taught by Edward Milner principal of the Crystal Palace School of Landscape Gardening and Practical Horticulture in 1881. She went on to design c75 public gardens in London with the Metropolitan Public Gardens, and in 1904 took over as principal of Swanley Horticultural College (where later Sylvia Crowe and Brenda Colvin studied).

Paula Laycock discovered a landscape drawing by Sheila Haywood at her place of work at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, where she is College Records Officer. Rather surprisingly for Paula it started a detailed investigation into Sheila Haywood’s life and works, and this talk shares some of her findings.

Landscape architect Wendy Tippett researched Dame Sylvia Crowe’s design solutions for major roadways in Bristol for her MSc in Conservation of Historic Gardens and Cultural Landscapes. The Cumberland Basin to Ashton Gate section, conceived and designed in the 1960s, belongs to the brutalist road building era. Working with Wendy Powell as her associate, Crowe incorporated piazzas, play areas, service station, a new hill and the viewpoint up the River Avon to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Now unloved, misunderstood and dilapidated, the future of the landscape is at risk, some already lost. There are huge plans in the Sylvia Crowe Collection at MERL and beautifully drawn by Wendy Powell, and this talk both makes sense of the drawings, and explains what Crowe was trying and succeeded in achieving.

These talks were organised in association with LI London
Speakers: Elizabeth Crawford, Paula Laycock, Wendy Tippett
January 2020 Marshall’s showroom, London

Links and resources:
Fanny Wilkinson (1855-1951) blue plaque
Crystal Palace School of Gardening
Edward Milner Collection part of the Landscape Institute archive at The MERL
Paxton’s protégé: the Milner White landscape gardening dynasty by J. P. Craddock
Sylvia Crowe collection at The MERL
Landscape of roads by Sylvia Crowe (1960)

Annabel Downs