FOLAR
Friends of the Landscape Archive at Reading

The Landscape of Public Health - FOLAR Annual Symposium 2024

Landscape of Public Health - FOLAR Symposium 2024

The Landscape of Public Health is possibly one of the most important subjects FOLAR has tackled - not just health, but how public open space and designed landscapes have been used in the past for the benefit of the general public. As populations have becomes increasingly more urban in the 20C, landscape architects and managers working today in this area as academics and practitioners can demonstrate, with confidence and research-based evidence, to landscape and associated professions, local and central government politicians, and the public, what can be achieved today, and how this can be done, and how long term management needs to be part of this healthy uplift for the population. The most important benefit, apart from nurturing a generally healthier population, is reducing the differences in health between the most economically deprived populations and those better off .

One theme for the FOLAR symposia is how the past can inform the present and the future. There is definitely a lot of past when it comes to wise city elders understanding and believing ie knowing the connection between being outside and being healthy. One speaker at this event looks back to ancient civilisations to demonstrate this. But for some time now this ‘knowing’ is deemed not enough to convince leaders today to provide funding to create or maintain green spaces, they want evidence. Another of the speakers says enough - we have more than enough research, stop please! As can be expected - with two or so serial career researchers present – this view was swiftly challenged.

It is not enough to be outside. The quality of public green space has to be of a particular standard, and it has to be accessible for all ages and all people. Green space is equigenic - ie it is associated with reducing the difference in health between the most economically deprived people and those better off. This has been proven through research. And the mechanisms linking landscape and health are explained in the final talk.

This was a thought provoking symposium, and it generated one of the best question and answer sessions we have had so far.

3. Bermondsey Beautification 1920-1940

Robert Holden has long been interested in the work of Alfred and Ada Salter and in his presentation he recreates many different aspects of local life in Bermondsey in the early 1900s, from noxious industries, the rise of infectious life-threatening diseases, squalid housing and cramped living conditions. Entering this bleak place are Alfred and Ada Salter working via different means to bring about positive change to the lives of local people. Alfred was local doctor and became Bermondsey MP and Ada worked to improve housing rising to be the Mayor of Bermondsey, amongst many other initiatives she set up the Beautification Committee, and implemented an extensive tree planting scheme on new estates and streets in Bermondsey, with many of the trees surviving today.

Robert Holden is a landscape architect with forty years of landscape practice overlapping with three decades of teaching, including two decades at Greenwich and then a short stint at Istanbul Technical University before retirement in 2014. Brought up in Preston he is an adopted Londoner and currently manure monitor for the Gunsite Allotments in Dulwich. He has written widely on technical matters.

Peter SimcoeComment