landscape matters volume 5 - Flipbook - Page 11
most people either leave that decision for someone else to make,
(possibly not a landscape architect), or because speedy action is
required, the records simply get disposed of.
drawings is fragile, the drawings are mostly stored rolled and
several attempts to raise lottery funding to better preserve these
records have not succeeded. It is saved but this significant
archive deserves investment to secure its future.
Landscapes take decades to mature and designing is an iterative
process. Has the concept for a design become unrecognisable
through inappropriate management, or supplanted by development? Or is it because for the most part each new design moves
the game forward by only a small degree that it is not thought
sufficiently innovative or original or significant to be included in
an archive? Or perhaps not enough landscape architects know
that places exist where records can be kept and used?
The Milner White and Son practice dates from c1850s when
Edward Milner was superintendent of works for Joseph Paxton,
rebuilding the Crystal Palace at Sydenham.This archive however, mostly held at their London offices, was destroyed during
WW2. A job book and a tentative sketch planting arrangement
for the interior of the newly relocated Crystal Palace survives.
Archives mostly contain unique records, and unlike published
material, once lost this is gone forever. Post-war work of power
stations, proving grounds, playing fields and quarries – work of a
completely different nature to the pre-war private commissions
- has survived and following the closure of the practice, this has
A number of practices have gifted their papers to the Landscape
Institute. Sometimes this has also included sketch notebooks,
diaries, lecture notes, plant drawings, book proposals, lantern
slides, tree stamps, as well as the more conventional project work.
now been deposited as part of the LI archive at The MERL.
A few landscape architects’ records are held in other places
across the UK, including the National Archives, county, museum,
university and business archives, depending on the client and
the nature of the work. Archives in the devolved nations hold
work by Frank Clark and Peter Daniel (Edinburgh University)
and Mark Turnbull (currently LI Scotland). From Northern
Ireland, Peter Hutchinson’s archive has been accepted by the
Irish Architecture Archive.To my knowledge there isn’t an
existing database locating all UK landscape architects papers.
Sketches showing alternative paving
designs for shopping centre at New
Ash Green (Kent) by Preben Jakobsen, for Eric Lyons and Partners, 1968.
Preben Jakobsen Collection
Image: LI/The MERL
Where landscape practices are absorbed into multi-disciplinary
and international practices, or when practitioners retire or die,
existing archives become extremely vulnerable. Space and time
is expensive and a skip is cheap and convenient. Does this
matter? Yes! Is all work equally important? No! But do landscape
architects think enough about their records or prepare for the
time when a decision will need to be made? It would seem that
Raven by Peter Shepheard
Image: LI/The MERL
The Landscape Institute archive
Geoffrey Jellicoe, appropriately, was the catalyst for the Landscape Institute establishing an archive of members’ work. He
was present at the founding of the Institute and would have
discussed the draft of the first constitution which established
an ambition to have ‘sets of lantern slides’ to promote the Institute’s objectives, and ‘educate the public in the art of landscape
architecture.’ Although the word archive, first used in the UK in
the early 17c, did not leap from their pen, this was what these
founders were planning to make available for their members,
together with ‘the publication of a Journal’, and to ‘found a
library’. Books were gifted by members to the institute over the
succeeding years, and the library properly opened in 1968 with
the part time appointment of their first qualified librarian, Sheila
Harvey. Some archival items had joined the library including a
fascinating and extensive catalogued slide collection donated by
landscape architect Cliff Tandy. But it was not until some 65 years
after that constitution was drawn up that Jellicoe, in donating
his plan chest of drawings, properly and probably intentionally,
initiated the Landscape Institute archive.
Jellicoe’s drawings, many dating from the last 30 years of his
life, are exquisite works, not only in terms of the designs and his
own distinctive drawing technique, but in the arrangement on
the sheet. Hal Moggridge pointed out subsequently that Jellicoe
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