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By Lionel
This is the last terra firma year end blog that I will do, given I retire next spring. Something both sad and exciting at the same time. Plans are in place for a great celebration as it will coincide with the company’s 40th birthday May 1st 2025 and we will be marking it with a publication and a party at The Garden Museum at Lambeth Palace. Succession plans have been in place for over a decade now and Robyn and Alison will be continuing with the firm in seamless fashion.
2024 has been another busy and enjoyable year in spite of somewhat tumultuous times around us on the world stage. We have now retracted from the overseas offices leaving terra firma Dubai and Vilnius offices to successfully go their separate ways but the home office in Petersfield has never been busier. Joined this year by post graduates Nasrin Chowdhury and Eleanor Flack (as Assistant Landscape Architects) and rejoined by Tom Jenner (now as Operations Manager) the Practice is now 17 strong.
In May we finally published our Strategic Business Plan pulling together a collective vision for the future and how we plan to go about achieving it. With the creation of six teams ; People, Development, Marketing, Processes, IT and Climate – each led by a staff member other than a director and all staff members being in 2 teams of their choosing – objectives, actions and timelines have been set out for the next 3 years. This builds on work begun over two decades ago for Investors for People and works alongside the Quality Assurance and Environmental Management Systems we were accredited with soon afterwards and have been ever since.
In January, the first of many team training events kicked off the year with a day-long guided session around Myers Briggs Type Indicator testing and reflections, held away from the office and giving plenty of food for thought around personal and team inter-relationships and areas to positively explore and benefit from. Valuing people and training have always been central to terra firma’s ethos and I am sure always will be.
Projects continue to come from all sectors, the largest being residential in all its forms (from individual dwellings to large scale settlements) followed by Health and Education, then Corporate, Commercial and Retail with Leisure and Tourism, Heritage and Environmental studies still all featuring significantly.
Planning permissions were obtained for dozens of projects over the course of the year. Among these, the exemplar Phoenix Project for the industrial north-east quarter of Lewes, a carbon positive mixed use development by Jonathan Smales and his organisation Human Nature where we supplied the Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment components for the EIA, as well as assisting with design guidance throughout a long and complex process with the South Downs National Park Authority (SDNPA).
Continuing a long tradition, we also worked directly for SDNPA, this year providing expert opinion with the Rampion 2 onshore cable routes from an extension to the offshore windfarm.
Notably, for its rather different nature, the DEFRA-sponsored Test and Trial for the Hampshire ELM (Environmental Land Management) Convenor project concluded in June after 11 months of intense work with Merrick Denton-Thompson, acting as Director of the project, co-ordinator and collator of much of the varied workstreams while serving the Advisory Board and leading consultation exercises reaching out across the County’s land managers and farmers. It is hoped that this national pilot might be the template for delivery of ELM (and perhaps other initiatives as the Local Nature Recovery Strategies) nationwide.
https://www.terrafirmaconsultancy.com/farming-in-hampshire-elm-convenor/
Current projects range from the large scale such as Swansea Seafront Regeneration masterplan , the expansion of MIRA Science and Technology Park and Fort Road Park Newhaven through to mid-range ones across all the sectors; residential, education, health, heritage and infrastructure.
We continue something of a specialisation in wineries with successful permissions for Pommery at Pinglestone and at Newsells near Royston. We have also assisted at Gold Street in Kent and underway for Roebuck in West Sussex.
It is good to point to our previous work for SDNPA with Vinescapes ;
https://www.southdowns.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/FINAL-VERSION-VGIA-V1.6-compressed.pdf
and the SDNPA resulting summary and technical notes;
https://www.southdowns.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/South-Downs-Viticulture-Growth-Impact-Assessment.pdf
https://www.southdowns.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SDNPA-Viticulture-Technical-Advice-Note-TAN.pdf
A city we appear to be doing much in at the moment is Cambridge and adding to the expansion of the Biomedical Campus, we are working for St John’s College on new accommodation at their Wolfson campus collaborating with MICA and Jeremy Rye once again.
Pics above; Landscape construction and planting underway in projects in London and the midlands.
At the Inside Housing Development Awards , Acklam Road won the ‘Best affordable housing development – less than £20m’ category and Princes Mead Dining Extension was shortlisted for a South Downs National Park Design Award. West Sussex Fire and Resource Flagship Building won the Southern Construction Excellence Award and was shortlisted for the National one.
We are sponsoring the Hampshire CPRE Countryside Awards this year for the category of best project in protected landscapes. The winner is Blacknest Fields Nature Recovery, a wonderful project transforming an 8-acre site into a flourishing wildlife haven.
Robyn and Alison co-hosted an ‘Optimise your Development Potential’ networking event at Lainston House, Winchester, where Alison spoke to a wide range of developers and consultants about ‘De-mystifying landscape-led’.
We have continued to give our time to the wider profession and community and Robyn and Martin continue to sit on the SDNP and NE Hants Design Panels respectively, Alison chairing the Landscape Institute’s Professional Review Group at the University of Gloucestershire and as exam monitor for Pathway to Chartership candidates. Robyn completed her fourth and final year as an external examiner for the post-grad courses at Leeds Beckett University. All staff members have visited schools and college for careers events and we took on two short-term work experience placements students in the summer. We continue to support the Petersfield Green Infrastructure Group and the Humanitarian Landscape Collective (from whom we had an inspirational visit early in the year’s CPD calendar).
I led a staff day trip up and around London sites (both our own work and that of others) in June and Alex hosted the office family summer party a month later.
Other events over the summer included attendance at the Landscape Institute President’s Reception at the Royal College of Physicians and having Ramune back to visit us from Vilnius.
Yesterday we gathered for our Christmas lunch! I am very lucky to work with such wonderful people and I will certainly miss all of this when I depart next year.
As I sign off on my final ‘end of year blog’, may I wish you all the most lovely Christmas and the very best for 2025!
Lionel
Dec 13th 2024
