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I was honoured to have been invited to give an online presentation to the RIBA South Conservation Group last week. Although exact number of attendees was hard to calculate , over 200 had signed up on Eventbrite in advance and it felt a very worthwhile thing to do. I understand that they had not had a speaker on landscape issues before ( or for a very long time) and it was a chance to explain the role landscape architects can undertake in heritage projects and reflect on how very wide that can be.
It does appear that more of our projects involve heritage than not and it would be unusual for us not to dig around for a site’s history and historic mapping at very least.
As my pre-talk publicity suggested I would, I discussed the interactions between heritage, landscape and architecture within terra firma’s work over the last 3 decades. From small scale memorial gardens, through National Trust Property Conservation Management Plans, to large scale landscape character area assessment , with everything in between. The practice has been sometimes involved with controversial schemes including a planned re-opening of Europe’s largest open cast goldmine ( now a UNESCO Protected site) and in last year’s RIBA Award winning tower and reinterpretation routes at Sutton Hoo.
within UNESCO designated central Vilnius, September 2021
The main messages I wished to convey were hopefully obvious to those of us working within built environment professions but perhaps less obvious how they might be applied in differing scenarios around the world. It is surprising how many times we have found ourselves having to impress the benefits of preserving, or rather conserving, heritage assets and how they can be the defining narrative for a destination and unique sense of place.
This is not the place to present the full lecture with its 60 slides and their wide-ranging issues and discussions but the final message was quite simple. We ignore history at our peril and it is as unimaginable to carry out a landscape project without some understanding of its past as it is to ignore past lessons in ones own life, in politics, in science and innovation, in addressing the climate crisis.. as the adage goes ‘Learn from the Past, Think of the Future’..
