Think of England’s listed gardens and your mind conjures up visions of rolling Capability Brown landscapes, stately home lawns flanked by herbaceous borders and yew hedges clipped into crisp geometric formations. You probably don’t think of the ponds outside the old Jammie Dodgers factory in Moreton on the Wirral, or the car park of a 1980s business estate near Heathrow airport.
But Historic England and the Gardens Trust want you to think differently. These two unlikely sites are among a fascinating new list of 20 postwar parks, gardens and landscapes that have been added to the protected national register this week, in an eye-opening move that might make you look again at an innocuous bit of verge or a concrete bench.
“These are living landscapes,” says Dominic Cole, president of the Gardens Trust, “places that people are using in their daily lives. They’re often not thought of as pieces of art or design, as they’re simply there, blending into the background. We wanted to highlight the fact that, in each case, someone has thought hard about what that place feels like to be in.” After a three-year process of inviting submissions from the public and whittling down potential sites with panels of experts, the heritage bodies have unveiled an astonishing variety of landscapes to be awarded protection.
The sites range from Campbell Park in Milton Keynes, which blends the grid-planned new town into the pastoral Buckinghamshire countryside, to the strikingly modernist concrete deck landscape of the Golden Lane housing estate in central London, a precursor to the nearby Barbican centre. There is the suburban fantasy of York Gate in Leeds, created by a family of amateur designers, with 14 elaborate “garden rooms” compressed into a compact one-acre plot, along with the world-famous gardens by Beth Chatto near Colchester and a number of sites by renowned designer Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, including the Kennedy Memorial landscape at Runnymede in Surrey. The rest of the list includes many little-known locations, from gardens outside factories and business parks to council-estate playgrounds.
“Postwar landscape is such an undervalued area,” says Sarah Charlesworth, who led the project for Historic England. Of the 1,600 sites on the national register of parks and gardens, only 24 had been from the second half of the 20th century. “Our new selection reflects the overall sense of optimism and experimentation that was around then, with immense care and detail found in the most unexpected places.”
The edge of the main road in Moreton, Wirral, is one such unexpected place. Along the route from the railway station to the former Cadbury Bros chocolate factory (later Burton’s Biscuits), where 6,000 workers used to arrive daily, are a series of cascading pools that once provided a bucolic backdrop to the commute.
Recalling a theatrical water feature from an Italian Renaissance garden, each of the 10 ponds is tapered, cleverly creating a false perspective to give the illusion of distance. The pools are anchored to the adjacent lawn with raised square planters in the corners, creating punctuation points in the landscape, while the zigzag profile of the weirs echoes the roofline of the factory beyond. The watercourse was designed in the early 1950s by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, one of the leading landscape architects of the 20th century, and it embodies a number of ideas that he would develop in his later projects, such as the Water Gardens in Hemel Hempstead and Shute House in Dorset – which was also added to the register this week.
The Moreton pools were not, it turns out, just there to provide a pleasant arrival. “The modern water barrier corresponds to the 18th-century ha-ha,” Jellicoe explained. “It provides a fence which, though not invisible, conceals its true purpose … its intention is not to keep out the determined attack, but rather the casual.”
There was an element of fantasy to it, too. Jellicoe later wrote of mounds in the landscape as the “extended shape of two serpents”, his landforms suggesting the “vast prehistoric monsters” that would have inhabited the submerged forest that once existed on site. At Shute House, designed between 1969 and 1988, his clever ways with water reached a peak, with a series of channels culminating in a formal rill where bronze pipes provide a chorus of different tones to cascading water. “Like the portrait painter,” said Jellicoe, “the landscape designer needs to be a psychologist first and then a technician afterwards. He needs to dig into the subconscious.”
A similarly poetic flourish is to be found in a corner of west London, on the edge of the Brunel estate in Westminster, where a stepped brick ziggurat rises out of a sunken play area. Its terraced levels are connected by little stairs and battered slopes, climbing to a summit where a metal slide sweeps back down to the base of the bricky outcrop in a serpentine swoosh.
Built in the 1970s, this majestic slide – Grade II-listed as part of today’s announcement – is the work of the acclaimed landscape architect Michael Brown, designer of numerous council-estate gardens of the postwar era. He believed that spaces for children should be as central to any design as space for adults. “I would differ from the view that children’s play areas need always to be equipped,” he said. “The whole housing estate, the total environment, should be designed as fittingly for children as for adults.”
And so he conceived the Brunel estate as a singular landscape for exploration, with sinuous redbrick paths winding around sculpted earthen mounds and scattered groves of mature trees. The play areas are designed as part of the meticulously detailed brick landscape of twisting slopes, ramps and ledges, using cheap materials in careful ways. When you look at Brown’s sculpted designs, it comes as no surprise that he always kept a little sandpit in his office to help him imagine the effects of his radical earthworks.
The whole landscape of the Brunel estate has been added to the national register this week, as has Brown’s Fieldend project for Span Developments in Twickenham, designed in collaboration with architect Eric Lyons, where front gardens are replaced by a communal free-flowing landscape, prioritising pedestrians over cars. Landscape should not just be the space left over between buildings, both designers thought, but an integral part of the whole.
“It is striking that so many of the projects on the list show architecture and landscape conceived as one,” says Tim Waterman, associate professor of landscape architecture, history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. “We’ve become so accustomed to their separation, with landscape often an afterthought, but the postwar period shows how well they can be combined. These sites all feel incredibly fresh and well suited to their architecture.”
The Cummins Engine Factory in Darlington is one such example, where the 1960s building – a modernist corten steel temple to industry by US firm Roche-Dinkeloo – is complemented by an equally pared-back, minimalist landscape by Dan Kiley, the godfather of American modern landscape (with whom Brown worked briefly for a time). It’s also true of Stockley Park, a 1980s business campus built on a former gravel works in Uxbridge, west London, where the undulating topography was mobilised to conjure a pastoral setting for a cluster of corporate headquarters.
“It was particularly significant at the time,” says Cole, “representing a period when developers recognised that employers and their workers wanted more from their office environments. There was stiff competition to create places where people would actually want to go and work, and landscape was the key attraction.”
Stockley Park drew influences from 17th-century garden design, with car park “courts” enclosed by clipped hedges, inspired by the compartments found in French gardens, while the avenues of lime trees that flank the pedestrian routes reflect the formal avenues that ran through the gardens of Dawley House, which once occupied the site. Out of town business parks have long been despised as deathly anti-urban car magnets, but in the post-Covid-19 era, the importance of locating open green space close to centres of work could seem increasingly desirable. After the early months of being trapped at home, bar the daily constitutional in the local park, landscape feels more important than ever.
“It makes me giggle that it takes a pandemic for people to realise the importance of landscape,” says Cole. “It’s great that it is being recognised, but of course it’s always been fundamental to creating healthy, beautiful places to live and work. It would be even better if this new appreciation came with a handout of cash – the landscape budget is usually the first thing to go when ‘value engineering’ begins.”
From Harlow Town Park to Churchill Gardens in Pimlico in London, the projects on this refreshing list point to a time when parks, gardens and the wider public realm were treated with an ambition and level of care that we could do well to learn from.
