This week I have been in Liverpool for the UK Landscape Awards and Conference. It was a really inspiring two days, beginning on Monday with the announcement of the winner of the UK Landscape Award. The winner was the Durham Heritage Coast , a fantastic local project to reclaim some of Britain’s most beautiful and distinctive coastline from decades of abuse as a site for colliery waste. There is a short video of their entry on the UK Landscape award website, and I encourage you to have a look at it - and indeed at the videos for the other five shortlisted projects, which were all of a high standard and really demonstrated how involving local people is critical to long-term sustainability. Watch them all here. On Monday we also had foretaste of Prof Iain Stewart’s new television series ‘The Making of Scotland’s Landscape’ which has begun showing in Scotland and is due to be broadcast in England shortly.
For me the high point of Tuesday was spending two hours talking to Simon Schama, who flew over from the States to address the conference on his way to India to take part in the Kerala satellite of the Hay on Wye Festival of Literature. Almost as soon as he sat down his mind simply uncorked and the most extraordinary effusion of history, anecdote, Jewish jokes and political invective poured over us in a warm and good-humoured torrent. Despite being in a hurry he found our company sufficiently entertaining to delay his departure for London more than once, before finally sweeping off into the chilly night leaving us all feeling slightly inebriated.
All of this was set against the backdrop of Liverpool, a city which is a thriving tribute to landscape architecture. For a number of years the city’s landscape architects have been laying out their vision for a city that is being completely reborn. It is a real pleasure to visit now, to walk along the waterfront, to stroll in the Liverpool1 centre and to look in amazement at the confident modern buildings rising next to the great 19th century jewels of Liverpool’s municipal architecture. It was very much a fitting host for the landscape conference and if you have not been to Liverpool for a long time, it really is worth a visit (though perhaps not till Spring when the wind over the Mersey has died down a bit).