Poet and presenter, Ian McMillan’s article on landscape

Read his words on what the landscape means to him and how it's essential to everyone…

Ian McMillan

Presenter of the awards, Ian McMillan delivered a hilarious opening speech at the ceremony. Behind the laughter, however there was a genuine message that sought to remind everyone how landscape can be different and very personal for everyone.

McMillan pointed out: "What we want when we make landscapes or alter them is landscapes that are available for myth.

"I think landscape architecture can remind us who we are and hint at who we will become," he said talking of mythical landscapes such as redundant mines in his native Barnsley.

Ian McMillan also wrote the preface to the Year In Landscape based on his experience of being a judge for the UK Landscape Awards 2010. The book which provides an overview of all of the Awards run this year by the LI can be downloaded here.

Ian McMillan's essay:

I’m writing this at my table-scape; it’s a continually evolving and shifting scene, with a tottering pile of books over to the left of my laptop, a blue coffee cup balanced on a coaster to the right and a pepper pot, a refugee from lunch, in the middle. Later, one or two of the books will change position, and I’ll take the coffee cup away and wash it up. The pepper pot will be a constant, though. I never seem to get round to moving it. The whole thing is like a landscape, of course: there’s accumulated knowledge there, and sustenance, and a landmark that never seems to alter, no matter how much history shifts.

And I can look out of my window at the landscape I’ve seen for twenty-odd years, ever since I moved to this house; I can walk down the street through the village-scape that I’ve known for more than fifty years, and I can taste the changes, the alterations in the accepted scheme of things that we used to believe.

The landscape of my childhood and early adulthood was that of the pit-stack and the slag heap of the South Yorkshire Coalfield. From where I’m writing I could see the muck stack of Houghton Main Colliery, with the railway line snaking in front of it. Now, the muck stack is green and the railway line has been replaced by a fast and hectic road that connects Grimethorpe to the rest of the world. The railway line belongs to a past that contains a photograph of me clutching my trainspotter’s notebook, and the spoil heap (in official dry language) is greened and manicured and just right for people to walk on, with or without their whippets.

The view from my window is a microcosm of what has happened and what continues to happen to Northern post-industrial landscapes. The pit shuts. The railway line is closed. The jobs move away or crumble to dust, and then what? Money, from central and local government and from regional development agencies (RIP), trickles into the area; never enough to replace the jobs, but enough to do a very good job with the landscape. And all landscapes, of course, are there to be altered...

That’s the crux of the matter, and something I’ve been thinking about since I made my judging visits for the Landscape Awards. If a landscape can be seen as a kind of epic poem with endless stanzas that stretch backwards and forwards through history, then what about the redrafting? Who is in charge of it? Who takes the decisions on how and when the redrafting takes place? The places I visited have been tended with love and concern and care, and with the proper amount of consultation with the people who have to live, work and play in them. In lots of ways they are a testament to the passion and commitment of the people who, in some cases, have worked in the landscape for years and years and who want to see it evolve and grow because they love it.

So, in these tight times we must be careful with our landscapes, because in the end they’re memory-scapes too. Not only living memories, as you recall walks and picnics or working days and freezing nights, but memories beyond the living; memories held in stone, in hillsides, in field-patterns, in ruins, in bridges, in front doors and back gardens, in high hills that define how we think and vast expanses that shape the way we experience perspective.

In the end, all landscapes belong to everyone. They’re personal-scapes and collective-scapes. And because I’m a poet I can be that imprecise...

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