A travelling exhibition celebrating women’s contribution to post-Second World War landscape architecture in Britain comes to London and Yorkshire!
London exhibition: Tuesday 29 November – Saturday 3 December, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston (‘Show and Tell’ on 3 December, 12.30-4:30pm)
Yorkshire exhibition: Tuesday 24 January – Tuesday 7 February (weekdays only), Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield
One hundred years ago, in 1922, before gaining the right to vote, 25-year-old Brenda Colvin started her own independent garden design business. Today, her practice Colvin and Moggridge is the longest-running landscape firm in this country. Once described as ‘wildly eccentric’ and run by a ‘Polish Countess who needed to live in a constant state of high-drama’, Colvin’s office has been at the forefront of finding new ways of working to preserve our landscapes and tackle what we today call the climate and biodiversity emergency.
Through researching and understanding Colvin’s work, advocacy, and collaborations, the AHRC-funded Women of the Welfare Landscape project – led by Dr Luca Csepely-Knorr from the Liverpool School of Architecture – commemorates the network of women and their collaborators who have had a major impact on shaping the post-war designed landscapes of the British Welfare State. The projects aims to shift attention to and celebrate the complexity and wide variety of female praxis in the post-war period: women’s work as educators, campaigners, or advocates; and projects of the everyday: landscapes in service of communities.
Through a variety of public-facing events, Women of the Welfare Landscape aims to engage with, and learn more about, the projects designed by women and their evolution and change since their completion. The travelling exhibition gives a flavour of the variety of projects by Colvin and Colvin and Moggridge between the start of the business in 1922 and Colvin’s death in 1981. It will be installed at the Stanley Picker Gallery in December 2022 and the Department of Landscape Architecture in Sheffield in late January 2023, before going on to the Garden Museum, Birmingham University, and the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading.
The exhibition introduces a variety of landscape architectural typologies and scales to show how Colvin’s practice can exemplify the changing profile of the profession of landscape architecture in the post-Second World War period and shows designs that prove the continuity ideas and working principles in her collaboration with Hal Moggridge and the practice. While showcasing the many aspects of Colvin’s landscape projects, the exhibition also aims to introduce other female professionals with whom she collaborated and whose achievements have so far been overlooked.
‘Show and tell’ events will give people a hands-on experience in sharing photos and ephemera relating to these projects, which will be shared through a dedicated HistoryPin site that will create an open archive and database. Luca and her colleage Dr Camilla Allen hope to gain a better understanding of the legacy of landscape architecture in the post-Second World War period and the contribution women made to it. They welcome any comments, information, memories, or images you might have and would love to hear from you.
You can keep up to date with Women of the Welfare Landscape by following the project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and its dedicated HistoryPin site, or contact the team at womenofthewelfarelandscape@gmail.com.
