Thames Area Strategy zones from the 2009-10 Mayor's London Plan

You can download the .pdf and comment the draft of Mayor Boris Johnson’s London Plan 2009.  The most interesting chapters, for me, are Chapter 6 on Transport and  Chapter 7 on London’s Living Spaces and Places. The Gardenvisit website has a historical analysis of previous Open Space Plans for London and I have a special interest in Boris’s plan because he is the only politician I have ever voted for who has been elected. Briefly, my comments on the 2009 draft of the London Plan are as follows.

• The section on Cycling is very welcome - and Boris won my vote by supporting this cause. I hope I live  long enough to ride into the capital on a Cycle Super Highway, but since Ken Livingstone promised something similar when he was first elected I am maintaining a healthy skepticism. The policy that ‘to bring about a significant increase in cycling in London, so that it accounts for at least 5 per cent of modal share by 2026′ is insufficiently ambitious. ‘In 2003 fully 36% cycled to workplaces in Copenhagen whereas only 27% drove to work’.
• The Blue Ribbon Strategy, also introduced by Livingstone, is very wise and very welcome. But it needs some tough political muscle behind it.
• The Walking Strategy, based on my 1992 Green Strategy for London, is supported by Boris as it was by Ken, with thanks to them both.
• The plan for a Hierarchy of Open Space in London is as irrelevant today as when it was first advanced by the GLC in 1969. I can only think that it survives because there is standard textbook a Town and Country Planning which supports this kind of absurdity.
• The Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land ideas are supported for the very good reason that there would be a public outcry if they were not supported. The fact that they have no obvious affect on planning decisions scarcely matters.
• The Biodiversity Strategy is welcome. But there should also be a strategy for the diversification of open space types. London has far too much generalized public open space and not nearly enough specialized public open space. See blog comment on Urban parks, POS and landscape architecture.
• The introduction of Thames Policy Areas, based on Thames landscape strategy, is welcome but does not go far enough. The Thames needs a Scenic Quality Appraisal and then zoning to show (1) zones where there should be a presumption in favour of conserving the existing character (2) zones where there should be a presumption in favour of changing the existing character - because the scenic quality is low. See blog comment on the Millennium London Eye.

CONCLUSIONS ON THE LANDSCAPE SECTIONS OF THE MAYOR’S LONDON PLAN

1) The 2009 London Plan is qualitatively inferior to the 1943 Open Space Chapter of the Abercrombie Plan for London. The latter is obsolete in most respects but it had the great merit of taking a simple, clear and idealistic view of the problems and the opportunities. Abercrombie was a member of the Institute of Landscape Architects and had a deep understanding of the subject.

2) If the Greater London Authority is unable to afford the cost of expert landscape consultants, I modestly point them to the  Green Strategy I prepared for the London Planning Advisory Committee in 1992. The Mayor’s London Plan is over halfway to adopting the principle of a series of overlapping green networks (for Rivers, Walks, Cycling, and Habitats). These layers should now be INTEGRATED  on a Londonwide basis.

3) Town planners should not have responsibility for landscape and open space planning unless they also hold professional qualifications in landscape architecture. I do not know who wrote the landscape sections of the 2009 Draft but they do not read like the work of imaginative, well-educated and influential landscape planners.

Nemea has the only sacred grove proven by archaeology

Western cities are full of  echos Greek architecture, almost all inspired by surviving Greek temples which were built in sanctuaries and sacred groves as houses for gods. Greek temples were not buildings in which people congregated to pray, as Christians and Muslims congregate. As Vincent Scully argues, temples were located in landscapes which were  sacred long before the temples were built. Often, these places also had sacred groves, comprising either wild or planted trees, before the temples were built. I therefore suggest that all those cities with echos of Greek architecture should also have sacred groves. They would be  wonderful gestures to the origins of western landscape architecture. London’s Waterloo Quarter has commissioned a Christmas Forest for 2009, thankfully turning its back on all those centuries in which the Christians felled sacred groves. See  Waterloo Forest designed by landscape architects naganJohnson.

Pierre Bonnechere writes that ‘At present the sacred grove of Nemea is the only one archaeology can claim to have discovered with certainty. Called an alsos from the first literary evidence, the site was landscaped [ie planted] in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and perhaps earlier: twenty-three planting pits, carved into the crushed rock at the south of Zeus’s temple, were uncovered and found to contain carbonized roots of cypress (or perhaps fir) trees. The excavators have now replanted the site, restoring its former appearance (Fig 1: they have followed Pausanias, who mentioned cypress trees in the second century AD)’ (Conan, M., Sacred gardens and landscapes: ritual and agency 2007 p.18).  See also Sacred Groves: Sacrifice and the Order of Nature in Ancient Greek Landscapes 2007 Barnett R. Landscape Journal, 26:2. University of Wisconsin Press, 252-269 (kindly made available by Rod Barnett at http://www.rodbarnett.co.nz/texts/)

Image courtesy Miriam Mollerus

Following in the footsteps of Britain’s most quoted historians (W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman) we should ask: is the London Eye is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

• 30m people have ridden in the Eye (@ £17.5 each =£525m) and the owners pay the South Bank Centre £2.5m/year to rent a tiny strip of land. It thus enriches London and Londoners. This is a Good Thing.
• The London Eye makes Central London resemble a Theme Park: County Hall and the Palace of Westminster have lost their dignity and now resemble toys in a model village. This is a Bad Thing.
• The London Eye was originally given planning permission for 5 years but was then made permanent, thus enriching the owners at the expense of the public good. This was a Bad Thing.

On balance the London Eye is therefore a Bad Thing and Lord Rogers was  wrong. He declared “The Eye has done for London what the Eiffel Tower did for Paris”. Lord Rogers is a decent architect but has little understanding or urban design and no understandisng of landscape architecture or geography. The Eiffel Tower does  not dominate the historic core of Paris.
The London Eye should be moved downstream of Tower Bridge, to a site which would not be dwarfed by its scale (eg Chamber’s Wharf). It should also be hoisted by 30m (from 135 metres to 165 metres so that it is higher than the Star of Nanchang (160 m). This would be a Very Good Thing.

Seen from St James Park, the London Eye makes Whitehall resemble a themed hotel in Disneyland

http://www.archtracker.com/the-garden-house-takeshi-hosaka-architects/2009/04/

Apart from what looks what looks unfortuneately like artifical turf on the roof - the Garden House by Takeshi Hosaka Architects with its tight triangular plan is a surprise and delight! Definitely a garden for my soul! The living spaces are designed around the edges of an enclosed garden courtyard, cleverly stacked and arranged to take advantage of every square mm of space, create privacy and capture views. In the photographs the garden is very young…it would be fantastic to revisit the house as the tree grows and the potted garden matures.

If you can’t resist viewing more  maybe a trip to Japan is in order…

Thinking, sometimes, that landscape designers can turn to artists, much as we turn to  engineers and  ecologists, for specialist inspiration on projects, I went to the Frieze Art Fair this afternoon. By way of a review: I found about 2% of the exhibits wonderful and 40% of them trash. Judging from the way other visitors were pacing up and down the aisles, I suspect this opinion is common. Fortunately, we visitors were in disagreement as to which works of art fell into which  category. I came away with some design ideas but, better than that, I stopped on the way home to buy a box of Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic Color. I did not bang into any celebs, unless you count the blue statue of Norman Foster. He can be seen on the video and on this webpage. I was very impressed by the high style in which most visitors were dressed - but instead of high style bikes outside there was a fleet of sinister Black Series 7 BMWs labelled ‘Frieze art 2009 VIP transport’. Trust me, life is better on a Brompton.

the Bassin Mirroir and Orchard at the Jardin Plume

I vividly remember my sense of injustice and disappointment when a university tutor dismissed the French Romantic poetry I was raving about as ‘cliché’. I had only just met it, and I thought it was wonderful. Please then, go to see this wonderful garden before it becomes cribbed, copied, and eventually clichéd. It is so new and so original, yet the formula is old, because this garden takes the best principles of the past and applies them in a strikingly modern way.

Sylvie and Patrick Quibel are hortics who built the garden to promote their nursery. Now the nursery funds the garden, and the garden has been voted Garden of the Year by Those That Know.

It is on flat ground in the middle of farm land in Normandy, a climate similar to ours in England, so plenty of scope for copying. The Quibels based the design on the principles used at Vaux le Vicomte by Le Notre (a design so successful that the Sun King jealously imprisoned the owner, stole the chateau, and got the designer to do him Versailles). There are grand allées, formal hedging and tightly clipped parterres. The house is raised above the land, and extra land is ‘borrowed’ by carrying the eye seamlessly into countryside beyond. There is a potager as purely ornamental as Marie Antoinette’s, a pool to reflect the heavens, and secluded spots for indulgent reverie. So far so déjà vue, but what makes the garden modern is the way all this is done.

The raising of the house is by one sole brick step, and that is the only new hard landscaping to be seen. The allées are wide paths in an orchard, mown between geometric squares filled with tall grasses and colourful perennials. Thus French formality is wittily contrasted with the billowing grasses which play so well to the wind swept site .The Quibels saw them as undulating and continued the metaphor by clipping the formal hedges into waves.

The parterre in front of the house is filled with the Summer garden - a jumble of hot colours and tall shapes including over 8 different types of Helenium - on close inspection each bed of the parterre has a side missing, ‘to let in the air’. This looks out onto the orchard, and beneath an enormous apple tree, the reflection pool, which is a simple square cut in place of one of the grass cubes in the orchard.

There are traditional box balls in the Spring garden, but there are over twenty of them, of varying sizes and interplanted with mainly whites such as hellebore and solomon’s seal, astrantia and pulmonaria, all brought alive with the lightest scattering of Molinia ‘Fontane’ dancing above.

The Autumn garden is hidden behind hedges on the west side of the house, and Patrick describes how they built the arbour as this is the best spot to enjoy an evening aperitif. In front of the arbour an enormous ‘table’ of box separates the diners from the crowd of ‘vivaces’, a brightly coloured jostling jungle of perennials, with annuals and grasses, mostly over six foot tall. The Quibels site Dixter as an influence, and like Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garrett they plant in associations. They will try out groupings in situ until they are happy with a combination, when they repeat it again and again, so that the result is harmonious, whilst looking natural. In the spring everything is cut to the ground, weeds removed and, like Dixter, self-seeders scrutinised and allowed tenancy where they enhance the original planting.

The arbour and box 'table' in the Autumn garden at Jardin Plume

As nurserymen the Quibels were influenced by Priona in Holland, and they propagate a huge range of new perennial style plants such as Aster, Cimicifuga, Veronicastrum, Circium, Epilobium Sanguisorbas and Thalictrums and wonderful grasses including their own self seeded Miscanthus ‘saturnia’, a luminous white flowering possible love child of Miscanthus ‘Silver feather’ which is similar but heavier.

It is this mixture of formal and natural, control and laissée faire, old fashioned structure and twenty-first century planting that makes this garden special. It is a very sensual garden, crammed full of colours, scents and movement, and the French are very sensual about their plants. Nursery catalogues talk of finding the plants that have ‘seduced’ you in the gardens, and to overhear the eager replies to Patrick’s question ‘Do you want it?’ (vous le voulez?) in the nursery, you can see why.

The Quibels will be speaking at the Garden Museum on October 20^th www.gardenmuseum.org.uk To visit the garden see www.lejardinplume.com

Patrick Quibel in le Jardin Plume

The landscape architecture should consider the implications for the landscape of supplying the UK's energy demand when the oil runs out (image from the 10-page Synopsis, reproduced courtesy David Mackay)

So far as I know, there is only one excellent book on Sustainable Energy. It is available free and the author, David MacKay, has become a government advisor. Everyone should read the 10-page synopsis. My question is this: how will solar power affect the landscape and what can landscape architects do to help the shift to sustainable energy? Solar, Clean Coal, Nuclear, Tide, Wave, Hydro, Waste, Pumped Heat, Wood, Biofuel, Wind.

The European average for energy use is 125 kWh/day.  Covering the windiest 10% of Britain with onshore windfarms would yield 20 kWh/ day per person; covering every south-facing roof with solar water-heating panels would capture 13 kWh/day per person; wave machines intercepting Atlantic waves over 500 km of coastline would provide 4 kWh per day per person.

Do landscape architects have anything to say about the layout of giant solar farms? David MacKay believes they are the most promising solution in the longer term. And what about giant wind farms?

This is called urban agriculture - but the food is not grown in a field (agri in Latin)

Cities can, should and will, I believe, become much more productive of food. A friend whose paved ‘garden’ measures about 20 sq meters is self-sufficnent herbs and in summer fruits. He has 16 fruit trees, all grown in pots, and produces strawberries and other fruits with  a flavour far superior to supermarket food. He does not have to worry about chemical sprays. He contributes to the balance of payments.  NO energy is required to transport the produce. His plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. The vitamens do not have time to decay in storage. There is no need for a refrigerator or deep freeze to store the food. Tending the plants is good exercise. He provides ‘visual policing’ for the community while doing the work.

Why don’t more people grow their own food? Because most cities are not planned for urban agriculture, unless they are in Cuba.

The Skateboard park on London's South Bank is a specialised POS, created by and for its users - in defiance of the authorities. It involved no capital cost and nor is there any maintenance cost.

Too many park managers have a horticultural training. To few park managers are trained in landscape architecture, garden design, event management, community leadership, economics, public accountancy or social entrepreneurship. The consequence of the imbalance is that too much public open space is managed as ‘parkland’: ‘green deserts with lollipops’, shrubberies, flowerbeds and a few facilities for young mums, sporty youths and old age pensioners. We have too much generalized public open space and too little specialized public open space.

Hundertwasser's design for Spa Blumeau increases the urban area while allowing a vegetated landscape to develop

The most popular urban design policy is NIMBY Not In My Back Yard: lets keep on building but lets do it somewhere else. This may change when we all come to see the Earth as our Back Yard. Meanwhile, how can we make urbanization more popular? There are about three times as many humans on earth today as on the day I was born. If this trend continues, as is projected, we need a lot of space for urban sprawl or we need to intensify the use of each square meter which is already urbanized. How can either policy be popular? My suggestion is asking landscape architects to study plots of land and  find ways of simultaneously (1) creating more indoor space (2) creating more greenspace which is both useful and accessible to the public. This can be done in lots of ways and one of the best examples comes from the work of the Austrian artist-designer Friedensreich Hundertwasser. At Spa Blumeau, illustrated above, he took some tired farmland and made a popular spa with, I guess, more wildlife and vegetation than before the development took place.

See the Landscape Urbanism Blog and Wiki on Landscape Urbanism Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism which argues that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.