Author Archives: Tom Turner

Scotland's landscape & architecture Trumped by Alec Salmond and the SNP

Donald Trump enjoys a game of golf in Scotland (Guardian photo)

I first noticed the disease on the outskirts of Edinburgh: splurges of badly planned, ugly developments with no consideration for the historic landscape and architecture of Scotland. This has been trumped and Trumped by the ghastly golf course north of Aberdeen. Donald Trump says it will be the ‘best’ golf course in the world. Fiddlesticks. The local people were against it so the planning application was called in by the Edinburgh government – and approved. Compulsory purchase powers are now being used to force local landowners to sell their land. Why is this being done? Because Salmond wants to prove that an independent Scotland can prosper economically. It is a policy which has worked elsewhere. If you effectively abolish town and country planning controls then developers are attracted, like crows to carion and Russians to the Mediterranean.
I lived round the corner from one of the founders of the Scottish National Party for 20 years and supported the idea of an independent Scotland. Wendy Wood was the daughter of a landscape painter, and an artist herself. Like me, I think she would have withdrawn her support from the SNP if she had known it would lead to the destruction of Scotland’s landscape. There are good landscape architects in Scotland but a friend told me that the major part of their workload is now supporting, and opposing, the construction of windfarms. The turbines are pork barrels – ways of giving subsidies to local people to buy their votes.
The Arbroath Delcaration, addressed to the Pope in 1320 stated (here in a brilliant translation from the Latin) the wish to be independent ‘Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. ‘. Wood, like Roger Casement, was of English stock. The declarators of 1320 were proud of their descent: ‘Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today. The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all bondage ever since. In their kingdom there have reigned one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, the line unbroken a single foreigner.’ Today, they do not want to be ruled by the Pope or the English. Far better, they think, to be ruled by Mamon and the Brussels Bureaucracy.
Trump International Golf Links hopes to become “the world’s best golf course”. Bill Forsyth made a wonderful film in 1983. Local Hero is about a small community in Scotland chose preservation of their landscape to riches from oil. Congratulations to the Guardian for its photograph (above) and to BBC2 for showing Anthony Baxter’s film You’ve been Trumped.
I’d like to see Salmond return to the land of his forebears: Greater Scythia. He will find lots of oil and even-more-ghastly development. With luck, he will be able to wrestle naked with other Scythians and enjoy Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Good luck to him – and good riddance for Scotland.
I would like to be able to boast that the UK landscape profession, led by the Landscape Institute Scotland Branch, has fought a bitter campaign against Trump golf course. But it hasn’t.
Conclusion: watch Local Hero with a tumbler of malt whisky. It will make you feel better.

Wind turbines' landscape and financial impact in the UK

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Wind turbines beside a motorway in North West France (image courtesy P-Y Bégin)

Big landowners have the easiest job getting planning permission for wind turbines, because the only people who live within sight are likely to be their tenants. Wind farm subsidies were about £1bn in 2012, though the rate of subsidy was cut by 10% this year. I drove past an ugly wind farm in Scotland this year, with 22 turbines dominating the landscape. The visual impact was grim, so I began to wonder about their financial impact. With the advantage of generous subsidies, Merryn Somerset Webb calculates that each turbine will yield the owner a profit of £200,000/year for 20 years. This amounts to £4m over the period, or £88m for the group of turbines. This lets the ‘generous’ company which developed the scheme give £1m to the local community over the 20 year period. A landowner who allows a turbine on his land can expect a rent of £1m over the period (£50,000/year). So why not follow the French example and locate the turbines on land beside motorways? This would keep the two sorts of ugliness together and remind motorists that they should be using electricity to power their vehicles. The airflow from vehicles might even be used, with special turbines, to generate electricity when there is no wind. Noise barriers could designed to deflect air currents to roadside turbines.
At present, visitors to the UK probably conclude that UK policy is to splat wind turbines anywhere in the landscape, providing only that no wealthy people, except landowners, live near them.

Canon Bernard Iddings Bell and the postmodern landscape architecture of Heatherwick and Jencks

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Old Airport Road Park (from Thomas Heatherwick Making, Thames & Hudson, 2012)

I visited the V&A this week, to see the Heatherwick Studio Exhibition, and looked at two books in the V&A Library. Heatherwick’s exhibition and book complement one another. TS Eliot proclaimed Rudyard Kipling a great hymn writer on the basis of a single hymn. Kipling’s Recessional is below. Heatherwick can be recognized as a great landscape archtiect on the basis of as single unbuilt design, above. It is the Old Airport Road Park, commissioned by the Abu Dhabi royal family in 2010. Most of the new landscapes made during the Middle East’s Age of Wealth have been horticulturally, climatically and culturally inept. Heatherwick took a lump of clay, moulded it to the shape of a tortoise shell and let it dry. Cracks appeared. This generated the concept of a canopy through which shafts of light pierce the dark, as in a hamam. It was ‘Conceived as a place for friends and families to gather and picnic… the colonnaded spaces below ground are protected from the harsh sunlight by the fragmented pieces of desert supported overhead on columns. Within this environment are cafes, public baths, pools and streams, as well as community vegetable gardens, market gardens and date palms’.
Heatherwick, like most artists, holds back from classifying the style in which he works. But he has a well-tested design method and explains that ‘If a potential commissioner asks for “just a sketch”, we have to try to explain that this is not the way to work’. This is because ‘The studio’s design process has always depended on its workshop, which allows it to test and realize ideas through the making of experimental pieces, protypes, models and full-size models of buildings’. I commend this method to the landscape profession. Jonathan Ive (of Apple) also goes through a protyping sequence – which results in the classic High Modernism of Apple products. Corbusier would love Apple products. Heatherwick and Ive both trained in the UK, Heatherwick studying 3D design and Ive studying industrial design. Heatherwick then went to the Royal College of Art, which presumably helped him to become as much an artist as a craftsman as a designer. Also, I believe, it led him into postmodernism. Heatherwick accepts the core insights of Modernism but adds ‘something more’. The more is often a fascination with the controlled repitition of shapes and patterns. Sometimes, this reminds me of Andy Goldsworthy’s work.
The word ‘postmodern’ was first used by John Watkins Chapman in the 1870s as a term for what we would classify as post-impressionist art. In 1926 the term received an unrelated but serious treatment in Canon Bernard Iddings Bell’s Postmodernism and Other Essays. Bell’s argument was that religious fundamentalism is unacceptable, because of the advance of science, and that a full Modernism is also unacceptable. Equating Modernism with the Liberal theology of George Tyrrell and Alfred Loisey, Bell put forward a Postmodernism which welcomed the the insights of science but held firm to the core principles of Christianity. Quotations from Bell:
The Bible can no longer be regarded as an inerrant touchstone, the wholly infallible gift of the Eternal to struggling man.(p.4)
Modernism is, properly, a way of looking at religion which originated with Loisey and Tyrrell, two eminent and deposed Roman Catholic priests. (p.7) [Both were excommunicated]
There is no art for art’s sake. All art exists for the sake of Truth. (p.13)
The scientific intelligentsia now realizes, and for the most part freely admits that, merely by scientific methods, nothing of basic importance, of primary importance, of ontological importance, can be discovered. (p.21)
Fundamentalism is hopelessly outdated. Modernism has ceased to be modern. We are ready for some sort of postmodernism. (p.54)
Insofar as he exists at this moment, the Post-modernist is apt to be a man without a Church. Protestantism, Modernism, and Romanticism alike seem to him to miss the point. (p.65)
This takes us to the distinguished theorist and landscape designer who brought the term Postmodernism to the visual arts. Charles Jencks argues that postmodernism is an approach which is ‘one-half modern and one-half something else’. This is not as different from Bell’s view as one might have expected. Bell and Jencks appear to agree that (1) a scientific understanding of nature is essential (2) artists should be concerned with truths about the nature of the world – as the best landscape art always has been.

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!

Ultra-safe policing in London public parks

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Britain’s police forces have been criticised for heavy-handed policing. From time to time, policing shows every sign of being based on prejudice and self interest tempered with sloth and incompetence. We have had the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, Jean de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, Bloody Sunday and this week’s Hillsborough Report. They are deeply troubling and when the ‘Independent’ Police Complaints Commission investigates it is like the KGB investigating the Stasi. But NO ONE can accuse the police of neglecting the excruciatingly arduous task of policing the Royal Parks, THANK GOD.

Should urban design start with architecture, landscape, infrastructure – or music?

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The highwaymen seem to have won so that modern (or should it be Modernist?) urban design begins with the layout of roads. The gaps are then filled with blocks and the SLOAP is slurped with slabs and shrubs (SLOAP = Space Left Over After Planning). This is how Concrete Jungles are made. ‘Ugh’. So let’s demote the highwaymen and then think about how to design cities which will be more than assembles of Big Boxes and Little Boxes beside roads (see video below).
Should we launch our urban designs with music, architecture, landscape, planning or infrastructure? Music can set the mood for a design. We can remember the example of the Greenwich landscape architecture urban design project 2011. And we can look back to the example of St Clement Danes (see video above). The original church, built by Danish imigrants, stood between the cities of London and Westminster – possibly near trees, as today. James Gibbs designed the tower – and the music it was to produce was surely the starting point for his design, reminding us that form can follow function without being its slave.
Yet what is the function of a city? Is it to help its citizens lead good lives: healthy, comfortable, safe, sustainable and beautifully inspiring. If so, we cannot expect good cities to result from starting with the design of roads. But where should the urban design process begin: planning, architecture, landscape architecture, green infrastructure, grey infrastructure? You might say ‘start with urban design’ but it has proved too broad a discipline for the training of professionals at first degree level – and also problematic at masters level.