An additional reflection on Gordon Patterson from Roger Cartwright
A Memory of Gordon Patterson and the Landscape Course at Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham - Environment Counts
I was a student at the School of Architecture and Landscape, Cheltenham 1962 to 1965 and was sad to hear of the great loss of Gordon Patterson who I (and many other students) found an outstanding inspirational lecturer and friend. Although we didn’t realise it, this was a Golden Age for landscape architecture in Britain and I was lucky to train and embark on a career as a landscape architect in the second half of the 20th Century.
After completing our training it seemed easy to get employment, we could choose what to do and where to work – I was very tempted by the possibility of a job as an assistant with Sylvia Crowe who had recently been appointed as the first landscape consultant to the Forestry Commission. It had been a revelation when I had borrowed her books from the Library - “Tomorrow’s Landscape” and “The Landscape of Power”, and “Land and Landscape” by Brenda Colvin, This was the philosophy I had been looking for and the approach I thought was needed in forestry.
I became interested in natural history as a child and have been able to follow this interest throughout my career. Firstly through practical experience as a forest worker and training to become a forester in Scotland and then working in the colonial service in Africa. I was lucky in choosing to work as a forester in Nyasaland, where the Chief Conservator Richard Willan was about 50 years ahead of his time in encouraging and training his staff to practice enlightened wildlife and conservation management in one of the most beautiful and biologically rich regions of Central Africa. I have written about this in my book Wind on the Hills (2012) Scotforth Books, based on diaries describing my early life. After returning to England in 1961, I worked as an assistant manager for Tilhill Forestry in South West England, where I found that many of our clients didn’t need conventional forestry management, they often wanted help with amenity and environmental issues that required an understanding of landscape design, ecology and conservation.
I wrote to the Secretary at the Landscape Institute, Alison Dale, who sent an encouraging reply with information about landscape courses. The nearest one to me was at Cheltenham and I enquired if I could train part time, but they suggested that the best thing would be to enrol on a full time course. I was dubious about this, as I thought that at the age of 26 and about to get married, I was much too old to be going back to full time education. Ian Abbott was the Head of the school and I think it may have been him together with Gordon Patterson who interviewed me and eventually persuaded me that, taking account of my previous training and forestry experience, I should be able to complete all the work of the four year course in three years.
An attractive feature of this course that I found valuable for future team working was that during the first year, landscape students were trained together with the architectural and planning students. Together with one of the architectural students, I worked full time during holidays for a Mr Hughes, who was a landscape gardener at Prestwick. We became experts at wall and rockery building and laying turf. We used to talk of inventing a system for producing turf that could be laid in rolls and some years later were pleased to see that somebody must have had a similar idea and put it into practice.
Things became easier financially during my second year when I obtained a part time, pioneering job as Conservation Corps Organiser for the Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation, for which I was paid an honorarium. I was also able to attend a series of lectures on grassland ecology by David Barling from The Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester and this, combined with lectures as part of our second year by Tom Wright from Pershore College of Horticulture, helped widen my understanding of plants and ecology. These excellent lectures and imaginative field work projects, including studies of the derelict Capability Brown landscape at Croome and the historic Dutch water garden at Westbury Court, helped to prepare me for my new future career.
Tom Wright later moved from Pershore to Wye College, where Chris Baines describes Tom’s influence on his career here: https://iale.uk/wye-influence As a student I didn’t know the full story but I am sure that Gordon Patterson was involved in recruiting these like-minded lecturers, such as the landscape architect John Ingoldby who, together with Gordon, led us on a visit to study landscape design in Germany and Austria. Besides seeing fantastic baroque houses and gardens, we had our first experience of a Garden Festival!
Besides landscape, I had been strongly influenced by ideas on town planning and modern building by our architectural tutors and was impressed by the success of prefabs and the Eric Lyons Span development, just down the road from where we lived in Cheltenham and the possibilities of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.
During the summer holidays I was employed by Gloucestershire County Council as a student landscape architect under Betty Willis, who had previously worked as Head of the Landscape Section at Cumbernauld New Town. The County Council offered me a job when I finished College but in the end, I decided to apply for a post with Cumbernauld New Town. Although I enjoyed working at Cumbernauld and remain committed to designing and building New Towns as the best way to solve the housing crisis, I could see that this was leading me towards a career in urban landscape. I wanted to return to countryside work, so in 1967 I moved to Lancashire County Council, to work on landscape conservation and recreation policies for the Forest of Bowland AONB. The work eventually included the design of Beacon Fell Country Park and other schemes in the county, such as the landscape treatment of roads and quarries, the reclamation of coal waste heaps, and ideas for the restoration of Glasson Dock and the recreational use of the Lancaster Canal.
In 1970 I was made a member of the planning team for the Morecambe Bay Barrage and took many of the ideas from this to my next job, which was with Northumberland County Council. It included the planning and landscape treatment of the future Kielder Water and the surrounding Forest. I also worked on the design and development of several country parks, including Bolam Lake. After this experience and a visit to see the herd of wild white cattle at Chillingham Castle, I became interested in managing woodland pasture and more aware of the need for a conservation grazing service for country parks and wildlife conservation areas.
After local government re-organisation in 1974, I moved to the new Cumbria County Council to do similar work and for my family to return to live in the wooded countryside that we all loved, on the shores of Morecambe Bay. As Head of the Environment Section in the Planning Department my work became increasingly office bound and, from about 1980, the changes introduced by central government began to seriously adversely affect our ability to get landscape work done on the ground. This decline is well documented in the “Landscape Review”, the Julian Glover report of September 2019.
I took early retirement in 1991 and was able to enjoy another 27 years working in private practice doing landscape restoration and socially desirable development as a landscape architect and woodland manager. It was a refreshing change to work for a variety of interesting clients on a large number of small estates and farms in the Lake District, Cumbria and Lancashire, (particularly in the Arnside Silverdale AONB), helping with management plans, Environmental Sensitive Areas, Forestry Commission grants and Countryside Stewardship applications.
I retired from private practice on 31st March 2018 but have maintained my interest in practical, hands-on work in the woodland and pasture that I and my wife have owned at Hale Moss for thirty years. As part of this, I helped establish a Grazing Animals Project using native cattle and sheep, combining this with the provision of a voluntary conservation grazing service with our own Fell ponies, and I am still learning. I started this as a landscape restoration project but now realize that it has become a small scale rewilding project.
None of this may seem to be directly related to Gordon Patterson but hope it demonstrates how a lot of successful landscape work remains anonymous and is taken for granted. The landscape course at Cheltenham, and Gordon Paterson’s teaching may have had a very wide influence and has continued to inspire me and many others throughout our careers.
Roger Cartwright 3rd October 2021