The Landscape Foundation, a view from the Director’s chair

In her former capacity as director of the Landscape Foundation (LF), Gillian Darley recently offered FOLAR a small bundle of papers in connection with the work of the Landscape Foundation and Geoffrey Jellicoe and some other related matters. We hope the MERL will accept these as part of the Landscape Institute collection. In the meantime, we invited Gillian Darley to write something about her interview for the post of director of the Foundation, and also about the work with which this organisation was involved. This is what she wrote for us.

Becoming a Director

It was only my second formal interview in my first twenty-five years at work. The place was the House of Lords and the job on offer was that of becoming the Director of Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s latest initiative (for all that he was already well over 90) — the Landscape Foundation. Those in the room in the spring of 1994 included several Trustees of the Landscape foundation, Lords Pym, Jellicoe and Puttnam, along with the impeccably well connected and slightly mysterious Michael Tree. They were, essentially, Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Star Chamber, his fond clients, family and friends, while his impeccable professional colleague Hal Moggridge would later become the Chair.  

I have very little memory of the actual interview (in marked contrast to that held at the Courtauld Institute, long before, in front of disdainful Sir Anthony Blunt who, only a month later, was to be interviewed by Peter Wright on account of his extra-curricular activities as a spy). I do, however, remember the setting in the Palace of Westminster: it was confected from the forceful Pugin wallpaper (just before Derry Irvine’s refurbishment) and a heavy clubland atmosphere. Our conversation was well mannered and affirmative. I don’t think the post had been advertised and I may have been the only candidate for what had to be - given the fragile finances - a part-time role. With a change of arts editor, I had just been stood down after three years as the Observer’s architectural correspondent and it may have been Michael Ellison, principal landscape architect within the Department of the Environment, who tipped me off. Soon after, he became the Foundation chair.  

On getting the post, I felt that I could only run what we might now characterise as a nimble operation, in reality hanging on a shoestring and most of that out of Geoffrey’s own threadbare pockets. My first task was to get to grips with fundraising, to reimburse him discreetly, without that being an obvious object, either to donors or the recipient. Charitable status had been secured and there was a highly distinguished board (as someone put it to me when I was embroiled in yet another funding panic, why worry, ‘you’ve a Board to die for). There was, however, a hollow feeling. What was the Foundation for? 

It seemed, or does in the rear view mirror, that there was no very clear direction of travel beyond a focus on contemporary landscape practice and, I think following my own emphases, on the potential gains and insights of cross disciplinary professional contact. My predecessor, an efficient naval Captain, Peter Broadbent, had previously been the administrator at the Landscape Institute. He’d done the donkeywork achieving charitable status for the Foundation and had embarked on instituting some awards. Possibly mistakenly, I decided to turn us towards a series of events, visits and seminars rather than become tangled in the top-heavy administration required to run an awards programme. But with hindsight, and good PR from lead sponsors, it could have usefully brought the Foundation into the spotlight. As it was, we were confused by many with the Institute, the Landscape Design Trust (another of Geoffrey’s ideas) and even the Architecture Foundation (founded 1991). There were other environmental quangos at work or being formed with government blessing, the Lottery was in preparation and, by 1999, CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) had been set up, among its objectives that professional cross-fertilisation that I had hoped the Landscape Foundation might have driven.  

I took a desk within the Bowling Green Lane offices of Austin Smith Lord Architects and as the waters began to close over my head in terms of time and tasks, Mary McHugh came to help (and instructed me in the still arcane world of email). We organised discussions, visits and presentations aiming to give a wider, more international and more cross-fertilised view of the field. I visited the Netherlands and made a rich network of contacts, Kathryn Gustafson was one visitor who came in the other direction, while Mary’s own knowledge of Barcelona played its part in our (pre-Google) knowledge. I visited Geoffrey, first in Highpoint where I was shocked to see the failing windows and realised we held the funds that could maintain his home. When he went to Seaton, before his death in 1996, I visited more than once and reported on what we were up to - to his apparent delight.  

But the reality was we were too little, too distant from the profession whose official attitude seemed to be that of mild disdain for another of Geoffrey’s initiatives. No invitation came to write for the landscape professional press, despite my own background in journalism.   

For all that we discussed major land reclamation at Stockley Park, innovative public domain design and work such as Lynn Kinnear’s urban playgrounds, we made links to the schools, in particular Edinburgh, and laid the way to a wider and deeper investigation of landscape design as the millennium approached. One Foundation summer party was held at Marsh Lane, the Gibberd Garden outside Harlow, whose MEP, Hugh Kerr was also a Trustee despite his political views being very distant from the tory grandees. Everyone was conscientious, encouraging and civil. I value those dealings.  

Meanwhile, my own life (with a child still at nursery) began to point back to writing and I resigned, having decided to complete my biography of John Soane which Yale University Press published in 1999.  

Andrew Cross, an environmental artist, seemed a suitable person to take the Foundation on. It always felt to me, and seems so again as I write this, that we were on the edge of something but lacked the scale, resources and drive to step out into the foreground. The Landscape Foundation should have emerged from the shadows in the 1990s but, somehow, it never did.  

Gillian Darley