20C women in landscape design FOLAR + The Gardens Trust
LEFT Photo of Brenda Colvin CREDIT: Brenda Colvin Collection, The MERL, University of Reading RIGHT Plasticine model of Gale Common Hill c1962 CREDIT: Brenda Colvin Collection, The MERL, University of Reading.
Speaker: Hal Moggridge
The Talk will touch on Brenda’s childhood in India and her early practice (1922-39) designing gardens, which she continued throughout her career. Because she was a thinker about landscape the talk will be interspersed with brief quotations from her writings. She was elected president of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1951, the first woman to lead a British design or environmental profession. From the late 1940s Brenda shared her office with Sylvia Crowe, but practicing separately. The talk will illustrate how they, like other colleagues, broadened the scope of the landscape profession in the latter part of the 20th century. Brenda, independent in thought and practice, worked on government sponsored activities, for instance as consultant for large projects for the Central Electricity Generating Board, a Water Authority, a military town and a new university. Committed to continuity, she set up the basis for perpetuation of her practice and its ideas.
Hal Moggridge was introduced to Brenda Colvin by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, in whose office he had worked after qualifying as an architect. He then became a landscape architect, and in 1969 entered into partnership with Brenda who had retired her practice to the Cotswolds. They worked together harmoniously, and their landscape architectural practice, Colvin & Moggridge, continued after Brenda’s death in 1981 with Chris Carter joining as partner; and still thrives, now under new directors.
Between 1969 and 2005 Colvin & Moggridge handled 1,430 commissions, varying between large long-term rural industrial landscapes, reservoirs, cement works, quarries, a waste ash hill, and new parks and gardens including consultancy to the Inner London Royal Parks and creation of the new National Botanic Garden of Wales.
Hal Moggridge was elected president of the Landscape Institute in 1979. He has represented the Institute on the International Federation of Landscape Architects, was a commissioner of the Royal Fine Art Commission, served on the National Trust’s Architectural Panel, and on ICOMOS Cultural Landscapes Committees. He has explained the practice’s approach in an illustrated book: Slow Growth – on the art of landscape architecture. He has been awarded the OBE in 1986, the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour in 1999 and the Landscape Institute Medal.