F E AT U R E By Hal Moggridge
1. Ratcliffe Power Station: aerial view of model of Gordon Patterson’s landscape design. © Journal of the ILA 1968
2. Eggborough Power Station, an early view of the recreation area in use for staff allotments. © Colvin and Moggridge
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Post-war power Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe were at the heart of landscape developments in the post-war period – Hal Moggridge explores their impact.
https://research. historicengland.org.uk/ Report.aspx?i=15846
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andscape architects enjoyed opportunities during the 1960s-70s when working on landscapes of power in the rural context. Historic England’s (2016) ‘England’s Redundant Post-War Coal and Oil-fired Power Stations’ confirmed that “landscape architecture became a key aspect of the Central Electricity Generating Board’s (CEGB) policy from its formation in 1958,” with early landscape appointments. Dr Luca Csepely-Knorr explains this in her article, mentioning many of the landscape architects involved. It was partly due to effective campaigning by the Institute. For instance, I remember the LI’s splendid 50th anniversary international dinner at Kings College Cambridge in 1979, when CEGB chair Glyn England, a guest, discussed potential with British and international landscape architects; within weeks landscape architects were appointed for forthcoming electricity projects. In their report 86/2016 ‘High Merit’, Historic England1 recognised the profession’s historic contribution to power station design: “It was Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe who early on helped shape the CEGB’s attitude and approach to landscape design [...] during the 1950s and 60s [...] Colvin was the first to become directly involved with the landscaping of power stations (from 1952).” Brenda Colvin recognised the impossibility, and in her opinion, undesirability, of screening the larger components, seeing the problem as one of how to ‘integrate and relate them to their surroundings’. Her approach to the new generation of 1960’s stations was to employ massed planting of trees and shrubs (often raised on linear banks), to give strong horizontal base lines that balanced the height of the cooling towers and principal buildings while 15
