On Landscape Leaders: Geoffrey Jellicoe

We asked leading figures of landscape to recall the people who have had a significant influence on their life, work or practice.

Annabel Downs on Geoffrey Jellicoe

Having been involved in the landscape profession for over three decades, and like others on voluntary committees, I have been fortunate to encounter many talented and generous landscape architects who have influenced the way I think, see or operate.

My first boss was Peter Shepheard, his practice at SEH was forward looking, cultural, interested in its staff and a fun place to be. He was a talented and engaging designer and he definitely shaped me, so it may seem quirky to identify someone else whom I scarcely knew but who changed my life in an entirely unanticipated way.

As part of his move from Highpoint in London, to Devon, Geoffrey Jellicoe had arranged with Sheila Harvey, the LI librarian, for her to take a stack of books as well as his plan chest of drawings. The early ILA (Institite of Landscape Architects) Constitution’s aims of those first members (of whom Jellicoe was one), was to establish an archive of books and lantern slides; the former for its members, the latter to explain to other professions and the public what their work was about. It took years for the library to be established, but when Jellicoe handed over his drawings in 1994 the most exciting part of the LI archive had just begun.

Sheila invited me to volunteer to catalogue the drawings. We both assumed this was a discrete collection and a short term role, but it seems that Jellicoe knew exactly what he was doing and following a visit to the RIBA about conservation methods and their archive (which then had 600,000 drawings), it became obvious that this was the beginning of something much bigger for the LI. And so it was that the archive expanded and within 13 years it had become the largest collection of twentieth century landscape drawings and papers in the UK, rich in information on design, designers, ideas, techniques and individual sites, providing an invaluable resource for academics, students, practitioners, other professions and government agencies.

Although the LI archive has now been transferred to the MERL, University of Reading, the archive still needs to be kept alive and growing with a range of new projects, including digital material. Do bear this in mind when your most favourite commissions reach the end of their liability period, or you downsize your office, and please contact FOLAR in the first instance.

Considering the range of work the archive spanned, it surprised me that the most requested project from our archive was Jellicoe’s Kennedy Memorial. In comparison with other schemes, we had hardly anything on this apart from Susan Jellicoe’s brilliant photos and Jellicoe’s writings. A few years ago I was asked by the Landscape Design Trust to write a piece about the design of the Kennedy Memorial as part of a HLF project engaging children with designed landscapes. I thought it would be a couple of paragraphs but I have carried out my own research and found a hoard of papers across many archives and am hoping to publish the full story of this project and Jellicoe’s remarkable contribution next year, coinciding with the long-overdue exhibition on Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe.

Annabel Downs CMLI FSGD. LI archivist 1995–2009. Editor of Peter Shepheard LDT monograph, winner of LI research award (2006). Chair of FOLAR (friends of Landscape Library and Archive at Reading).Member of LI Plant Health and Biosecurity Group.

Professor Kathryn Moore on Geoffrey Jellicoe

Water Gardens at Hemel Hempstead designed by Jellicoe and restored by HTA

© Nick Harrison/HTA

Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe has had and continues to have a profound influence on my life. He was a beacon of sensibility in a world obsessed with quantification, the concept of objective neutrality and a penchant for simplistic reduction– an approach that remains all too evident in towns, cities and rural areas around the world.

Jellicoe had a far more holistic approach to design. A polymath, he knew that to design well required not only technical knowledge, but also seeing the bigger picture, bringing in ideas, concepts, culture and philosophy to shape the materiality of the discipline; the quality of the experience of place. He knew that the art of design was not purely dependent on the size of a client’s budget, more than simply a matter of expedience. To Jellicoe it was much more than that.

His understanding of the scope of landscape architecture, analysed so brilliantly in “The Landscape of Man” (1975) is still without parallel. In its introduction “Landscape and Civilisation” he anticipates that “the world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognised as the most comprehensive of the arts”. Over half a century ago he recognised that in its capacity to straddle the silos of art and science, landscape design has the agency to deal with the complexity and scale of the global challenges we now face.

I visited him as a student in the 1980s, determined to find out more about the art of design. I was awestruck by the paintings and drawings by Sutherland, Hepworth, Nicholson and Klee hanging on the walls of his home in Grove Terrace, but I was most impressed by the man himself, by the impression that I was meeting the éminence grise of our profession.

After several years in practice at Salford City Council, frustrated with the lacklustre and limited profile of landscape architecture and acutely aware of the negligible attention given to teaching the design process, I moved from leading a 24 strong landscape practice group to put my money where my mouth was – into education. This seemed to be the only way to challenge the boundaries of the discipline and the profession and move it away from the mundane to what Jellicoe saw as “the mother of the arts”. I had a welcome if totally unexpected response to my first article “Towards Creative Design” published in Landscape Design in 1991. Sir Geoffrey wrote that, “it was such a gigantic step forward for the art of landscape”, he wanted to come and see the next stage, translating the abstract into reality – “almighty difficult in landscape”.

It caused great excitement at Birmingham City University. He came to see what my students were up to and we were all enthralled to see the great man critiquing the work. After that, every time I published an article he offered encouragement, advice and criticism, just as he did in our conversations over the years including an interview in 1995.

His niece, Anne Jellicoe Mayne asked me to speak at his memorial service in the Royal Society of Arts, this lead to an invitation from then president of the LI, Alan Tate, to stand for Council. Subsequently, as President of the LI (2004–6) and as President of International Federation of Landscape Architects (2014–2018), Jellicoe’s artistic, critical design expertise, together with his vision and ambition to develop the education and practice of the discipline across the world, has sustained me. I will always value his council and inspiration.

Kathryn Moore is President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and Professor of Landscape Architecture at Birmingham City University and a former President of the Landscape Institute. She has published extensively on design quality, theory, education and practice. Her book Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design (2010) provides the basis for critical, artistic discourse.

Alan Tate on Brian Clouston and Geoffrey Jellicoe

The Kennedy Memorial by Jellicoe

© MERL/Landscape Institute Collection

It is, of course, an invidious task to select a single significant predecessor who has had a major impact on one’s career. I could select one of my educators at the University of Manchester – Ian Laurie, Tom Howcroft and Allan Ruff. Ian argued that good design can benefit the poor as well as the rich. Tom impressed on me something that I still tell students – “every project involves keeping things, improving things and adding things”. And Allan introduced us to ecological design way before its contemporary currency.

Then there was my first boss – John Kelsey in Clouston’s London office, with his dictum that professional practice (and life, for that matter) consists of “filling what’s empty, emptying what’s full, and scratching what itches”. And that brings me to Brian Clouston (PPLI) himself – a business owner with a singular ability to trust and support younger practitioners and allow them to run his offices their way. That led to me running the Clouston Hong Kong office from 1979, at the tender age of twenty-eight. Our work in Hong Kong kickstarted a career-long interest in the design, construction and management of public parks. As an academic in the twenty-first century, I have written about them in two editions of the book Great City Parks.

I took over the Hong Kong office from Henry Steed and subsequently helped Harry and Jenny to establish our Singapore office – where, with his passion for plants and seductive settings, he continues to promote the importance of human immersion in the landscape. In that respect he is a successor to Geoffrey Jellicoe (PPLI), with whom I was fortunate to have a long conversation on 12 March 1986. When I asked Sir Geoffrey about his idea of the perfect public park he suggested the journey through (the “wilderness” of) Highgate Woods to the (Repton-inspired) parkland of Kenwood and into the Adam-designed building (particularly the library) and the fine art of the Iveagh Bequest. And that, of course, is comparable to his account (see The Guelph Lectures) of the pilgrimage to the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede.

Before leaving London for the University of Manitoba in 1998, I worked for a number of years with the gone-too-soon John Hopkins. It was a complementary working relationship – although I still find his appointment for the Olympics (a position for which I also applied) vexing … but the boy done good. And he tolerated my term as President of the Institute (1995- 97) and its cost to our business.

My mentor for the presidency was the admirably pithy Michael Ellison (who once described talking to a mutual acquaintance as being like a walk along the edge of a high cliff – “the view can be wonderful but you never know whether you’re going to be pushed off”). My move to Manitoba was prompted by marriage to then PhD student (in landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art), my subsequent mentor and co-author Marcella Eaton. I admire and thank them all.

Professor Alan Tate is a Fellow and Past President of the Landscape Institute and a registered Landscape Architect in Manitoba. He spent nine years running the Clouston landscape consultancy in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia before returning to Europe to lead the landscape design team for EuroDisneyland. Alan then spent nine years based in London before moving to Canada to take up a teaching position at the University of Manitoba.