One hundred years ago, in 1922, before gaining the right to vote, 25-year-old Brenda Colvin decided to start her own independent garden design business. Her practice – today Colvin & Moggridge – is the longest-running landscape firm in the country. Once described as ‘wildly eccentric’ and run by a ‘Polish Countess who needed to live [...]

West Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, seems a world away from us in Reading. Yet for 12 years in the 1950s, a farm there was owned by Clyde Higgs, an English farmer and journalist and the uncle of John Higgs, one of The MERL’s founders. Higgs used the condescending phrase “Natives and the Earth” to describe his time [...]

In 2022 The FOLAR symposium held at The MERL explored how Landscape Architecture worked in alliance with the design and planning of post-war housing. This exhibition explores these themes by highlighting some of the key Landscape Architects of this time, using documents and drawings from the Landscape Institute collections held in our Special Collections.

Over the past year, we have had many a conversation with individuals from across Reading and the surrounding area. These conversations have highlighted the role of the sewing machine in their lives, in the lives of their friends and families and, as the stories were shared and the laughter flowed, it drew attention to the [...]

People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority group, making up nearly 20% of the population. While many people are born with a condition, anyone can become disabled at any time. And yet, in so many contexts, disabled inclusivity is lacking. People’s needs are not anticipated, asked about, or accommodated for. But the disabled label [...]