Women of the Welfare Landscape

Photograph of Brenda Colvin
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 [...]

International Federation of Landscape Architects, 1948

Austria IFLA meeting
The mission of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, which represents 77 national associations, is to create “globally sustainable and balanced living environments for the benefit of humanity worldwide”. This year, IFLA marks its 75th anniversary. As part of an AHRC-funded anniversary project, IFLA 75: Uncovering Hidden Histories in Landscape Architecture, this online exhibition explores [...]

Snapshots of Simba Farm

View of Mount Meru from Simba Farm, with hazy cloud-covered mountain in the distance, hills, trees, and an arable field in the foreground.
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 [...]

Where Do We Go From Here? — Audio Trail

Reading’s museums hold a vast array of objects that represent the lives of many different people. Like the diverse population of the town, these artefacts carry with them a diaspora of experiences. Items at Reading Museum convey the histories of local and global connections alike. Those in the Museum of English Rural Life welcome countryside […]

Stories we live by: Life in the Anthropocene

A mixture of cultivation and craft objects with a shellmex petrol pump globe and a mannequin in a smock wearing a facemask

Museums offer a useful way to engage people in discussions about environmental change, habitat loss, and the climate crisis. But how good are museums at asking the right questions or at highlighting the right concepts? Taking a critical approach to the words, stories and images selected for display in The MERL, this online trail takes […]

The Landscape of Housing

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.