Women of the Welfare Landscape

Brenda Colvin was born in Sima (now Shimla), India, where her father worked in the Indian Civil Service. She was drawn to art and horticulture from a young age.

In 1922 Colvin started her own independent practice, whilst also giving visiting lectures on garden appreciation and advocating for periods in practice for aspiring landscape architects. Her practice quickly grew, and within a decade Colvin was exhibiting her designs at the Chelsea Flower Show, and she was one of the founding members of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1929.

Colvin was a vanguard of a new kind of landscape architect who sought to engage with the rapidly changing and developing world. Her innovative engagement with the landscape architecture of roads, power, universities, housing, reservoirs and large-scale tree planting led her and her contemporaries to set the standard for sensitive industrial and institutional design.

Colvin was the first woman to be elected president of any leading built environment institute, when she took on the role of President of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1951. Her work not only defined the future of the Institute – and the profession – but also had lasting impact on the education of landscape architects.

To find out more about Brenda Colvin and Women in the Welfare Landscape, click here.

Landscape architecture is often said to had been being more open to women because of its roots in garden design and women’s prominent role in the evolution of designing the domestic sphere. A long lineage of female garden designers such as Gertrude Jekyll and Norah Lindsay paved the way for women looking for an independent career in the first half of the 20th century.

Until the end of the Second World War, Brenda Colvin’s portfolio of work was predominantly garden designs for private clients, and despite the increasing number of large-scale commissions, she continued to take on garden design commissions throughout her career. Her private and public garden projects covered all different scales and included designs for Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury, Salisbury Crematorium, the CEGB Headquarters, David Astor’s gardens at Elm Tree Road and Sutton Courtenay, and her own garden, Little Peacocks, in Filkins, Gloucestershire, as well as the now lost Seething Lane Garden in the City of London.

The skills that she developed as a garden designer were integral to the success of her public schemes, creating gardens and landscapes for all.

To find out more about the park and garden designs of Brenda Colvin and other notable women Landscape Architects, click here. 

In 1947, electricity generation and provision in Britain was nationalised and a decade later, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) was established through the 1957 Electricity Act. This Act regulated the activities of the Board and included a so-called ‘Amenity Clause’, that defined its dual statutory duties. Firstly, to develop and maintain an efficient, coordinated and economical system of electricity supply, and secondly to consider any effect which their proposals would have on the natural beauty of the countryside and on the flora and fauna. The Board put huge emphasis on the creation of landscapes around their power stations, both coal-fired and nuclear, to fulfil its duties towards the public.

Brenda Colvin became a foremost authority in the design of coal-fired power station landscapes. Her approach led to the creation of complex, multifunctional spaces that satisfied not just the needs of the power industry, but also the communities who lived and worked around them, by creating spaces for leisure, education and amenity.

To find out more about how Brenda Colvin and other women Landscape Architects designed landscapes around sources of power generation, click here. 

Mining, quarrying and other extractive industries have been key in the British economy, and a key question of the post-war period was the reconstruction of the disused sites. As the Duke of Edinburgh wrote: ‘there is no better illustration of the dilemma between conservation and the demands of an industrial urban society than the situation of the extractive industries. We need the resources, but we are naturally anxious about the damage done in their extraction.’

In the post-war period ministerial consent to quarrying was dependent on satisfactory landscape plan that included a long-term design for the site. The first of these types of plans was created for Hope Cement works in the Peak District designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe.

To find out more about how Colvin and other women Landscape Architects helped to heal the damage caused by mining and quarrying, click here.

Reservoirs have been changing the landscapes of Britain since the early part of the 19th century, with an accelerating demand for water and water infrastructure in the 20th century. By the end of the Second World War, a number of companies – over 1,000 in England and Wales, and an additional 210 in Scotland – were involved in providing water. Legislation, such as the 1945 Water Act in England and Wales, the 1946 Water (Scotland) Act and later the 1963 Water Resources Act in England and Wales, created a centralised system of Regional Water Boards and Water Authorities (13 in Scotland and 10 in England and Wales) responsible for supplying water and developing new resources. With similarities to the 1957 Electricity Act, the 1973 Water Act also created a duty to promote ‘amenity’ by the Regional Water Authorities, and landscape architects became key part of the design teams for reservoirs.

To find out more about how Colvin and other women Landscape Architects helped to shape the landscape around reservoirs, click here.

Housing was a priority across peacetime Britain, rebuilding homes that had been lost whilst also delivering a new residential programme through the 1946 New Towns Act and the 1952 Town Development Act. The new towns built upon the garden city model which had led to the creation of Letchworth and Welwyn, as well as creating a new mechanism which removed the provision of large-scale housing from local authorities and placed it in the care of development corporations.

The ILA had been consulted by Lord Reith’s New Towns Committee in 1946, ensuring that landscape architects had a critical role in the planning of new towns. Key to the endeavour was the importance of the ‘landscape treatment’. The principles that the ILA put forward as evidence to the New Towns Committee highlighted the importance of trees, soil, and climate, as well as situating any new habitation within both an agricultural belt and a green belt.

New Town Development Corporations and local authorities gave women many opportunities to work as landscape architects and consultants – Jane Wood, Mary Mitchell and Sheila Haywood all contributed to various new towns and housing estates. Brenda Colvin was engaged as landscape consultant for East Kilbride, while Sylvia Crowe worked on several new towns including Harlow, Basildon, and Warrington.

To find out more about how Colvin and other women Landscape Architects were pivotal to the New Town Movement, click here. 

Recreational patterns changed after the end of the Second World War, as increased car ownership and leisure time coupled with reduced working time led to a growing demand on access to the countryside. Charities such as the National Trust aimed to ‘promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest’, whilst associations such as the Youth Hostel Association or the Ramblers Association aimed to facilitate and advocate for open-air leisure and the right to visit the countryside.

The 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act and later the 1968 Countryside Act defined a legal framework to confer powers to local authorities and conservation bodies to create sufficient spaces for rural recreation.

To find out more about how Colvin and other women Landscape Architects used their skills to create and restore beautiful areas for recreation, click here. 

The end of the Second World War saw an expansion of universities in the UK, building upon the creation of ‘redbrick’ universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. Deriving from the 1944 Butler Education Act and the 1946 Barlow Report, the extension of university education became Government policy. Higher education grew significantly in the 1960s, and new institutions were created parallel to the expansion of existing institutions, supported by significant government funding from 1962.

Colvin worked directly on four campuses, including Trinity College, Oxford, Queen’s University, Belfast, Aberystwyth University – all of which were pre-war universities – and the University of East Anglia in Norwich which was one of the new generation of post-war ‘plate-glass’ universities. In each incidence and at varying scales, Colvin created gardens and landscapes that provided delightful environments in which to learn and relax. The first university that Colvin worked on was Trinity College, with a focus on the area around the chapel and the president’s house and taking in buildings and gardens that were up to 400-years-old and which had evolved from a monastic grove to a formal garden in the 18th century.

To find out more about how Colvin and other women Landscape Architects designed and re-designed university campuses, click here.