4. Celebration of Brian Clouston's career in Landscape Architecture

4. Garden Festivals

Garden festivals build on technical skills and expertise acquired through Brian Clouston Partnership’s (BCP) reclamation work. But how did the first garden festival in Liverpool happen? Hal Moggridge tells the story about a meeting he attended, arranged by Brian with Michael Heseltine, then Secretary of State for the Environment and recently appointed Minister for Merseyside. Following the Toxteth riots, Brian proposed that a garden festival in the area could bring many opportunities for Liverpool. Watch the video to learn more!
To enable the garden festival to be realised, Robert Holden outlined the creation of the Merseyside Development Corporation to distribute government derelict land funds. The selected 100ha site comprised of former docks, petrochemical tanks and landfill; on the plus side was the River Mersey and Otterspool Promenade. Work on the garden festival had to be completed within 3 years, the government’s timetable, in comparison with 10 years for garden festivals in the Netherlands. It attracted 3.5 million visitors, unprecedented for Liverpool.
Neil Chapman joined the BCP Liverpool office in 1984 and talked about the legacy of the garden festival on the site, the impact on the landscape profession and industry, and on the city of Liverpool. The site is still a work in progress as the 1981 proposals have yet to be realised. It provided a highly significant boost of confidence to the city of Liverpool, later awarded one of the European Capitals of Culture; and to the profession, it was a 'game changer' as this scale of work and ambition had not been witnessed before.
Tim Gale noted that the London Docklands Development Corporation also commissioned BCP to prepare a plan for a London docklands garden festival site - a photo of the drawing is shown. Although this was shelved in favour of Glasgow, a number of other practices would also have been commissioned to prepare designs and masterplans for garden festivals that were similarly not realised.

The next talk is Work in the Middle East    • 5. A Celebration of Brian Clouston’s ...  

The previous talk is Reclamation    • 3. Celebration of Brian Clouston's ca...  

For more information about FOLAR: https://www.folar.uk/
Landscape Institute collection at MERL: https://merl.reading.ac.uk/collection...


About this series of talks
Landscape architect Brian Clouston OBE, past president of the Landscape Institute, established a landscape practice in the 1960s that became multi-disciplinary and operated internationally. By the 1990s it was one of the leading practices in the UK and employed more people than any other in Europe. FOLAR wanted to learn more about Brian Clouston, what he did, how he attracted so many young talented staff and what type of projects they worked on. FOLAR also wanted to know what they went on to do on leaving BCP. So we invited lots of former staff to tell their stories at an event in September 2023, with Brian Clouston as the star. Brian continues to think about the role and contribution that landscape architects can make to society and to world affairs and in an interview, and he chose this opportunity to discuss his current big vision for Africa.

We recorded this event and two interviews with Brian Clouston, as a contribution to the oral history of the profession of landscape architecture.

Section One: Introduction; Early days and the formation of the practice; Reclamation; Garden Festivals; Work in the Middle East, Work in Asia and Australia; Urban renewal and Rural infrastructure; Business Parks

Section Two: Legacy Practices and practice, discussion.

Section Three: Brian Clouston’s future vision.

These sessions were chaired by Annie Coombs FLI who was Managing Director of BCP Asia and Tim Gale PPLI who was a Director of BCP.