About this talk

Running time: 29 minutes

The late Sylvia Crowe was among the most respected of Britain's landscape architects. Trained in horticulture before World War II, she set up in private practice in 1945 in time to landscape the English new towns Harlow and Basildon.

The designs she executed thereafter were generally on a large scale, such as the Commonwealth Park in Canberra, master plans for English new towns (Washington and Warrington), coastal reclamation, the setting for nuclear power stations and reservoirs.

She was landscape consultant to the Forestry Commission for fourteen years, and was the author of half a dozen books on landscape. She received many awards including that of Dame of the British Empire, and she held a number of high offices including that of President of the Institute of Landscape Architecture (UK), and was a founder member of the International Federation of Landscape Architecture.

For her talk she concentrated on the landscaping of forests and reservoirs, showing several of her projects and discussing the related problems she encountered. Not least has been to reconcile the landscape, with all its treasures and all the beauty of the past, with the new town-bred population who swarm over the country and need to be educated to respect what they have come to enjoy.

"We are trying" she says "to make again a land which people can enjoy, a land, too, where wild life can flourish".

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