This autumn we have continued to look after the Royal Horticultural Society. Our design for a new car park including sustainable drainage system at Hyde Hall, Essex is now under construction - all part of our original masterplans completed earlier this year. The new eco-friendly Learning Centre at Harlow Carr, Harrogate, is gearing up to be the highest BREEAM rated building in the UK. The centre will have a sedum roof, a geothermal heating system and will be built from sustainable materials. It will provide teaching areas for children and adults, a library, advisory centre and teaching garden.
The November issue of the RHS magazine The Garden will feature a piece about the masterplanning project.
A common theme for projects recently has been the seaside (design competitions in Redcar and Bridlington), and now we’ve come further down the Yorkshire coast to Filey where we have been asked to design the large garden of North Cliff House, which was built on a fortune made from the cotton trade.
Work continues in restoring the park and gardens at Nyn Park, Hertfordshire with the preparation of design proposals for the formal and informal garden areas and continued tree works including clearance of 40 acres of conifer plantations and enhancement proposals in relation to the various habitats on the site, in particular Well Wood SSSI.
Elsewhere, soft landscape proposals have been prepared for a planning application for a data centre in Wiltshire, and at Sonning Golf Club, Reading, we are going ahead with woodland management and new planting works to improve the woodland both from a silvicultural and a golfing perspective. The first phase of work will take place between November 2008 and March 2009.
With a few of our projects nearing completion, we have recently submitted schemes for Awards from the RIBA, Landscape Institute and the Georgian Group. Results will be known later this autumn and we hope to have some exciting news on this front shortly. One of our projects – the restoration of the Grade I listed woodland garden of follies and vistas at Hackfall near Ripon – has already been shortlisted by the RIBA/Landscape Institute White Rose Awards, and members of the team are attending an awards dinner at Leeds Hall later this month to hear whether we have been successful. Read more about Hackfall in the Yorkshire Post – see news blog to download pdf of a feature by Michael Hickling published on 11 October.
In-house, our Marketing and Graphics team have been busy putting the finishing touches to our new practice brochure which we will be posting out to everyone we know later this month!
Managing Director, Patrick James, will be one of the speakers at a conference to be held by Grosvenor Estates this month to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its Gardens Department. The conference will explore the common benefits and problems of managing London squares at a practical level, as well as touching upon the important strategic issues associated with maintaining predominantly 19th century urban landscape design. Patrick is an accomplished public speaker having previously addressed audiences from the Historic Houses Association, the Architectural Association and Sheffield University.
Finally, it may be October outside but our cheerful new surroundings keep the autumn doom at bay! At our head office in York we have painted our walls a brilliant white and re-arranged the office environment to create a studio feel with open-plan meeting area and open book shelves to maximise light and airiness.
We take sustainability very seriously and recently held a staff meeting to explore ways in which the company and individuals could work to agreed sustainability targets. More on this later.
That’s all our news for now but we will be back in touch next month.
Patrick James
