Hello, Natalia. How are you?

Hi David. I'm very well. Thanks for calling.

Good! I wanted to talk to you about the 20 years of HTA's landscape division, of which you are design director – especially the 10 years that you've been there and some of the key changes that you've witnessed in that discipline in that time in London. But first, can we talk dinosaurs? Can you tell me a little bit about the Crystal Palace Park regeneration scheme that you're involved in?

Yes, absolutely. So, lots of interesting stuff to cover there, and I hope we make it in the next 10 minutes! So, starting with dinosaurs, HTA is the lead consultant of a large multidisciplinary team, working with the London Borough of Bromley and Crystal Palace Trust to deliver the first phase of the regeneration plan, which includes the restoration of the Grade I listed Geological Court, and the famous dinosaurs, and the Grade II listed Italian terraces, which is essentially the place where the Crystal Palace itself once stood. They are the two most distinctive areas of the park, with future phases to follow.  It has been an incredible journey, over the last year that we've been working on the project, trying to create a toolkit that allows us to approach a heritage landscape whilst having the opportunity to create a park that is climate resilient, biodiverse and could cope with the needs of a growing urban population around it – but also the needs of events, as these will generate revenue for its long-term maintenance, because a park is a business model too. So, just trying to manage these for climate resilience, programming and, of course, the health and wellbeing aspects of the communities that will use the park. We developed a toolkit to deal with this, which I think is quite interesting. The first part of the toolkit was to create this landscape framework, that consisted of fixed infrastructure items, items that are fixed in the park but also open-ended processes. And very much in the way that Paxton tried to capture the notion of time when he designed the park, I think as landscape architects, it's very important to work with this fourth dimension rather than to try to rather design landscapes as a fixed layout at one point in time, when we cut the ribbon; to design landscapes that can cope with change, whether that is seasonal change, whether that's climate change, whether that is change in terms of programme. So, together with a fixed landscape infrastructure, we tried to plan for open-ended processes that have to do with water management, with successional planting, and all the things that we want to have the ability to orchestrate now but let them run as processes in the park in the long term. So: working with nature in a way; let nature do a little bit of heavy lifting. Am I rambling on? (laughs)

No, not at all. I'm just marvelling at how prestigious this project is. I mean, I can't think of many more prestigious landscape architecture jobs to be working on, certainly in the capital. 

Natalia Roussou 
No, absolutely! But going back, this was the first step, trying to decide what's next now and what we have to essentially introduce as a process. The toolkit on this specific intervention had four strands. The first one was about ‘removing to reveal’ - a park after many years accumulates a lot of layers that detract from its original character, if you like. The first attempt was to remove clutter, trying to reveal, for example, the beauty of the Geological Court, which was the first attempt pre-Darwin to illustrate pre-history and what it looked like. Think about the fact that when Paxton and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created the Geological Court it was at the same time when excavations were happening to reveal Dinosaur bones and fossils, so there was a lot of imagination and interpretation in the process of illustrating this fascinating part of Crystal Palace Park, which is a primitive landscape, and it sits at the lower section. The other thing to note about Crystal Palace is that it sits on the Norwoodridge, this is a Geological outcrop itself. It's one of the very few parks in London that has such a fascinating topography, 60 metres drop from one side to the other. So, it lends itself to this idea of illustrating different geological eras, different aspects of time. So, the primitive landscape sits at the lower section of the park, and includes the dinosaurs, and Geological Court, then the landscape next to it is the traditional English landscape as Paxton referred to it, an idyllic, undulating, pastoral landscape, and then right at the top the Victorian sophistication, the cutting edge of the palace itself, and the Italian terraces in front of it. And this was very much, and still is the largest building that was made out of iron and glass...

...sorry, if I can just interrupt, I note that your job here will be also include restoring the 30 Grade I-listed dinosaur sculptures. Have they degraded over the years, then, and it seems like a specialist job to be restoring something like this! What are they actually made of?

 

Absolutely, I started talking about the toolkit - the second was ‘conserving and repairing’, which is about all the restoration work. The third strand was about ‘enhancing’ biodiversity, climate resilience on the park, and the fourth strand of our toolkit - because I think this is a toolkit that's relevant to a lot of the Victorian parks in London- as landscape designers are asked to renovate them in a way. So, the fourth strand was about ‘introducing’ modern facilities and in this case, the new dinosaur themed play area, and a new information centre, new ramps to allow people to move across this 60-metre drop. So how can we, with these new facilities, make a park much more usable and accessible to the public? And I will go back to your question about the dinosaurs! The different types are made of different materials, but most of them are made out of concrete with an iron and brick armature. There is one dinosaur that's made of natural stone. And some of the dinosaurs had parts of what were referenced as leather wings, so these are the Pterodactyls and obviously, these wouldn’t have lasted for a very long time. In recent years, Historic England have restored parts of the Dinosaurs with 3D printed jaws and fibreglass sections, so at the moment there is a real mix in terms of how these dinosaurs are made.

They were commissioned, I think, as part of the move from the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, weren't they?

Yes, so we're going round in circles, literally travelling in time! So, the Crystal Palace Park itself was created to house Crystal Palace after the Great Exhibition. The park was specifically created for the Palace...well actually the Palace was enlarged. It was much smaller when it was in Hyde Park and then when it was moved to Crystal Palace Park, it was extended.

So, HTA's landscape division is celebrating 20 years – which is nothing in terms of prehistory, of course! And you've been there for 10 of those years, I think... 

Over 11 now...(laughs)

Okay, over 11. So, what have you noticed, in terms of the marketplace in London and London's general attitude to landscape architecture over that period? Would you say things have improved? Would you say it's difficult at the moment because of economic constraints? What's the general flavour of that 10 or 11 years?

I mean, what has very much improved is the awareness of the importance of landscape, green space and nature, and offering spaces for people to reconnect with nature, in the dense urban environment. And, obviously, policy has helped a lot in this because we are now supported by the requirement to provide a certain amount of urban greening on each site and as part of that a Biodiversity net gain too. So, we're in a much, much better place than we were 10 years ago. I also think the scale of developments has changed. We are, together with other practices, working on creating much larger neighbourhoods in London now than we did before, for example 4,000 and 5,000 homes in Kidbrooke Village for Berkeley and also Dagenham Green for Peabody. The scale of developments grants the creation of proper parks as part of this, and we need these large green spaces to support the creation of new communities around them. At the same time, we are dealing with challenges of funding, in terms of capital funding, but also maintenance; service charges, obviously, are affected by the need to maintain these large landscapes. So, I guess the question then, going back to the idea of working with nature is how we can design landscapes to rely more on regenerative processes, and how we can at the same time foster more ownership from the communities that live around them, so that they can be involved with the maintenance. The big difference going back to the notion of time is that a landscape is not complete at the point of practical completion. A landscape changes, and its forms are dynamic and evolving. So, considering maintenance, considering the long-term ability to adapt and change with the changing community needs is very, very important. There are obviously budgetary constraints. You know, we were in a better place halfway through that journey. You find now that the budgets have reduced, and at the same time the ambition is greater. So, it has been difficult to reconcile this. And also, the other thing that you see is a lot of acknowledging of the importance of landscape, but there's a lot of greenwashing that goes with this too; the labelling of master planning as ‘landscape-led’, even if there's very little landscaping, then there's also risk that it's seen as a tick-the-box exercise. The awareness is there, but the knowledge and the skill sets throughout the industry haven't developed at the same pace to be able to differentiate between one and the other. 

So last question, as we're just up to time. Are you optimistic under the new Labour government that this particular area of the built environment will be in an improving condition?

I am an optimist by nature. And as I said earlier, we're supported by policy; there is greater awareness. Obviously, a lot of research has demonstrated the tangible effects that access to nature has in terms of health, and wellbeing and also, I feel that there's no choice with climate emergency. Unless we design landscapes that can cope with that; attenuate water, support with urban cooling,  boost biodiversity and create a more habitable environment in the long term, then our cities will become uninhabitable. So, there is no choice we have to keep working hard to make cities more liveable. Saying this, I think we should always recognize that London is one of the greenest cities of its size, with 40% of green space. So, we are very fortunate to be living here in the first place. I think.

There's a certain irony in what you've just said, in the – admittedly – debated fact that the extinction of the dinosaurs was due to a climate incident. And here we are again! 

Exactly. Or maybe we have to accept that it's the end of the world as we know it (laughs)!

On that cheery note… (laughs) thank you so much for your time, Natalia, and good luck with the project. I look forward to seeing it emerge. 

My pleasure. I hope it all made sense.

It definitely did. Thank you so much Natalia

Natalia Roussou
Thank you so much. See you soon. Bye.