Laurel Truscott loves concrete but she draws the line at pebbledash - particularly when it happens to be two metres high and is blocking what would otherwise be a dramatic view across the Thames to Woolwich Ferry.
“Standing here, you feel really closed off,” she says, indicating a particularly ugly section of the pebbledash wall in Royal Victoria Gardens in Newham, east London - part of the park’s flood defences.
“It’s what I call real 70s functional design,” she says. “You have no sense that the river is just behind you.”
If Truscott, a landscape architect with the top London firm LDA Design, has anything to do with it, that could soon change. She has been commissioned by Newham council to come up with a masterplan to restore the park - once a Victorian pleasure gardens famed for its open promenades, masquerade balls and hot-air balloon ascents - to its former glory.
It would be a difficult brief for any architect, let alone a 26-year-old just three years out of university. But Truscott, who joined LDA Design after gaining a distinction in her postgraduate diploma in landscape planning and design at the University of Sheffield, is nothing if not optimistic.
“There are some really fantastic features if you know where to look,” she says, showing me around the park on a grey and rainy Sunday afternoon. “Take the promenade. There used to be beautiful little wooden pavilions dotted all along here. If we can restore them and make the river a focal point by widening the promenade and improving the access points, this could a place where people would want to spend time again.” She points to a bleak expanse of concrete bordered by rusting municipal railings and empty benches facing away from the river.
Listening to Truscott outline her vision, it is clear landscape architecture is not so much a job as passion.
“I hate it when people say, ‘Oh, you’re a landscape architect, will you do my garden?’” she says. “It’s about so much more than plants and borders. There are so many different skills involved - at times it feels a little bit like you’re conducting an orchestra.”
When a landscape architect takes on a project, he or she usually begins by making a thorough survey of the site. Next comes the process of sketching rough design ideas and, if necessary, a model for the client. Usually, this is followed by more detailed drawings, either hand-drawn or computer-generated. But it isn’t enough to be a good artist. A landscape architect also has to have an understanding of plants and ecology, and how the development fits with the surrounding environment.
“When landscape design works well it’s seamless - you’re almost unaware of it,” she says.
Truscott attributes her interest in landscape architecture to the fact she was raised in Silverdale, in Lancaster, surrounded by the rolling green hills and lakes of the Lake District. It also helped that both her parents were landscape architects and that as a child she was a frequent visitor to her father, Walter’s, practice in Kendal.
“I grew up being very aware of my surroundings - through my parents I learned to look at spaces, form, and materials and textures. Space, whether inside or outside, is really important to me. What makes us feel comfortable, inspired, peaceful in a space - this is what is at the heart of landscape.”
For Truscott, landscape architecture is a “way of life, a way of looking at the physical world”. Having said that, she was never under any illusion that it would be easy. “Growing up I saw that to be successful, you had to give a lot of yourself and be quite passionate,” she says.
After graduating with first-class honours from Leeds Metropolitan University, Truscott decided to go to Australia to gain hands-on experience, joining Knox and Partners, a small Sydney-based design firm. One of her first jobs was helping to lay out the gardens and sculpture park adjoining Sydney’s Campbelltown Art Gallery and Museum. She also worked on a detailed planting scheme for a prestigious housing development in the grounds of a former seminary overlooking the city’s Manly beach, preserving native trees but also installing unusual new planting schemes.
“Australians are very bold with their plantings,” she says. “They tend to do big swaths of things and they use a lot of concrete. That’s something that I think in England we’ve tended to shy away from.”
One of her favourite landscape architects is the Brazilian Roberto Burle Marx, famed for his abstract forms. She also admires the work of Dan Kiley, an American architect known for his keen gardening skills.
“Like Kiley, I’m attracted to bold and quite sculptural planting,” she says. “That’s the key to any idea - to have a strong vision and to keep the planting simple.”
Since joining LDA Design, one of the most rewarding projects Truscott has worked on is an outdoor play area and woodland at a Sure Start scheme in Croydon, south London. The brief was to create a fun outdoor space for informal play and learning that would be safe and make children aware of the beauty of their surroundings. Truscott’s solution was to use lots of natural slate and stone, and to create areas full of sculptural planting, wildflowers, orchards and woodlands that changed colour through the seasons.
“It was fun working with children because they are so honest in their likes and dislikes,” she says.
Truscott is also part of an LDA Design team looking at ways to improve the Thames Gateway, a region with a reputation for being something of a post-industrial wasteland. And it could hardly be more urgent. Government plans call for the construction of 120,000 new homes in the estuary. And there is the imminent arrival of the Olympic Village in the Lea Valley in 2012 and the upgrading of the existing east London rail links, including the construction of a new tunnel under the Thames connecting Woolwich Arsenal with the Docklands Light Railway.
Not surprisingly, Truscott is reluctant to be drawn on specifics, but says the project will include making a virtue of the Gateway’s rich wetland ecology by threading the concept of “estuary parklands” through new and existing towns along the Thames flood plain. She has been looking at cities such as Amsterdam and Malmo, where planners have successfully married urban settings to water.
“The problem is that the Thames Gateway has become a byword for industrial unsightliness - basically, it’s seen as London’s dumping ground,” she says. “We want to remind people of the good things about the Thames Gateway - the huge skies, the fantastic ecology, the deep history and the great resource of the river itself. Instead of camouflaging the industrial landscape, the idea is to understand it, make a virtue of it.”
Similarly, Truscott sees little point in trying to recreate the original pleasure gardens in Newham. Instead, her idea is to create an “updated pleasure gardens for the modern city”.
But the pebbledash wall is not the only design blight. When planners raised the flood defences they also changed the levels of the park, ruining the vistas that used to run straight out to the river. Similarly, play areas and sports facilities are dotted haphazardly here and there, giving the park an untidy and disjointed feel. One of Truscott’s proposals is to build a cafe to give the park more of a focus, perhaps on two levels so that people could enjoy views over the river again.
She would also like to plant ferns and reeds in front of the railings adjoining a busy main road to screen the park from the noise of traffic. In addition, she hopes to install boulders and logs that could be both visual features and encourage spontaneous children’s play. Finally, she would like to com.
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