ABSTRACT

The beauties of nature In the introductory chapter of Design with Nature (1969),1 Ian McHarg describes his childhood in the sootblackened streets of industrial Glasgow, and the way in which his experiences of the polluted city were heightened by the contrasting scenery of Loch Lomond and the Scottish Highlands which lay almost upon Glasgow’s doorstep. When I first read this, it resonated because I grew up in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, a town kept economically alive by a nuclear shipyard, which also boasted a steelworks and the largest slag bank in Britain. But Barrow’s back garden was the English Lake District, and at least once a month as I was growing up I would go walking among hills that had been celebrated by Wordsworth and explored by generations of shipyard workers with hob-nails banged into their work boots. Though I seem, like many of my interviewees, to have stumbled upon landscape architecture as a career, I have often wondered if its appeal had something to do with those formative years, when I was regularly exposed to the contrast between an urban landscape which could be ugly and a rural landscape which was nearly always beautiful.