

Thursday 15 October 2020 7:30pm-8:30pm
The inaugural Margaret Helme Memorial Lecture
This event has now passed. Please contact admin@cambridgeshiregardenstrust.org for access to the YouTube recording, available for two weeks from broadcast.
Title New light on Repton: unlocking a system of landscape design
Abstract Humphry Repton is often characterized as a rather practical designer of gardens and parks, rather than as someone who thought in abstract terms about landscapes, or who developed any very rigorous and systematic approach to their creation or modification. But his overall approach to landscape was rooted in theory. His stated ambition was to ‘establish fixed principles in the art of laying out ground’. This lecture will explore those principles; how they operated in practice; and what they tell us about Repton and his world.
Our Speaker Tom Williamson is Professor of Landscape History at the University of East Anglia and has written extensively on landscape archaeology, environmental history, and the history of landscape design. His books on garden history include: Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1995); The Archaeology of the Landscape Park (1998); and Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men (2016). His latest book, Humphry Repton: Landscape Design in an Age of Revolution, will be published by Reaktion Books in October 2020.