| HERITAGE
Land is a vessel of memory — a living record of culture, ecology, and human experience. Sensitive design can honour this complexity while opening to new possibilities of connection.
Heritage commissioners include National Trust, Abbey Gardens, All Saints Church and Doddington Hall.
Bury St Edmunds Abbey Gardens
One heritage project that stands out is the design of the play area within Bury St Edmunds Abbey Gardens in the east of England, which was evolved in collaboration with Judy Legg of Playlink. This Grade I listed heritage site, with its monumental stone walls above the River Lark, contained a traditional playground of fixed play equipment. Our brief was to extend and enrich this space in dialogue with the wider site and its deep history as a place of pilgrimage.
Spending time on the land —listening to its visible and invisible layers—we found ourselves drawn to the medium of wood in all its many forms. While the stone and flint structures of the Abbey had endured, the timber, trees, and living plants that once supported the community’s life had long since disappeared. We set out to bring them back.
The design celebrated wood in its richness: as furniture and structures, as living walls and gateways, as bridges, as market stalls, as food and shade, as fuel for warmth, as herbal remedy, and as a material woven with symbolic meaning.
Particular elements include woven willow enclosures, carved seats and tables, a sheltered gathering place and wooden troughs that can be filled from a hand-pump, sending water towards the slow-flowing river. Fifteen years after its completion, the landscape remains popular with children, who are able to explore, shape and co-create with each other and the different elements on site.
“IN USING LOCAL MATERIALS AND ELEMENTS THE AREA BECOMES SUCH A SOFT ALMOST INVISIBLE FEATURE BUT FULL OF THE RICHNESS A CHILD MIGHT SEE AND EXPERIENCE COMING ACROSS A SECRET STREAM RUNNING THROUGH WOODLAND. I CAN SEE HOW THAT THIS APPROACH IS APPLICABLE ELSEWHERE.” Parent visiting the Abbey Gardens
