Week 4. 2nd February: Designing the Century - The Life and Work of Geoffrey Jellicoe with Katie Campbell
Born in 1900, trained at the Architectural Association, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe was one of the twentieth century’s foremost landscape and garden designers. Genial, eccentric and insatiably curious he drew his ideas from art, literature, religion, philosophy and psychology. Whether inspired by Giovanni Bellini’s C15 painting Progress of the Soul, John Bunyan’s C17 Pilgrim’s Progress, Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes or Paul Klee’s modern abstractions, Jellicoe’s designs were always elegant, unique and utterly intriguing. His work encompassed private, public, industrial and commercial landscapes, memorials, workers housing, roof gardens and water terraces. A writer and teacher as well as a practitioner, from his first book, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 1924 (with JC Shepherd) through his seminal 1975 The Landscape of Man, to his final 1995 Garden and Design, Jellicoe, who described his beloved profession as ‘the most comprehensive of the arts’, shaped Britain’s land and inspired her landscapists throughout his long life.
Katie Campbell is a writer and garden historian. She lectures widely, has taught at Birkbeck, Bristol and Buckingham universities; she writes for various publications and leads art and garden tours. Her recently published Cultivating the Renaissance (Routledge, 2022) examines how the Medici’s Tuscan villas reflect the changing ideas of the Renaissance. Earlier books include British Gardens in Time (Frances Lincoln, 2014) which accompanied the BBC television series, Paradise of Exiles (Frances Lincoln, 2009), which explores the Anglo- American garden-makers in late nineteenth century Florence, Policies and Pleasances: A Guide to Scotland’s Gardens (Barn Elms Publishing, 2007), and Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design (Frances Lincoln, 2006). She is currently working on ‘Virgil and the Bees’ a social history of beekeeping.
Image: Kennedy Memorial, Runnymede
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