Southern Green is 25 years old!  We’ve been celebrating by revisiting some of our historic landscapes, designs, clients and staff over the past few weeks and it’s been amazing to see the development of the practice through our history.  We’re a proud practice with a diverse and talented team and we wanted to celebrate our people and the practice’s birthday with a CPD trip across the country to Manchester so we packed our bags and set off from the office bright and early!

First stop on the itinerary was RHS Bridgewater.  RHS Bridgewater is the fifth and most recent RHS Garden to be completed, opening its gates in 2021. It’s one of the largest garden projects in Europe undertaken in recent years and consisted of the revival of the 154 acre Worsley Estate.  World renowned Landscape Architect Tom Stuart-Smith developed the masterplan for the site and proposals for the restoration of the Walled Garden and dramatic ornamental landscape at the heart of Bridgewater.  “The Walled Garden is comprised of a series of spaces graduating from a large outer walled garden enclosed by a low wall, through to an intermediate garden which has a high wall on three sides, to an inner space which has high walls all around. The intention was that the garden experience parallels the spatial one, becoming gradually more intense and also more colourful.”  Bridgewater provided a great start to the trip with the team getting to grips with various planting styles and cultural references evident across the garden and getting perhaps a bit too involved with the fantastic naturalistic play space watched over by a rather ominous dryad (…not Simon...honest!).

We went on to visit a wide and diverse range of landscape projects great and small across Manchester (some resoundingly more successful than others!) but none more impressive than Mayfield Park.  Mayfield Park is Manchester’s first public park for over 100 years and forms a centre piece of a wider £1.4bn urban neighbourhood to be delivered over the next 10 years.  The park emerges around the formerly culverted River Medlock opened up to form the spine of this fantastic new green space.  The design balances naturalistic design and a post industrialist aesthetic really well with large swathes of meadow style planting, mini flood plains and brilliant new play space alongside the river.  The park was designed by Gillespie’s Landscape Architects and really is a great example of the difference the profession can make to these constrained urban sites by applying creativity and resourcefulness to a space.

The team ended the night in the Northern Quarter with a highly competitive (if a little erratic) game of darts.  Miraculously no staff were harmed in the process and we made it back east the next day brimming with inspiration.  It was a brilliant trip and we’d like to say a special thanks to Lang and to Ethan for organising and planning the tour (and Ethan doing a wonderful job as tour guide for the day).  We can’t wait until the next trip!