In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, many postwar Modernist landscapes have been, and continue to be, at risk, their importance unrecognized. The two sites that follow, designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and Richard Sudell, are both of national significance, and have been placed on the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) within the past five years. Yet for some time their fates were worryingly uncertain.

Jellicoe (1900-1996) was born in Chelsea, London, and raised in the coastal town of Rustington, England. He attended the British School at Rome and helped establish the Institute of Landscape Architects (now Landscape Institute) – a Royal Chartered organization similar to the American Society of Landscape Architects – in 1929. He was a landscape architect as well as a prolific writer and theorist, authoring more than a dozen publications. Jellicoe was knighted in 1979 and awarded the ASLA Medal in 1981; he is considered one of the most influential landscape designers of the last half of the twentieth century.

Sudell (1892-1968) was a contemporary of Jellicoe’s and also played an instrumental role in founding the Institute of Landscape Architects. He was born near Preston in Lancashire, northern England, and left home at the age of fourteen to apprentice as a gardener, also earning certifications in botany, chemistry, and geology. He worked as a gardener at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, but then established his own practice in 1919 as a horticultural consultant. His focus was on gardens, and like Jellicoe, he was a prolific author, writing for a popular audience. Unlike Jellicoe, however, Sudell was, as Michael Gilson calls him in a 2019 article for Garden History, “the forgotten man of early twentieth-century garden and landscape history.” Or as Annabel Downs writes of him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “only a few of his contemporaries recognized the quality of his skills as a designer,” and very few understood the “significance of his publications.”

TCLF staunchly supported the advocacy of individuals and groups in the U.K., bringing visibility to the at-risk status of Jellicoe Gardens (The Cadbury Factory) and Dolphin Square Gardens to a greater American public and reinforcing their significance. With both sites, sharing their rich histories and significance with the British public, the sites’ stewards, and public officials were vitally important to saving them.

The Cadbury Factory at Moreton, designed by Jellicoe in 1952 and completed in 1954, was developed within the United Kingdom’s postwar reconstruction era. As a chocolate and biscuit (cookie) factory, it was conceived as a means of moving from wartime to peacetime production in a Modernist idiom – a rarity in its day. As landscape architect Ed Bennis wrote, “The factory appears as a testing ground for Jellicoe’s later work, particularly in his use of water, perspective and the role of the subconscious.”

Background

Located a few hundred meters from the Irish Sea on the northwest coast of England, the Cadbury Bros. Ltd. Factory (now Burton Foods) is near both Birkenhead and Liverpool. During World War II, the area suffered the greatest level of enemy bombing outside of London and experienced severe unemployment. It was recognized that building a factory on the site would be an asset in the reconstruction of the region. Its location was chosen by Cadbury since it was a few degrees cooler compared to its main factory near Birmingham, allowing them to refine chocolate year-round. Originally designed to employ 450 men and women, it employed more than 6,000 at its peak.

In developing the landscape, the site could hardly have been worse, since it was poorly drained and hammered by strong winds off the sea. Jellicoe wrote in 1963, when he returned to extend the complex: “From the point of view of landscape it is a diabolical site. It is bare and exposed to the most violent winds. There is a major drain, now a canal, of great width and depth cutting the site in half.” In the same report, he described how he attempted to humanize the landscape by breaking it into smaller geometric units that could be used for factory extensions, playing fields, or housing. He used the building positions and new tree plantings to provide shelter and spatial definition. The excavated spoil was used to create a mound with the new trees running along the entire east-west axis, to the north side of the new factory buildings.

At this time, a developing Jellicoe trademark was his use of metaphor; he believed in supplying interesting titles to his landscape features as a means of stimulating the imagination. At Moreton, he developed a storyline where the mounds took on the “extended shape of two serpents”; he referred to this as a clue to his design, where nature provided the artistic inspiration. The serpent was also a reference to the “vast prehistoric monsters” that would have inhabited the submerged forest that once existed on site. He used the same symbolism of the serpent for the water canal at Hemel Hempstead; in this case the serpent was seen as the guardian of the environment. The metaphor continued into the planting, where the windward side of the mounds would be “armour-plated with tough hardwood or conifer trees, whereas the inside face (being the soft under-belly) would be richly planted with flowering trees and shrubs.” Jellicoe’s use of metaphor is not contemporary with the project but was overlaid approximately a decade after the project was completed.

As part of his design Jellicoe located ten pools with nine cascades and four balconies parallel to the main road of the factory – interestingly, not at the main entrance, but instead along the route that workers using the nearby train station would take. Jellicoe wrote that “the modern water barrier corresponds to the eighteenth century ha-ha, for its purpose is to provide a fence which, though not invisible itself, nevertheless conceals its true purpose…its intention is not to keep out the determined attack but rather the casual.” This appears to be his first use of cascades, which – along with the use of water in general – would become a major feature of his later work. Moreton is pivotal in the development of Jellicoe’s thinking. It is also a rarity in terms of Modernist landscapes within the United Kingdom; few exist, as most postwar reconstruction looked backwards rather than forwards, desiring a sense of safety in the past rather than embracing an unknown future.

The Cadbury Factory was taken over by Burton’s in 1986, and the company closed the main part of the factory in 2011. Even before this closure, the landscape was in a state of neglect: it appeared that the stewards of the site had little knowledge of the importance and rarity of the work. The ponds were leaking, and the pumps had stopped, leading to clogging of the lower pools with bulrushes and weeds.

Thankfully, the Landscape Institute had been given four drawings of the site from Jellicoe, and as a result of this knowledge the landscape could be restored and its mechanical systems rehabilitated. The factory had a substantial amount of undeveloped land, including the area between the ponds and the main factory; there were development proposals for the site that could eventually result in the loss of the original fabric.