Pictorial meadows: the perfect urban landscape for our time?

Meadows_Slingsby Place.jpg — Pictorial meadow at south yorkshire housing association’s new development at slingsby place, sheffield
photo matt hall, a-i-a studio

Celebrating South Yorkshire Housing Association’s new meadowscapes

Project date 2016-

Team:
Green Estate - Sue France, Dan Cornwell
Sheffield City Council - Zac Tudor
South Yorkshire Housing Association - Gordon Watts, Mark Osborne and the NEAT team

“Lockdown has made us see the world anew”

— Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian

The pandemic has helped us all notice the joy in small everyday details, the flowers, the birdsong. Staying close to home, walking daily through local streets and green spaces, has helped us appreciate the natural world around us.

And at the same time, the massive overnight reduction in road and air traffic, the resulting improvement in air quality, the reduced noise and the fragility of our food chains, has focused our minds on the bigger picture of climate change and our relationship with the natural world.

Changing the world isn’t easy, but Gaby Hinsliff reminds us that we can all think local and take action in our own backyards.

Green Estate, a social enterprise in Sheffield led by the inspirational Sue France, has for the last 20 years been growing, creating and managing annual and perennial meadows under its brand Pictorial Meadows, co-owned with the University of Sheffield since 2004 and based on the research initially undertaken by Professor Nigel Dunnett.

Zac Tudor, landscape architect at Sheffield City Council, has been a leading light in creating sustainable and high-impact landscapes in Sheffield using mostly planted, as opposed to seed-sown, meadow schemes particularly suited to the built environment.

Green Estate and Zac Tudor have shared skills and learning and influenced each other to extend the possibilities of urban meadow landscapes over many years.

These urban meadows aren’t new. So why do they feel so right for now?

Three reasons:

#1 Beauty in everyday details is helping us through difficult times.

#2 Home and our immediate surroundings are where we are spending our time.

#3 The climate emergency and biodiversity crises have gained new impetus.

#1 Beauty in everyday details

“This year with lockdown our beautiful flowers mean more than ever. My daughter and I wake up every morning looking forward to every new flower and every new insect visitor.”

— Resident

I have always loved meadows. One of my earliest childhood memories is of a picnic in a meadow. My phone wallpaper for many years was a meadow in Puglia. I have dozens of photos of meadows, none of which can convey their magic: that the beauty lies both in the detail of individual flowers and how they weave together into an elaborate tapestry.

It’s not surprising that throughout my career I have experimented with meadows.

I started with lame attempts to recreate hay meadows, all of which failed. And moved on to urban meadows based on research by the University of Sheffield and practitioners in the city.

I worked with Dr Oliver Gilbert on experiments in the early 1990s in the Lower Don Valley, Sheffield’s steel heartland, sowing wallflowers onto brick rubble and urban mixes onto subsoil - with very mixed results.

Meadows_Pictorial Meadows.JPG — landscapes that are beautiful and lift the spirits
photo pictorial meadows

A decade later I collaborated with Green Estate on their ground-breaking Pictorial Meadows, which blazed a trail across estates in the north and south of the city as part of Sheffield City Council’s Housing Market Renewal programme.

And now at South Yorkshire Housing Association, the partnership with Green Estate continues along with design input from Zac Tudor, the inspiration behind the award-winning Grey to Green.

When Sue France started work in 1999 on The Manor, a deprived estate in south Sheffield, she realised that local people were interested in a more ecological approach to their outdoor spaces - but they didn’t want brambles. They wanted landscapes that were beautiful and that would lift the spirits.

In the early 2000s, Green Estate developed Pictorial Meadows into a social enterprise building on Nigel Dunnett’s research, first using annual flower mixes and then moving onto perennials.

In 2005, Green Estate won a major contract with Sheffield City Council, thanks to the leadership of the wonderful Jan Fitzgerald, to manage sites that had been cleared of housing in the north and south of the city. Instead of the conventional and very dreary treatment of close-mown grass, earth mounds marking the boundaries and an endless (and expensive) battle with fly tipping, they promised community engagement, artists, biodiversity and beauty.

Sue’s vision was to transform gang-mown grass to fields of flowers, to remind us of the different seasons, to connect us to an urban version of nature.

“Take notice” is one of the Five Ways of Wellbeing. Long before The New Economic Foundation (NEF) documented the Five Ways, Green Estate collaborated on Flowers in the Frame with Eventus, a social enterprise that used arts and culture to effect change (and sadly no longer operating).

Eventus and digital photographer Ali White worked with local people in the north and south of the city to document the pictorial meadows and manipulate their images to create calendars and art works that were displayed at Cupola Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Hillsborough, at local libraries and at the Winter Gardens in Sheffield city centre.

Jan Fitzgerald and Clare McManus, who led the project for Eventus, both went on to become Green Estate Board members.

Close-up experience of the flowers improved the participants’ wellbeing; celebrating local landscapes changed perceptions of these neighbourhoods; the meadows became a source of pride in these estates.

Local people loved these meadows so much that they didn’t want to see them go when the time came to build new homes and asked for them to be incorporated permanently into new and existing open spaces.

Pictorial meadows bring beauty to everyday urban life.

#2 The importance of home and what’s on our doorstep

“These are fantastic! Please plant more.”

— Resident

The constraints of lockdown have brought a new focus to our homes and the streets and open spaces around them.

At South Yorkshire Housing Association, we believe that everyone has the right to beauty. We want our customers and our employees to experience everyday beauty and are slowly transforming the landscapes on our estates to achieve this.

Creating new meadowscapes with Green Estate has been the starting point. We have also been sharing seed mixes with our customers for their window boxes and gardens.

More recently, we have invited Zac Tudor to work with our in-house NEAT team to create sustainable landscapes on our bigger estates.

And Zac has also designed the planting for the roof garden at our new workspace in Sheffield which Green Estate recently planted.

Meadows_Rockingham Street roof garden.jpg — green estate planting our rockingham street roof garden

Why did we choose to work with Green Estate and Zac?

South Yorkshire Housing Association is rooted in its place: all of our homes are in South Yorkshire and Sheffield City Region. Our customers relate to us - recently some of them told us "we are South Yorkshire Housing Association."

How can we celebrate this identity, given our 6000 homes are dispersed in small clusters of 10-100 homes across a wide geographical area?

One obvious way would be to put up signs on our estates declaring that we are the landlord. But we really don't want to do this: no-one else's home has the name of their landlord on it.

Another way would be to have a standard house type that we roll out on every site regardless of its immediate context. But that would just be a different way of labelling our homes.

Instead, we are exploring the use of narrative to make our homes and estates both distinctive and of their place: how the physical, historical and cultural contexts of a site can generate design ideas that give a place meaning for the people who live there.

Each site will have its own specific features: its location, its neighbours, its views, its boundaries, nearby woods, trees and waterways. And all of our sites have opportunities to connect with broader narratives around their place in the neighbourhood, the city and the region.

Pictorial meadows provide one of these opportunities.

Meadows_Pictorial Meadows Rotherhan.JPG — roadside meadows in rotherham
photo pictorial meadows

These meadows have become a feature of Sheffield and South Yorkshire. From their origins as temporary habitats on cleared sites, they have been included as permanent landscapes in parks and roadsides across the country.

First, nearby Rotherham adopted them for their main roads, leading to an uptake across many other cities.

More urban versions have appeared in Sheffield city centre: the award winning Grey to Green - designed by Zac and planted and maintained by Green Estate - and the landscaping around the new HSBC building, visible from our new roof garden, are prime examples.

Although these meadows are now created all over the country, they have their origins in Sheffield and South Yorkshire, and are a hallmark of the region. They are part of the Made in Sheffield brand.

“Why not make these meadows a hallmark of our estates? ”

The meadows can also act as a metaphor for our portfolio of homes: each mix is tailored to its specific site and setting in terms of orientation, soil, slope etc and yet they all have something in common.

In some ways, our portfolio of homes is like a pictorial meadow: lots of individual blooms scattered across a large field, that together, create something coherent and beautiful.

Pictorial meadows are a great way to make our estates beautiful and locally distinctive.

#3 The climate emergency & biodiversity crises

“Our Pictorial Meadows offer tangible benefits in terms of carbon emissions, biodiversity and site management. However, at least as important is the connection they create between our customers and the place they live. ”

— Gordon Watts, Sustainability Manager at South Yorkshire Housing Association

We want our homes and estates to support our purpose: "with South Yorkshire Housing Association you can settle at home, live well and realise your potential; we want your experience with us to be a joy and we intend to be here for the long term."

Being here for the long term matters to us in more ways than one: we will own our homes forever and our customers have security of tenure - they can stay in our homes for as long as they wish.

We are long-term stewards, not just of the houses, but of the estates in which they are located.

And we have an important role to play in addressing climate change, given that housing contributes 25% of the UK’s carbon emissions. A new theme in our Strategic Plan, Tackling the Climate Emergency, recognises the importance of this agenda.

Our Sustainability Manager, Gordon Watts, has been working for the last six years to reduce our carbon footprint in ways big and small. He has been instrumental in introducing meadows to our estates, replacing areas of mown grass with fields of flowers that last for months.

Our new housing developments have incorporated large areas of meadow: Slingsby Place is next door to Green Estate‘s home base, so it was a no-brainer to ask them to create a perennial landscape on the steep slopes either side of the new homes.

And when we refurbish gardens, we take the opportunity to incorporate meadows.

Our customers love these meadows: they are visually beautiful, seasonal and bring wildlife and biodiversity to our estates. Landscapes that literally buzz with life.

They also save us money on long-term maintenance: although there is an up-front investment to create them, the ongoing annual maintenance is cheaper than mowing grass, especially for more remote sites.

And they reduce our carbon footprint: we make fewer maintenance trips and use less fuel in our vans and mowers in the process.

Incorporating large areas of meadow into our estates is one way of making visible our commitment to nature and the planet.

Don’t be put off by the fact that these meadows don’t use only native species and aren’t deemed “natural” by the conservation lobby. They have been carefully designed from wildflowers around the world to have a long flowering season, to bring beauty and wildlife value to our cities, to flower year after year and to reduce maintenance visits.

They do not seek to replace their wildflower cousins, but to complement them and bring life and colour to sites which would formerly have been managed as a mown grass monoculture.

Sue France is in the process of converting Green Estate to a “centre for future nature”, recognising the significance of the shift in public attitude prompted partly by our experience of the pandemic and partly by the growing awareness of the climate emergency.

Just as the meadows Green Estate created for the London Olympics in 2012 brought this new landscape to public attention and placed it in the mainstream, so a bold approach to housing estates can make it part of our everyday experience.

Meadows_Golden Girl at Olympic Park.jpg — stunning meadows at the 2012 london olympics
photo pictorial meadows

Pictorial meadows are the perfect urban landscape for our time.

Further information and help

If you want help creating pictorial meadows of any scale contact Green Estate through info@pictorialmeadows.co.uk

And you can buy mixes for your window boxes and gardens through the same portal.

You can find out more about South Yorkshire Housing Association from our website including our new Strategic Plan.