Stanley Picker Gallery is pleased to be hosting Women of the Welfare Landscape, an exhibition by the Kingston University Landscape and Architecture Course.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, before gaining the right to vote, 25 years old Brenda Colvin decided to start her own independent garden design business. Her practice – today Colvin & Moggridge – is the longest running landscape firm in this country and has been at the forefront of finding new ways of working to preserve our landscapes and to tackle what we call today the climate and biodiversity emergency.

Women of the Welfare Landscape commemorates Colvin’s work, advocacy, and the broader network of women and their collaborators who have had a major impact on shaping the post-war designed landscapes of the British Welfare State. The exhibition celebrates the complexity and wide variety of female praxis in the post-war period: women’s work as educators, campaigners or advocates; and projects of the everyday: landscapes in service of communities.

On Saturday 3rd December from 12:30-16:30 the exhibition organisers are hosting a ‘show and tell’ event which will give visitors a hands-on experience in sharing photos and ephemera relating to these projects, which will be shared through a dedicated HistoryPin site that will create an open archive and database that will help form a better understanding of the legacy of landscape architecture in the post-Second World War period, and the contribution women made to it.