Inter-war Gardens
- Nothing will ever be quite the same again
- Modernism: the new way forward?
- The Future in the Present!
- Comfort in tradition
- Keeping up with the Joneses
- A new sort of town
Nothing will ever be quite the same again
The 1914 -18 War had a devastating impact on all aspects of life in Europe, including the Story of Gardens. Many of the men who left for war never returned. The grand formal gardens of the nineteenth century had relied on large teams of garden staff to run them. Without the men, these gardens were neglected and many become overgrown and forgotten. After the war, there was a shortage of labour, and people didn’t want to go back to being servants. Life was changing so quickly that the pre-war years seemed like a distant dream.
Modernism: the new way forward?
Artists, designers and architects wanted to look to the future, creating a new, modern world out of the destruction of the past. This became known as ‘Modernism’. Ideas about how things could be made and they could look were different from anything that had come before. Many of these new ideas were shown to the world and spread through groundbreaking international design exhibitions like the Art Deco Exhibition (1925) in Paris, and the Barcelona exhibition two years later.
The Future in the Present!
New technology and new construction materials like glass, steel and concrete meant that buildings and spaces could be created and shaped in ways that weren’t possible or even imaginable before. This was tremendously stimulating, to all art and design. The Art Deco style, Cubism and the Bauhaus movement all happened at this time. In France, artists started experimenting by creating gardens that didn’t look like ‘gardens’ at all, but modern, abstract works of art turned into landscapes. This was known as the avant-garde, or cutting-edge of modern culture.
Comfort in tradition
However, although Modernism was new and exciting it wasn’t widely popular. British taste was particularly conservative and resistant to new ideas. Most people preferred to stay with the reassuring comfort of the familiar. Gardens continued to develop on traditional lines, and the ideas of Gertrude Jekyll were as popular and influential as before the war. In 1930, the well known writer, Vita Sackville-West, began to develop her own garden in the grounds of Sissinghurst Castle, in Kent. She expanded Jekyll’s ideas of colour themes and the ‘outdoor room’. Her garden and her writings brought gardens and gardening to the mass public.
Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.
Vita Sackville-West
Keeping up with the Joneses
During the twentieth century, Consumerism became a stronger force in peoples’ lives. What people buy with their money makes an important statement about who they want to be and how they want to be seen. Magazines and newspapers, which were targeted to different groups and levels of society, showed them what was available. Ideal Home and House and Garden encouraged home-owners to develop their gardens, showed them how to do it and advertised the garden products they could buy.
A new sort of town
Town planners were forward-thinking and they applied new ideas to the shape and layout of new towns. In the brand new towns of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, industry, housing, commercial, education, sports and recreational facilities were deliberately planned for their position and access. Green public spaces and green links throughout the town were a design priority. The town and the surrounding countryside were interconnected. British town planning set an example that was followed world wide.
German Pavilion (Barcelona Exhibition) 1927
Seen as a pure example of Modern style, with its simplicity of form, sense of space and quality of materials (steel, polished stone and glass).
Hilversum, Holland
20thc development based on British Garden City ideas. The city architect, WM Dudok, integrated woodland into the entire city plan and designed many famous Modernist buildings.
Heereman Garden, Belgium, 1938
This is one of the few Modernist gardens left in existence. It was designed to link the house and garden, and to give countryside views.
Sissinghurst, Kent
Poet-gardener Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson designed their much-visited garden as a sequence of ‘outdoor rooms’, with patches of well-chosen colour. This style appealed to most ordinary people.
