The Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure: Cooling down

In this Impact and Engagement project we will produce a series of interactive experiences and use these to gather public opinions about the value of landscapes around sites of post-war infrastructure. We will present a board game for primary school children, an interactive design experience with physical and virtual components and an immersive filmic experience at Bluedot 2021, a family orientated science, arts and music festival held annually at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire.

This research is part of a larger project about the Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure. As historians, architects and landscape architects, we know that high quality design thinking and extensive collaboration went into the production of the landscapes around sites of power stations, motorways, reservoirs in the rapid modernisation of the country after 1945.

If the landscape architect did their job really well, then 60-years on, it is hard to recognise that a professional designer was even involved. Alongside the innovative design work, a substantial programme of amenity provision accompanied the development of infrastructure. All sorts of leisure were catered for in and around infrastructural sites - nature reserves, wetlands, community halls, golf courses, playgrounds, sailing clubs.

As well as these formal, programmed uses, other activities have grown in and around these sites - cycling hill climbing, kit car racing, motorbike scrambling. The value of these landscapes is not just in their use though - the massive forms of gasometers, cooling towers, generator halls, dams and bridges loom large in the imagination as many had powerful presence in the landscape and they symbolise the sweeping modernisation and optimism of the post-war period. Thousands of people were employed on these sites and in the supply chains

As we move to a carbon free economy, these landscapes are being dissembled. The association between the amenities and the sites themselves is weakened and the ties that once bound communities with their landscapes through both work and play are broken. It is inevitable that these landscapes will change.

In this project we want to capture and represent the design innovation as we believe it has value to the design of future infrastructural landscapes, whatever they are made from. We also want to discover what these landscapes mean to people, how they value the landscapes, as users inside the landscapes and as viewers of the landscape. We think that these views are really important in understanding the social, cultural and amenity values that landscapes of post-war infrastructure created and how these values have evolved with the sites over time.

Our eventual reporting of our findings will show new ways of visualising value and showing quantitative and qualitative data together to enrich the readings and understandings of these sites as they change and to make sure that the hidden values are adequately represented in decision making processes. In our existing network we have a range of stakeholders from industry, academia, the heritage sector and communities.

We have built in some public events to our Research Network activities, but this proposal allows us to reach a much broader section of the population and to bring more voices to the research.

The immersive filmic experience will be used to engage older children and adults and will be a form of docu-tainment that uses new oral histories, archival sound and film recordings, new music, new footage to create a narrative work that speaks of the birth, life, death and afterlife of sites of infrastructure. All of the elements will be presented together at Bluedot, where, in 2019, over 19000 visitors attended.

The works will be used to generate a multi-generational discourse about the intangible values of landscapes and the results will feed into our final policy advice notice.