Thames Landscape Strategy - Hampton to Kew -

The meaning of 'Arcadia'

January is usually a quiet month on the river, providing the opportunity to concentrate on planning the year ahead and already it’s beginning to look like 2004 is going to be even busier than last year for the Thames Landscape Strategy. With the London’s Arcadia project now well advanced it has been possible to start developing new and exciting projects along the river at Teddington, Molesey, Brentford and Kingston.

These emerging projects were discussed last Tuesday at the Thames Landscape Strategy Annual Meeting held at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. This year, guests were joined by Sir David Attenborough the Patron of the Thames Landscape Strategy, who closed the evening’s more formal business with a rousing speech in support of the Strategy and of the London’s Arcadia project.

As guests chatted afterwards I was approached by one of our new volunteers who asked why the River Thames in this part of the world is referred to as ‘Arcadia’. Talking later to friends I realised that although the term is often used to describe the area, few realised why it was such an important and appropriate title for our famous river landscape. To answer the question posed by the volunteer one must first understand how the character of the landscape has evolved over time and for our purposes that means travelling back in time to the Tudor period.

Until this time, the Thames consisted largely of quiet riverside villages but following the building of Richmond and Hampton Court Palace the landscape began to evolve as successive royal and aristocratic families moved to the area. Up and down the river a series of great palaces, houses, gardens and hunting parks were constructed, linked to one another by grand avenues of lime trees.

During the eighteenth century, this concentration of power together with the area’s stunning beauty attracted the most influential thinkers, poets, artists and landscape designers of the day. This short stretch of the Thames quickly became a focus of Georgian culture, inspiration, taste and design that ultimately changed the face of the English countryside.

Inspired by Thames and in particular by the View from Richmond Hill a radical new way of perceiving beauty in the landscape was born. For the first time a view was seen as one huge ‘collected’ landscape garden where villas, gardens, groves and meadows formed a perfect picturesque scene. These ideas ushered the end of the formality of Tudor and Stuart gardens in favour of a much more romantic landscape where the boundaries between nature, art, poetry and gardening were merged. These new naturalised gardens were imagined at the time as the dawning of a new Arcadian age – the classical imagery of a simple pastoral life as enjoyed in ancient Greece transferred to the banks of the Thames. Arcadia was in essence an idyllic pastoral paradise, a place where man and nature co-existed in perfect harmony. These ideas led to the formation of the English Landscape Movement and would ultimately spread across Europe. But our story does not stop there.

During the nineteenth century the delights of the Arcadian Thames were opened up for the enjoyment of the public so by the late Victorian age, the once privileged landscape of the C18th had become a ‘Playground’ of London’ where Londoner’s came to walk, relax or simply to mess about on the river. Arcadia had been democratised.

A century ago however, the now world famous landscape was almost lost as suburbia crept relentlessly up the Thames. It was only the successful ‘Indignation!’ campaign led by local people to halt the proposed development that saved The View and much of the Thames side lands we enjoy today. It is often said that Arcadia had now helped to inspire something else we value dearly – the foundations of the modern town and country planning system and the principle that the public has a legitimate right in the development of private land.

Taking events to the present day, Arcadia can be viewed as many things. A place of inspiration, a place of beauty, a place for wildlife to thrive, a place to live, a place to visit and a place to relax. That such an amount of the wonderful riverside parks and open spaces have survived to the present day is due largely to the generations of people who shaped, cared for and protected them over the past 500 years. The Thames Landscape Strategy was established ten years ago to understand these events of the past in order take them full circle to conserve, enhance and promote the watery landscape for the next 100 years.

In his closing remarks at last week’s meeting, Sir David summed up the essence of our Arcadia stating, “It was a Greek ideal, an ideal of small communities living in large landscapes. We have a different problem. We have a hugely dense community living in a constricted area and at the same time trying to protect that element of Arcadia which is the natural world. The Thames Landscape Strategy is working out new techniques and getting new success. The two extremes, the wild world and the dense urban world, both have excitement and attractions of their own. But there is one kind of environment that makes my heart glad: one where these two things are in harmony, and it is that which Arcadia really represents and it is that which this organisation is bringing about”.

This is what is meant by ‘Arcadia’ – a place where local residents and visitors alike can enjoy the delights of a rural paradise, steeped in history and wildlife yet set within the largest city in Europe.

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