Sowing Seeds: Garden Festivals and the Remaking of British Cities after Deindustrialization

Sam Wetherell

doi:10.1017/jbr.2021.67

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores one of the strangest and most spectacular urban policies in postwar Britain: national garden festivals. Initiated by Margaret Thatcher's government, the festivals were vast state-sponsored gardening shows held in deindustrializing cities to reclaim derelict land for the property market. A festival was held every other year between 1984 and 1992 in a different city, five in all. The garden festivals showcased a new kind of urbanism, one that would change the ways that British cities related to nature, to capital, and to the wider world. First, they evinced a unique type of environmental politics—an implicit critique of urban industrial landscapes that was distinct from both the emerging critique of climate change and from older ideas about conservation. Second, they emerged at a time when the attraction of private capital was becoming increasingly central to urban regeneration. The festivals were at the forefront of this turn, outsourcing their events to corporate sponsors. Finally, the festivals offered an idiosyncratic, incoherent version of globalization. They courted a global pool of tourists and capital and invited delegations from across the world to plan events while, in many instances, reinforcing a preexisting racialized social hierarchy shaped by imperial legacies.

Highlights

One of the most spectacular, conspicuous, and ambitious attempts to remake Britain’s built environment in the late twentieth century was fleeting and transient and has perhaps been largely forgotten
Initiated by Margaret Thatcher’s government, the festivals were vast state-sponsored gardening shows held in deindustrializing cities to reclaim derelict land for the property market
The garden festivals showcased a new kind of urbanism, one that would change the ways that British cities related to nature, to capital, and to the wider world

Summary

MARKET ENVIRONMENTALISM

In the distinctive way in which they squared the human and the natural, the organic and the urban, national garden festivals were an implicit critique of Britain’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial landscape. Instead of an invisible and structural totality of relations negatively altered by economic and political growth, the environment invoked by national garden festivals was immediate, tactile, and sensory This was a third way of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, one that was not bound up either with the structural challenges of climate change gathering force in the 1980s or with the older Conservative undertow of conservation and rural protection.[38] Or, to use the distinction advanced by the philosopher Kate Soper, the festivals put forward a view of nature that was neither “critically targeted on its human plunder and destruction” nor mobilized in service of the “ideological naturalization of social and sexual relations.”[39] The garden festivals’ history is another instance of how, in the words of Chris Otter, British environmentalism had by the end of the twentieth century become a “protean concept” wholly compatible with and operating as a subtle metaphor for neoliberal economics.[40] Like the free market itself, flowers, trees, and grass would grow and spread in ways that could be loosely cultivated (rather than deliberately prescribed) by planners and politicians

ENTREPRENEURIAL GOVERNMENT

POSTIMPERIAL INTERNATIONALISM

CONCLUSION