The Mavis Batey Essay Prize is our annual competition which aims to encourage vibrant, scholarly writing and new research, especially by those who have not yet had their work published. Now in its 21st year, it is open to students or recent graduates, worldwide, writing on any aspect of garden history.
The prize consists of a £500 cash award, free membership of the Gardens Trust for a year and the opportunity for the winning essay to be published in our peer-reviewed Garden History journal.
This year saw a particularly strong field of entries. After much debate, the expert selection panel (chaired by Dr Barbara Simms, editor of Garden History) chose as this year’s winning essay ‘Gardenesque Urbanism: John Claudius Loudon’s Metropolitan “Breathing Places”‘. Its author, Patrick Smith, graduated in architecture from the University of Cambridge this year and is now working for Initiatives In Design Architects in Richmond.
GT trustee Jill Sinclair presented Patrick with the award at the October launch of our report Harnessing Parks and Gardens in the 21st Century. The essay’s discussion of the reconciliation of urban growth with the innate human affinity for open space mirrors key messages from the report.
On receiving the award, Patrick said “I am honoured to receive the Mavis Batey Essay Prize from the Gardens Trust, especially given Batey’s tireless commitment to the preservation of parks and gardens. The subject of my essay – John Claudius Loudon – also, in the early 19th century, defended common land and called for the establishment of public parks. I hope that my analysis of his prescient work might contribute to our understanding of parks’ reformist origins, and that others may be inspired by Loudon’s rationality, optimism and far-sightedness.”
Two further essays were highly commended by the panel, and their authors have been invited to submit them for publication in Garden History. Peter Williams, a PhD student at the Liverpool School of Architecture, wrote on ‘The Lost Landscapes of Trawsfynydd: Landscape Conservation in Conflict’, and Kari Traylor, an MPhil graduate of the University of Cambridge, on ‘Slave Gardens, Food, Production, and Power in Colonial Barbados, 1800-1833.’
