What Happens When Artists, Landscape Architects and Fabricators Design Together?

The best public spaces and places are created where creativity, craftsmanship and community come together.

Earth Trust Concept ideas by artist Mel Chantrey working closely with the team from Davies White Landscape Architects

The best public spaces rarely emerge from a single drawing board. Whether it is a destination playground, a place of remembrance or a community gathering space, the projects that endure are almost always the result of collaboration between people with very different skills. Artists bring imagination and identity. Landscape architects understand people, place and nature. Specialist fabricators contribute the technical expertise needed to transform ambitious ideas into structures that are safe, durable and capable of standing the test of time.

The best public spaces rarely emerge from a single drawing board. Whether it is a destination playground, a place of remembrance or a community gathering space, the projects that endure are almost always the result of collaboration between people with very different skills. Artists bring imagination and identity. Landscape architects understand people, place and nature. Specialist fabricators contribute the technical expertise needed to transform ambitious ideas into structures that are safe, durable and capable of standing the test of time.

At Davies White, we've come to see our role as bringing these different disciplines together. As landscape architects, we often act as design integrators, ensuring creative ambition is balanced with engineering, accessibility, ecology, maintenance and long-term stewardship. But perhaps the most important collaboration is not between professionals at all. It is between the project team and the people who will eventually call a place their own.

We first experienced the value of this approach at the Lakeside Adventure Playground in Heaton Park, Manchester. Inspired by the park's woodland character, the project brought together landscape architects, engineers and specialist fabricators to create the now iconic Bud Towers. By involving Massey & Harris from the earliest design stages, artistic ambition and technical delivery evolved side by side. The result was a series of striking structures that remain every bit as imaginative as they are robust, proving that creativity and technical excellence are strongest when they develop together.

That philosophy continued at the Weston Play Zone at Imperial War Museum Duxford. Working alongside artist Mel Chantrey, specialist fabricators Massey & Harris, accessibility groups, museum staff and the wider consultant team, we helped create an aviation-inspired play environment that became the UK's first museum play space to achieve PiPA Silver Accreditation. Yet one of the most rewarding aspects of the project wasn't the finished structures. It was watching children explore materials, experiment with fabrication techniques, build models and influence the design long before construction began. They weren't simply consulted; they became part of the creative process itself.

This idea of leaving a personal mark within a place is becoming an increasingly powerful aspect of placemaking. Hayatsu Architects demonstrated this beautifully at the Blue Market Clock Tower in Bermondsey, where local people engraved hundreds of the metal cladding discs with names, drawings and messages before they became part of the finished structure. The architecture became more than a landmark; it became a permanent record of the community that helped create it.

We're currently exploring similar ideas through two UK projects with Nature Sacred, an international charity creating places for reflection and wellbeing. Every Nature Sacred space includes a handcrafted bench with a hidden journal beneath the seat, inviting visitors to leave a story, memory or message for someone they will never meet. It is a beautifully simple idea that reminds us placemaking doesn't end when construction finishes. The landscape continues to evolve as people add their own experiences to it over time.

We've witnessed the same principle in projects as varied as the London Blossom Garden in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and Soho Parish CE Primary School, where artists, craftspeople, pupils, local communities and clients all influenced the final outcome. Every project has reinforced the same lesson: people care more deeply about places when they have helped shape them, contributed to them or can recognise a small part of themselves within them.

This collaborative philosophy is becoming increasingly important as the profession responds to a growing body of research and guidance, including Make Space for Girls, Play England's Design for Play, PiPA, BS 8300, the GLA's guidance on creating safer public spaces for women, girls and gender-diverse people, and the LLDC Inclusive Design Standards. While each approaches the subject from a different perspective, they all arrive at a remarkably similar conclusion. Successful public spaces are measured not simply by how they look, but by who feels welcome within them, who feels represented, and whether people develop a genuine sense of ownership.

The most memorable places are those where people can leave something of themselves behind.

Perhaps that is the future of placemaking. Not simply designing beautiful places for communities, but creating places with them. When artists, landscape architects, engineers, fabricators and local people all leave something of themselves behind, a project becomes more than a successful piece of design. It becomes part of a community's shared story.

Because the landscapes we remember most are rarely those that were simply built for us. They are the places where we can still find a little of ourselves.