Heritage Lottery Fund grant for Capability Brown Festival

The 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown will be marked with a nationwide festival, thanks to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

The Landscape Institute has been awarded £911,100 by HLF to stage the Capability Brown Festival throughout 2016 including a series of events and activities celebrating the life and influence of England’s most famous landscape architect.

Paul Lincoln, deputy chief executive of the Landscape Institute, said: “As the first ever celebration of Brown’s work the festival has two key strands. The first will increase public access to the sites Brown created and advised on – some of them rarely seen by the public before.

"The second will allow us to discover more about his work, and how he created his landscapes. The festival will fix Brown at the forefront of modern thinking on design and management of the natural environment and celebrate his enduring legacy which is still relevant to how we plan, manage and design our landscapes today.”

The Capability Brown Festival will be the first ever celebration of Brown’s works and brings together a huge range of events, openings and exhibitions along with new research to fully establish Brown’s importance in the development of landscape design.

The festival will also seek to share his story with a wider audience and encourage different ways of exploring landscape and its history. Activities will include geocaching treasure hunts, competitive poetry slams, computer games for young children and hands-on tours and study days.

Organisers hope to open up as many of the sites as possible including several gardens that are currently inaccessible. Guides and maps to important Brown sites will be produced and local exhibitions developed to help visitors orientate themselves within Brown’s distinctive landscapes and open up his legacy to new audiences.

An online calendar of events will be created along with a map so people can find their nearest site.

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