New London Landscape website

London as you’ve never seen it before, and an invitation to pick your favourite green scheme at Ecobuild

100 quirky, green and sometimes plausible ideas for how London’s landscapes could be improved by green infrastructure go live this week on a new website launched by the Landscape Institute, and visitors to this year’s Ecobuild (Excel 5-7 March 2013) are being asked to nominate their favourite design.

New London Landscape allows visitors to explore the 100 previously unseen designs from the recent ‘High Line for London’ competition run by the Landscape Institute in partnership with the Mayor of London and Garden Museum last October.

Visitors to the site will also be able to post comments about individual designs and strike up conversations with the designers. “We want to start a conversation about London – these designs may never be built, but our aim is to change the way Londoners look at and think about their city. Sometimes dreaming about what’s possible can help us focus on what is possible.

All kinds of amazing ideas are possible and this competition shifts the debate away from things which are mundane and easy to deliver. It challenges us to think creatively and imagine our city in a much more exciting way.” said Sue Illman, President of the Landscape Institute.

Whilst the 20 shortlisted ideas, including Fletcher Priest Architects’ winning mushroom garden ‘Pop Down’ are well-known to the public the other design ideas have never been seen before. Taken together the ideas provide a unique ‘green’ vision of the capital. New London Landscape is a first for London – a collective ‘green’ vision by some of the best and brightest designers, landscape architects, architects and green campaigners working today. It reveals a new ‘greener’ London with an exciting range of new spaces including micro orchards at bus shelters, pleasure gardens over the Thames, linear parks, elevated cycle paths and floating gardens. Some of the previously unseen designs include an idea to transform the old Eurostar building into a year-round arboretum and butterfly house; Grape London, which proposes planting a linear vineyard across London and Victus Pontis, an installation that spans the Thames where medieval London Bridge once did and includes hi-tech biomes and a bridge of food and life.

Nominate your favourite design idea anytime between the 5th and 7th March by visiting the Landscape Institute stand S1838 at Ecobuild, the world’s biggest event for sustainable design, construction and the built environment. The top ten nominated designs will be revealed online on Monday 11th March.

The website can be found by visiting www.newlondonlandscape.org

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