Darryl Moore
Landscape designer and co-founder of Cityscapes Darryl Moore sees opportunity for transformation in every unloved city space
I grew up in New Zealand, and as a child I had a very typical outdoor kind of life. We took it for granted that walking through bush and camping was what people did: we had a very direct relationship with the land. We learnt to respect the landscape and its potential dangers while still interacting with it in a positive way.
After moving to the UK as an adult in the 1980s, I worked in the music industry for a long time as a DJ and sound artist. I grew fascinated by the way sounds are shaped by the spaces they’re in, and started making field recordings. My focus gradually shifted from the sound within a space to the design that was influencing the sound. There was a buzz around landscape architects Martha Schwartz and Peter Walker, who brought conceptual and artistic elements to their work.
In time, I found there was this kind of confluence between my work and interests, so in the 1990s I visited the classic gardens of Great Dixter in East Sussex and Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness, then enrolled at the Pickard School of Garden Design. It was an intense period of work and study.
In 2010, Adolfo Harrison and I formed Cityscapes, bringing together dierent creative approaches to design. There were a lot of empty spaces in London at that time, and we wanted to turn them into dense, green, urban areas. We struck up an association with local cultural organisations, which led to us working with Sarah Eberle and St Mungo’s, the homelessness charity, to make Gibbons’ Rent, a pocket park near London Bridge. It was the start of a long relationship with St Mungo’s that led to our Chelsea show garden with them in 2022.
Having wild spaces in cities is important, but they have to be intentional. I’d like to see more robust policies that ensure green elements are central to redevelopment with planting involved in an integral way. I’d also like to create more of a culture around plants and celebrate the local and traditional knowledge of plants in this country. Every space has potential to be transformed by plants.
● Gardening in a Changing World by Darryl Moore (Pimpernel, £20) is out now. darrylmooredesign.com; cityscapes.org.uk