36 CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 Jenifer White is a member of the Gardens Trust conservation committee. spot-registration, which continues to this day. Thematic studies on topics such as deer parks, detached town gardens, cemeteries, garden squares, kitchen gardens, rock gardens and villa gardens were commissioned from experts to support the work, and members of the advisory panel and staff contributed their own expertise on topics such as public parks and asylum designs. The register team, with its expert advisory committee, grouped sites into three major classes according to their main function: • domestic use, further subdivided into sites associated with one household or dwelling, such as palaces, country houses, manor houses, villas, town gardens, terraced houses and cottages; sites associated with more than one household or dwelling, such as communal gardens and squares; and sites associated with private amenity but which were not attached to a particular house or housing scheme, for example, private resorts and rented town gardens • institutional use, such as asylums, botanical gardens, cemeteries, colleges, factories, hospitals, hotels, museums, pumping stations and reservoirs • public amenity and recreation, such as public parks, public gardens, public walks and public resorts. The broad date bands adopted reflected the major trends in garden and landscape design: • pre–1750: medieval to baroque. • 1750–1820: naturalistic, landscape or English styles (‘Capability’ Brown set up in private practice around 1751 and Humphrey Repton died in 1818). • 1820–1880: mixed gardenesque, formal or geometrical styles. This period covered advances in horticulture and the development of the public park (John Claudius Loudon died in 1843, and other big names like Paxton and Nesfield’s careers span this period). • 1880–1939: historical revivalism, arts and crafts and Italianate styles (William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll exerted a very strong influence). • 1939 to the present day: the modern movement and public landscaping schemes. By 2001, the register team had been dismantled, and in preparation for the launch of the National Heritage List for England in 2011, Historic England’s listing teams were restructured to provide a single approach to assessing appropriate protection regimes for any designation application. In the case of candidate register sites, listing and scheduling strategies are also considered. In step with the unified approach, the date bands for historic parks and gardens were revised to match those for listed buildings, and the classes of sites regrouped and published in 2013 as four selection guides: rural, urban, remembrance and institutional. Gradually the teams have developed more confidence in designed landscape assessment; however there are no longer any landscape architects or garden historians involved, and the system relies on consultation with bodies such as the Gardens Trust. Historic England has continued to strengthen the register with further thematic work. Grade calibration was undertaken for cemeteries and upgrading review of public parks to reflect restoration funded by the National Lottery; 24 more post-second-world-war designs were registered in 2020 to begin to address underrecording of this period; and county reviews such as the Suffolk landscapes were added in 2024. The Gardens Trust has collaborated with Historic England on these thematic projects and the development of topic guidance. The Register Review Programme work had indicated that the register still needed to grow considerably to be more representative of garden heritage. Since 2000 the register has expanded by 13 per cent, but probably needs to grow by at least another 15–20 per cent to begin to provide a truly comprehensive overview of sites of special historic interest, and in due course, like listing, more recent designs such as the Eden Project (opened 2001) and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (opened 2012) will need to be considered too. The threshold for registration remains high, as exampled by public parks, of which only some 300 are registered to date. That is a tiny proportion of the estimated 27,000 public parks and green spaces across the UK. There are known gaps in geographical coverage (particularly in northern England), and design periods and types (such as 1970/80s country park developments). There are also some important sites missing from the register, like Ruskin’s Brantwood, and Pentillie Castle, where Humphry Repton provided a Red Book. Sometimes there are clusters of listed garden buildings and structures, yet the layout and setting have perhaps been overlooked as a designed landscape.There are some interesting challenges too, such as how to capture the landscaping
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