Reflections on a Lake. Ripples on a pond

We forget sometimes how the designs we create can affect people.

Last Wednesday evening, as I drove home from a site visit in Essex, I took a short detour to visit a site that I’ve had an involvement in since 1986. I’m proud of the landscapes we’ve created at Cambourne. I know how valuable they are for wildlife, how they perform valuable engineering functions for SUDs and spoil disposal and how beautiful they look. Last Wednesday I learnt how valuable they are for people too.

Cambourne has been a constant in my professional life. One of my first jobs as a young graduate at Randall Thorp was to ink in and colour up a series of plans as part of the landscape evidence for the Public Inquiry to determine the location of this new settlement. I first visited the site in 1995 when I was part of the masterplanning team for the project. In 1998 I was lucky enough to ‘fall into’ the role of masterplan consultant and lead designer working for Taylor Wimpey plc and Vistry Group on this amazing project. For the next twenty years I would be visiting the site two or three times a month.

When I first visited the site in 1995, it was a series of vast arable fields, monocultures of wheat and oilseed rape on a huge industrial scale. The masterplan proposed part of the site to be a country park, a place we started design work on in 1995 and that was opened in 1999.

The country park has grown and matured into a beautiful area, a mosaic of semi-natural habitats with two lakes in the valley bottom overlooked by Crow Hill (all designed by the team at Randall Thorp and now the highest point in Cambridgeshire, in fact, the highest point between the A1 and … Norway – so I was told by a local landscape architect a few years ago!)

Last Wednesday evening the country park looked magical. The air was crisp and bright, the lakes were frozen and the sun was beginning to set. As I walked around snapping pics on my phone, I saw a couple of lads throwing stones on the lake and then noticed two other people out snapping pics of the ice and the sunset on a (my) lake. I watched them as they walked towards each other, eventually meeting up on the fishing platform. I watched as they showed each other the pics they each had taken, and I snapped away at the beautiful composition they were creating for me.

I waved at them and went to show them the pics I’d taken of the pair of them together. Ben was sixteen or seventeen. His mum told me he was doing a project for his photography GCSE (subject: ‘reflections’), and Ben asked if I’d airdrop the pics I’d taken of them both to his phone.

They then told me how beautiful the place was, expecting me as another photographer to nod and agree. Of course I agreed! I told them how, 25 years ago I designed these lakes and woods and hill and how lovely it was to hear how much they liked it all.

They then told me that, despite living ‘two villages away’ this was their ‘mum n son place’. It was a special place for them both, a place they’d discovered in lockdown when, desperate to escape the confines of living 24/7 with each other, they heard about ‘the lakes at Cambourne’. They told me they felt they owed their survival during lockdown to this place. It kept them sane they said, but more importantly, at a time of stress and teenage turmoil, it forged a bond between them. The peace and tranquility allowed them to walk and talk together. To talk honestly and openly to each other, to share their worries and their fears and to help each other through them. When lockdown eased, they carried on visiting the lakes together and carried on walking and talking and sharing their thoughts.

The three of us walked back to the car park and before we got into our cars 16-year-old Ben shook my hand and thanked me for my pics and for making this place for him and his Mum.

When I got into my car and looked through the pics of Ben and his mum it reminded me of 16-year-old me and my Mum and the chats we’d have together when out for a walk.

We forget sometimes that the things we do in life and the designs we create affect so many other people like the ripples on a pond. I know that the landscapes we have created at Cambourne are great for wildlife, but last Wednesday evening I was reminded just how valuable those places can be for people too, thanks to Ben and his mum.