Managing Arcadia

The King’s Cross estate in London is the largest urban redevelopment taking place in Europe. The site is an example of the neoliberal corporatisation of the urban that coalesces public and private space. Redevelopment is carried out at the expense of ‘giving up’ open ‘public’ spaces for ‘privatised’ open spaces. In this current scenario James C. Scott’s (1989) theory of ‘seeing like a state’ (he contends the state makes society legible through standardisation, organisation and design of cities in order to have command and control over its citizens), is being replaced by ‘seeing like an estate’ in which citizen spatial participation and contestation is regulated by the capitalist ideology of estate owners. This current 21st century urban development is akin to the rural estates of the landed gentry in England that – in particular – underwent redevelopments during the 18th and 19th centuries. During the eighteenth century a transition occurred in England whereby the landed aristocracy transformed the hunting woodland into the landscape park, at which point the invention of scenery took place. Influenced by travelling on the European Grand Tour, landed estates were re-fashioned to resemble the picturesque arcadian aesthetics as exemplified by the paintings of Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin This extreme landscaping involved moving and planting trees, creating artificial lakes, and reshaping of hills and valleys. When viewed though the windows of the country houses, these re-designed landscapes reflected the arcadian imagery of the paintings hanging in their interior. The effect of the pursuit of this idealised gaze was to compose and organise a class-based ‘framing’ of an ideal landscape ‘view’ that was un-peopled, and at the same time eradicated any traces of an untamed land of working labour, thus instilling a notion of separation and observation. The framing of the ideal view visually eradicated the gaps within which existed the working countryside, the sweat and toil of the land, the labourers, and the lower classes.
The Bretton Estate, the grounds within which the acclaimed Yorkshire Sculpture Park is based, is a perfect historical example of this 18th century transformation. Operating as an open-air gallery since 1977, Yorkshire Sculpture Park combines temporary and permanent sculptures with, and within, the 500-acre landed estate, designed vistas, and heritage.

This paper focuses on the King’s Cross urban estate in London and the rural Bretton Estate of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park the site of my research and production residency in 2016. The King’s Cross developer’s assertion is that these open ‘private’ spaces put people first. This chapter argues however, that this assertion is a fictitious ploy predicated on agenda ridden profiteering based on privatised capitalist concerns of a neoliberal society in which regeneration projects are invested and manifested as sites and sights of economic consumption. Whilst over the centuries the grounds of the Bretton Estate have developed, it does not deter from the fact that they were landscaped for a very particular purpose, and continue to be managed for a very particular purpose. What is apparent is a sense of its historical exclusivity as the private grounds of a landed estate, one mirrored today through restricted public use and access to the grounds. It is a coming together of the historical and contemporary fabrication and management of private/public landscape.