Managing Arcadia: From the King’s Cross Estate to the Bretton Estate

This chapter focuses on the King’s Cross urban estate in London and the rural Bretton Estate of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 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 strategy 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 and managed to attain a specific image and experience of its environment. Today it is still being managed, yet to attain a specific view and experience of art in its environment. What is apparent, is a sense of its historical exclusivity as the private grounds of a landed estate, one mirrored today through restricted and managed public use and access to the grounds. Both of these urban and rural estates exemplify a coming together of the historical and contemporary fabrication and management of private/public landscapes.