By Ralph Johns

*Two lifelong friends pedalling through and past* *Wildernesse House* *luxury retirement living by* *Pegasus*.

“This is mental time travel”, explains my friend Paul Shirley Smith. “Seriously, chronesthesia is a person’s ability to revisit the past, imagine the future, and mentally travel between them and the present. It’s very good for you apparently”. This might help account for the broad grin on his face as we pedal uphilll to the next place through an ancient coppiced chestnut woodland.

While some people might think he is crazy to be riding his bike all around the UK to visit one hundred landscape architecture projects that he’s worked on over the last four decades, Paul knows exactly what he’s doing.

It’s a still autumn morning, and I’m riding my gravel bike along the hi-ways and byways of Kent alongside my old pal. We are on our way to Wildernesse House, a high-end later living development, and the 67th place on Paul’s 100Places tour.

100Places is a bicycle odyssey Paul has embarked on to connect a career’s worth of landscape architecture projects scattered across Wales, England and Ireland.

After just having attended the 61st World Congress of the International Federation of Landscape Architects held in Nantes, France, I was overjoyed to join Paul for the leg of 100Places from Kent, just south of London, to Cardiff in South Wales.

Conceived as “a journey of celebration, reflection and conversation”, the adventure marks Camlins - the studio that Paul has led for the last 15 years - transition to employee ownership. And it’s also a fundraiser for Parkinson’s UK.

When I join Paul he has been on the road for 25 days, mostly riding solo but sometimes pedalling with others, visiting projects and meeting many of the people involved in their creation - collaborators, architects, engineers, artists, project managers and clients.

These in-situ reunions of old teams are testament to the depth and respect of Paul’s working relationships over the years. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the people”, he reflects.

*The old Camlins studio in mid-Wales. This is where I used to work, and the first of the hundred places on Paul’s itinerary.*

I played a small part in the story of Camlins, between 1999 to 2000, when I was a fresh Masters graduate from the University of Sheffield. I wrote asking for a job - it was the only place that I wanted to work - and I was lucky to be offered a freelance position.

A few weeks later I arrived at a small triangular, oak-framed studio at the edge of a tiny village in the middle of Wales and the next 18 months proved to be a hugely formative experience.

It was my first exposure to landscape practice, and my senses were heightened. There was strong plunger coffee, a chattering fax machine, the pervasive smell of roll-your-own cigarettes, a full set of Topos magazines stacked sequentially. The drawing boards had been pushed into the corner as they’d been recently replaced by Macintosh computers (which had even more recently been connected to the internet).

In those days there were only five of us in the studio. Today there are 25, and the studio’s output has increased vastly.

*Paul on our stop for sandwiches and coffee at a great bike shop, Lyndhurst.*

Back to 100Places, and the next morning our route turns westwards, into a stiff headwind, along the south coast of England towards the next place, the next project.

The following week of riding covered 110km per day on average, taking us along quiet lanes, old railways and canals, as well as busy highways through rolling, historic landscapes, villages, towns and conurbations. One by one: Portsmouth, Poole, Salisbury, Marlborough, Bristol, Bath and Tetbury, then across the River Severn to industrial South Wales and the capital of Cardiff, where my mum still lives.

Along the way the Camlins projects to visit feature the historic dockyards in Portsmouth which was completed for the millennium, newer ones such as Lakeshore in Bristol where a former tobacco factory has been transformed into affordable housing, and current ones under construction like the Velindre Cancer Centre in Cardiff, set to become the UK’s most sustainable hospital.

*Wild roaming beasts in the new Forest. And some cows.*

But what is this all in aid of, and what does it mean?

Aside from marking ownership transition and handing over to the next generation, Paul is looking back in order to look forward (mental time travel). Analysing, cataloging, reconnecting and acknowledging the projects and people that have defined the studio in order to provide a solid foundation and vision for the future.

It helps everyone to know what they are building upon and where they are heading. Projects come and go. Nothing lasts forever. Careers flash by. We don’t stop learning. There never seems to be enough time.

*Detour through Clifton to see Brunel’s magnificent suspension bridge over the Avon.*

As landscape architects we want to do something worthwhile, to leave places better than we found them - not just the built work, but also a business, a group of people with a shared history, culture and set of values. It’s rare to have the time to reflect on all this, but Paul has made the time to step outside the studio into the real world to observe, connect and think.

Ensconced at the Fox and Goose we order a couple more pints of IPA plus some fish and chips. It’s been a big day. Our legs are tired and tomorrow we’re up early for a site meeting at another project followed by a solid day in the saddle through prehistoric landscapes and cathedral towns.

Paul muses, “There is something magical about pedalling out of your front gate and visiting everywhere you’ve ever worked, all under your own power. And then, at the end, pedalling back through my garden gate. It’s quite amazing actually, connecting all these places and people with just a bicycle.”

It’s been an honour to share this experience alongside Paul, and to do some reflecting on the people and practice of landscape architecture. The cultural marks we make are important, but it’s the experience and the people that matter most at the end of the day.

100Places: A ‘cyclery’ of connections

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