Many Members of the Group may not be aware of the significant role of Landscape Research Group (LRG) and its partners in the origins of the European Landscape Convention (ELC), which celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary on 20 October 2025. All may therefore be interested to read a just-published paper by long-standing Members (indeed, Honorary Life Members), Steven Shuttleworth and Peter Howard, in the Journal of European Landscapes’ recent ‘anniversary issue’ celebrating the Convention, link below.
The ELC’s origins – in terms of the thinking, concepts and purposes of such an international charter, the initiatives and activities to shape a common understanding, and then influencing governments to approve it – began more than a decade before its adoption. A crucial step was the conference ‘Landscapes in a New Europe: policies for managing the diversity of European regional landscape identities’, which LRG co-organised with the French body Paysage et Amenagement in Blois in October 1992. One of the conference papers set out the first formal proposal for a Europe-wide convention for landscape, which idea was adopted as one of the event’s key recommendations (see Landscape Research Volume 18(1) and its Supplement for the conference papers and proceedings).
Steven and Peter’s paper relates the history of the ELC’s origins and development, reflecting on how the ideas behind it were formulated, the compromises made to progress the proposal to adoption, and how support for it was stimulated over a long period. The paper then reviews the extent of the ELC’s success in the context of the significant changes to subsequent landscape thinking, notably in regional cultural landscape identities, before looking to the future and how best to maintain its relevance.
More About the Authors
Steven Shuttleworth
Steven is an environmental scientist and chartered town planner, trained at the University of East Anglia and Leeds Polytechnic. He worked in consultancy, local and central government, retiring as Director of Service Delivery and Head of Planning for South Northamptonshire Council. He has been a Member of LRG since 1974, and as a member of the original body’s Executive Committee from 1979 to 1983 played a key role in setting up the modern registered charity in 1983, of which he was a founder member. He was then a Director/Trustee to 2016, Treasurer from 1980 to 2018, Company Secretary from 1997 to 2016, and a member of LRG’s ‘HERCULES project team’ from 2013 to 2016. Steven’s paper ‘Fifty Years of Landscape Research Group’ [published in Landscape Research Volume 42 (Supplement) (2017), pp. S5-S64’] sets out a definitive history of the Group from its founding in 1967 to 2017.
Peter Howard
Peter is a geographer, trained at the University of Newcastle, who was appointed to the unlikely role of landscape specialist at Exeter College of Art (later part of the University of Plymouth) in 1974. He has been a Member of LRG since 1976 and served as a Director/Trustee from 1984 to 2012, Editor of Landscape Research from 1985 to 1993, Vice-Chair from 1993 to 1998, International Officer/Coordinator from 1999 to 2012, and a member of LRG’s ‘HERCULES project team’ from 2013 to 2016. His doctorate was concerned with the historical changes in the landscapes chosen by painters. He later developed ideas of Heritage, and founded the International Journal of Heritage Studies. His ideas are most easily found in Heritage: Management, Interpretation, Identity (Continuum, 2003) and An Introduction to Landscape (Ashgate 2011) but he also part-edited the Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies (Routledge, 2019). Now firmly retired, he lives in Devon.