Filming again, Tereza Stehlikova and I’s film about disappearing / terraformed West London, and its mysteries, continues to grow, this time in the glowing boil of a heatwave. We were joined with others for this day, which is a rarity. www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood

I’ve been in residence with J&L Gibbons for six years now, that is to say I have built a wonderful friendship with landscape architects Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, and their team, over many years. We meet occasionally and they lay out all their remarkable work for me, bringing me into their processes, their conceptual thinking, their pragmatic practise - their constant efforts to think laterally and liminally with the design and shape of the places we live. They are inspiring people - outgoing, passionate, tireless, considered and considerate. Rarely do I meet people operating at such a high level of effect on the world around us who are never lost within a private professional culture or other personal motivation by the very demands of that work. (Worth checking out their new website too https://jlg-london.com/Practice)

Introducing Tereza and Jo and Neil a few years ago led to some grand moments, most especially in Kensal Green Cemetery and The Garden Museum, so it was natural we would get together to film. We met at Willesden Junction, traced Scrubs Lane down past towering new high rise flats, named Notting Hill Genesis - the beginning of all things. The new development Oold Ooak continues to grow, ebbing over the west lands, clearing space, jutting up into skylines. No Trellick Towers in stone, just rows of glassy plastic flats coming together, built by workers who poured through the lockdown still labouring at risk. Thousands of new homes coming, the HS2 burrowing underneath. Haunts now becoming glossy magazines alive, stuffed full of more people where there is now nearly no one. But us. We joined Wormwood Scrubs at its most northwestern tip, the scrubland as persuasive, quiet, welcoming and atmospheric as ever, before coming back to the grand union canal to finish. It’s a route I must’ve walked 300 times or more. Never with my friends, capturing snippets of conversation, knowing one day the brief connections will be part of the greater whole Tereza and I have been building

http://www.jlg-london.com/ In the current moment, the space a poet inhabits is without responsibility. That is in language, and whether or not the poet's response to their language world is powerful or flippant, derisive or optimistic, it is all predicated on a space of engagement with the reader which is entirely voluntary, & all the better for that. All the more room for me to seek out alternative spaces, to attach my practice, parasitically, to those creative few who inhabit the alternative, where they are tasked with shaping an environment where people have no choice but to be. A physical space that requires more than physical reckoning. A profound and humbling challenge it must be, to be faced with the responsibility of shaping space that people will inhabit, to need to be both wholly functional and eminently creative. To be mindful for the everyday in people's lives. So I'm beginning a residency with the remarkable landscape architects J &L Gibbons, and hope somehow, over the next year, to respond to their responsiveness, to somehow reflect the necessary complexity of their work, and the inspiring sensitivity and ethics they embody in their work.

We are all collectively responsible for our space, but there are those of us whose expertise puts them into moments of decision, in real three-dimensional praxis, and whose stake may not be immediate after they have left those environments but whose trace is essential to the feeling and experience of that place. In the urban context, where all, at some point, has been planned or shaped, even if accidentally, by the hands of money, so their role is a fascinating blend of immense power and fundamental invisibility, for the people who will use that space at least, once the architects are gone. This paradox is what attracts me so much to the work of J&L Gibbons and a progressive notion of landscape architecture. For I am, I must admit, quite frequently, unaware of the process of landscape, while being painfully aware of the evolution and environment of language in that very same space. So I believe this residency can be a symbiotic engagement on my part, learning to be mindful of this environmental evolution of the city, especially am ancient city like London, to see with new eyes through the work of Johanna Gibbons and Neil Davidson and their colleagues the changing of environments while tacitly recordings, archiving and reflecting on the language of that process, those spaces and the culture of its happening.

Like every profession or possession, familiarity breeds diminishing returns in the practitioners understanding of their own responsibility. The grind of unmediated human behaviour undoubtedly leads those who shape our environment to suffer the same prosaic reckoning as any other profession, just as a poet will write the same way for 40 years because he has found some recognition, so the unrewardable complexity of subtle, liminal, 'humane' approaches to the shaping of an environment seems a rare quality that would require great awareness, humility, passion, mindfulness and ethical self-interrogation. This is my meagre understanding is what defines the work of J & L Gibbons. In fact if I am now able to recognise different fundamental modes of landscape architecture, it is because of my being exposed to their extraordinary work. I had the privilege to speak in person with Johanna Gibbons and Neil Davidson at length about their work, where they fleshed out the content of this talk http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/page/grounds-for-optimism-designing-resilient-landscapes-in-london and (perhaps accidentally) exposed me to their remarkable humour, care, sensitivity and engagement with the very root of what they are doing. It so exciting to be in the presence of people at the height of their profession who have never allowed themselves to become lost in the necessary minutia of their task at the expense of the human experience, for all the complexity of that, that underrides their decisions.

I shan't now bring up individual examples of their working history, or their remarkable client list (though its worth looking it up http://www.jlg-london.com as it is all a matter of public record) as I want to save much of it for my work with them over the next year. Suffice to say, in beginning this residency, I am preparing myself for writing that brings with it a responsibility, and that is what I am seeking. Environments are shaped by language as much as anything else, though it hard to reckon, and over the next year I intend to improve my understanding of language in space, in the fundamental shaping of people's living space, and I hope, primarily to permanently refocus my own ability to perceive 3 dimensions and the human presence within then. I am in fine company to do so.