Bradgate Park is the childhood home of Lady Jane Grey – “The Nine-day Queen”. The house is a ruin but there’s enough there to appreciate the decorative brickwork and to imagine it bustling with activity in its hey day. 

The landscape is stunning and variable: conifer plantations, oak woodland, rocky stream, open deer park (complete with deer) covered with bracken, broad Victorian landscapes with huge, mature cedars, rocky outcrops, scattered standing-dead and veteran trees, dry-stone walls, rolling hills. But, the most obvious feature is probably the sky! It is huge. 

It perhaps seems odd for me to include the sky in the landscape but it plays a big part. Look north from a highpoint and you’ll see a vast rural landscape as far as the eye can see. Look south and you’ll gaze across Leicester city centre and beyond. Lower down the views become shorter – stopped by the woodland and topography, but the sky is still big. Lower still and you’re cosied by the closer woodlands and steep topography rising up from the river. The sky is smaller here: held back by the trees with a busier, distracting foreground. 

A large sky can make a place feel vast, open, exposed, liberating, fresh. One person could feel overwhelmed by the emptiness, others feel comforted by the space and distance from others and the world. I like a range of different landscapes, but where there are other people around…I…need…space!! But the busier parts of the park were the lower areas, near the river, so other people like the reassurance of others being around. 

When you’re creating a place for people, design in spaces with different volumes of sky, different feels, different light levels; vary the sense of enclosure or openness. Outdoor space isn’t just about how it looks or whether it encourages biodiversity, it’s also about how we feel in it and different people like different feels and experiences; or even want different feels on different days depending on their mood, company or activity.