Connecting People and Place with the Women of the Welfare Landscape

Abstract This article details the efforts made to map a project that commemorates the network of women and their collaborators who played a major role in shaping the post-war designed landscapes of the British Welfare State. It argues that despite the value attached to some parks and green spaces created in the twentieth century, many more have been overlooked and remain “unseen,” regardless of what we now know about their health and well-being benefits following the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, the role of an online open-access archive is explored as an innovative tool of public inquiry, in which the complexity of both archives and the passage of time are explored. The Women of the Welfare Landscape Historypin site was not solely focused on landscape architects and landscape architecture but also sought to communicate the perspectives of the communities that inhabit, work in, or recreate in landscapes that these pioneers developed. Through a contextualisation of the role of digital open-access mapping and archiving, along with local and social history, the project demonstrates the utility and opportunity of using an online and publicly accessible archive to show the humanities at work in public life.