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Lynn Kinnear, who has died of cancer at the age of 64, was one of the preeminent landscape architects of her generation. Her work ranges from urban playgrounds to natural parks such as Walthamstow Wetlands in east London. She collaborated with many leading architects and artists, including Richard Rogers Associates. The Burntwood school in Wandsworth, south London, which she designed with architects Allford Hall Monaghan and Morris, won the Stirling Prize in 2015. She said Kinnear’s first goal was to “work with local communities to transform their public spaces”.
Her approach combines an adventurous mind, often inspired by art, with a deep knowledge of plants and habitats. Influenced by continental European landscape designers such as Dutch practice West 8, she likes to contrast the natural with the artificial. She shot to fame in 1995 with the creation of Hellings Street Park in Wapping, east London, a project in which she created mounds and valleys out of track material and marked them with bright colours. Bull’s eye pattern and built a small plantation with bright blue walls next to pine trees. Featuring a rope bridge and playground, this “blockscape” is designed to encourage activity and adventure.
In Walthamstow, she led a team that opened a 200-hectare site, including a set of reservoirs, to the public. This work involves nurturing and enhancing the region’s rich biodiversity, while also enabling hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to enjoy and appreciate its natural and industrial heritage. Her contributions were at times dramatic and at times barely noticeable: a long boardwalk beside the creek serves as a memorable entry into the site, and she planted willows and reedbeds there to look like It’s like they’ve always been there. As with much of her work, the design of Wetland is about making the most of the inherent character of the place.
Kinnear strives to get more from commissions than her clients imagine. “It’s always a challenge to act a little outrageous when I get a briefing,” she said. She often spent more time interacting with the local community than securing funding. On Brentford High Street in west London, where she was initially asked to design nothing more than to install a lighting column, she redesigned the town’s market, making it a more pedestrian-friendly, active space and bringing the neighborhood into focus. The industrial shacks along the canal become more pleasant. , by re-covering them with wood grain. For this project, completed in 2014, she received the Landscape Academy Dean’s Award.
Kinnear may be reticent about promoting her work, but she is tenacious and pragmatic, essential qualities that make her most effective in public bureaucracies. Although she has a talent for collaborating with architects and other disciplines, she resists the common trend that landscape design takes a back seat to architectural design and is the first to be cut when budgets are tight. “If I were given a project and a building was already on the site,” she said, “I would strongly resist it.”
For Burntwood School and other works, landscape and architecture are equal partners in the success of the design.
Lynn was born in Edinburgh, the daughter of Margaret (née Geoff Cocker) and George Kinnear. Her mother raised Lynn and her three younger sisters. Her father worked for the city council, including as a council housing inspector. Formative influences included her mother’s love of gardening and her grandfather Ernest Jeffcock, a builder, who inspired her to study architecture. She was educated at James Gillespie’s High School and studied landscape architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, which was then part of Heriot-Watt University. There, she was one of a group of students taught by the strict but inspiring Professor David Skinner, several of whom went on to become leaders in their respective professions.
She worked for landscape architects Gillespies on projects including the 1984 Liverpool International Garden Festival, and later for multinational architecture firm SOM on the Canary Wharf development in London’s Docklands. While she respected the latter’s professional approach, she felt (as she later said) that it “did not adequately address the problems of the local community”. Keen to do her own thing, she established Kinnear Landscape Architects in 1991.
In 1992, as a lecturer at the University of Greenwich, she helped interview a young architect named Sean Griffiths for a part-time teaching position. She found him arrogant and recommended others, who were rejected. Despite a gloomy start, they became life partners and had a daughter, Lily. They also built the Blue House in east London, designed by Sean and his practice FAT, whose playful use of color and decoration bravely departed from the architectural mainstream and now makes it an object of student pilgrimage. It was completed in 2002 and remained Lynn’s home until her death.
At the same time, her growing reputation earned her a series of projects. Together with artist Richard Wentworth, she designed a new town square in Walsall, West Midlands, adjacent to architect Caruso St John’s new museum. Tony Blair’s government’s investment in education gave her the opportunity to design several schools. Design for London was established under the leadership of Ken Livingstone after he was elected Mayor of London in 2000, which enabled her to work on several neglected green spaces in the capital. As well as designing single projects, she has also undertaken strategic work, such as in the Highlands of South London.
Although she was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, she continued working at her clinic until 2023 when she decided to close it, despite the long and painful treatment process. She and Griffiths separated in 2008 but remained on good terms, and Griffiths, along with other friends and family members, helped care for her during her illness.
She is survived by Lily and her sisters Jo, Susie and Sally;
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