We are landscape architects. We enjoy working with others, thinking creatively to address the pressing environmental concerns of our time and to find shared value in the natural world.

As landscape designers we are uniquely placed to help tackle the causes of climate change and how we live with the consequences. We strive to enhance biodiversity in response to the global crisis, promoting a nature based approach, applied with precision and passion.

As we reshape our towns and cities, our placemaking supports social cohesion by creating green neighbourhoods where everyone feels safe and engaged. We shape new places that are responsive to the parent landscape, that are inspired by historical layering and that weave together strands of contemporary culture. New landscape should emerge from a collective understanding that people, places and society evolve continuously, so must retain the capacity for change, in order to offer enduring value.

Our clients invest in landscape change. We help them achieve their aspirations. Our approach is collaborative and creates value from good design. We make proposals that are viable, attract support and get built. We dig deep.

Camlins was established in 1980 and remains an independent practice, recognised for landscape design and urban regeneration throughout the UK and internationally.

We are acutely aware that agricultural practice, development and new infrastructure continues to denude the little remaining natural ecology of the British Isles, which is a small part of a bleak global picture. Perhaps counter intuitively, we are all now learning how development, particularly of brownfield sites, can have the capacity to enhance local biodiversity. We work with ecologists and arboriculturalists to protect existing ecology and think about all new landscape as habitat that will evolve over time. We promote ‘green default’ and ‘nature based solutions’ as key concepts in creating regenerative landscape. The closer we are to the natural world, the better we are as people.

The design of external space is the overarching environmental design discipline. Public realm is the glue that holds society together, particularly in our densely populated urban neighbourhoods. Good design is critical in building communities where people feel safe, spend more time and are happier to mix with others. Our placemaking emerges from community engagement, helping people to live the lives that they want. Tangible lasting benefits come from creation and nurture of communal allotments, playable landscape, events space and biodiverse gardens.

Our creativity is informed by a depth of experience in commercial aspects of development, buildability and the realities of procurement and construction. We are always responsive to the communal and political context of environmental change. In this way, we can help our clients achieve their aims by making proposals that are realistic and come to fruition. For us landscape design is not an academic exercise. We work to change the real world.

We understand how good design can create value out of thin air. For public sector clients, this means efficient investment with maximum benefits to enhance the wellbeing of our communities. For commercial clients, it means the enrichment of a product to offer something extra to the market and to enhance the marketing experience and sale. We work constantly with design teams to think how the environmental and architectural jigsaw can fit together in the best possible way.

Our approach is one of vigorous enquiry that enables us to understand our clients’ requirements in detail but also to commit to their wider aspirations. We like to strip the design brief down to fundamental issues with disarmingly simple questions such as: What is this place like? What is it for? Why would people want to be here? This brings clarity, defines purpose and informs the emerging unique aesthetic. The resulting landscapes are place specific, engaging and right for everyone who goes there.