Union Terrace Gardens (UTG) in Aberdeen, Scotland, is one of the UK’s most important park regenerations. Set amongst many of the city’s finest buildings, it is Aberdeen’s most visible green space. Located within a steep river valley and bounded by a railway line, it has a dramatic, challenging typography.
Dating back to 1878, UTG is central to the city’s history, and close to people’s hearts. However, recent times were hard on the Gardens as they fell into disrepair, becoming overgrown and a magnet for anti-social behaviour. Their future was the subject of a long, divisive struggle with multiple proposals failing to find support. One high-profile plan even proposed filling in the park valley with a shopping mall.
A 2016 masterplan for the city highlighted 22 sites for investment. Union Terrace Gardens was identified as the first project, importantly positioning investment in green infrastructure as the means of kickstarting wider regeneration and growth. Aberdeen City Council commissioned a team led by LDA Design to reunite the city behind a vision that would reanimate the space while respecting their Victorian character, giving the Gardens back to Aberdeen’s citizens.
LDA’s aim was to make the park more welcoming, inclusive and equitable, more biodiverse and safer. A place that could accommodate local community and city-scale events whilst providing opportunities for small-scale commercial activity.
Key was pivoting intense public concern into a groundswell of support. So, local people were positioned at the heart of the design process. The design team identified forty core local stakeholders and hosted workshops to discuss concerns, ideas and what the space meant to them. Wider engagement was designed to reach as many people as possible to reignite interest and rebuild the relationship between people and place. So, on a cold November day, UTG’s lawns fluttered with brightly coloured flags, keepsakes to take home featuring design details within the Gardens. This installation kicked off a sustained programme of engagement and co-design. The project team set up a stall at the city’s Christmas market and had conversations with 4,000 people over nine days. Thousands of cards were distributed around the city showing the future life of the place.
Reinventing a historic park for the 21st century meant finding new purpose and meaning. Key principles for UTG included:
•Celebrating existing heritage
•New and improved facilities: play, education, food and beverage, toilets
•Flexible community events spaces: including a large lawn and level paving in the lower Gardens
•Accessible gardens for all: fully accessible routes into and throughout the Gardens
• Safe and active space: improved lighting, passive surveillance.
•Preserving and enhanced green space: biodiverse planting, seasonality, and retention of healthy mature trees
Enhancements of natural and heritage assets were balanced with elegant contemporary interventions, including three new pavilions by Stallan Brand Architects, a new bridge and aerial walkways, plus extensive public realm. A central lawn provides space for lounging or events. There is a playground to attract families and a sheltered wooded glade. Lighting adds drama, transforms safety, and includes a dramatic halo feature suspended over the lawn. Neglected archways have been turned into gallery spaces.
Making the Gardens fully accessible, in a way that enhanced the heritage, was a main challenge. Extraordinary effort was put in to balancing new elements with original features, and it is a big part of what makes the project special. Accessible routes were developed in close consultation with disability groups. A key move was to make a steep-banked park accessible for the first time: the grand centrepiece, a granite staircase into the lower Gardens, was painstakingly rebuilt to allow for wheelchair friendly access via a new amphitheatre route. Two of the new buildings provide lift access to the lower sections. New public toilets, separate from the cafés, improve accessibility, and encourage longer visits. The Disability Equity Partnership Chair described the plans for UTG as one of the best examples of inclusive design they had ever seen.
It was vital too that the Gardens were made more climate resilient with biodiversity significantly enhanced, taking the Gardens from their previous low ecological value. More than 122,000 plants went into the redesign, including a high proportion of natives, replacing a monoculture of amenity grass, plus 88 new trees.
Now, families and friends, runners, walkers, and skateboarders have made the Gardens their own and once again people say how much they love it. The project is a fantastic example of what sensitive landscape-led design, early engagement and considerate collaboration with multiple stakeholders can deliver. The resulting masterplan proposals and designs received an unprecedented 91% approval rating from Aberdeen’s citizens. The popularity and use of the new spaces is evidence of the success of the approach.
• All landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape: LDA Design
• All architecture offices involved in the design: Stallan Brand
• Other credits:
Client: Aberdeen City Council
Structural and Services Engineering and Lighting Design: Arup
Project Management: Ryden
Cost Consultant: McLeod + Aitken
Contractor: Balfour Beatty
Landscape Contractor: Ashlea
Play: Timberplay
Public art: Beautiful Materials and Rob Mullholland
• Location of the project
Address: 1 Union Terrace, Aberdeen AB10 1NJ, UK
