About us > Consultants

Consultant for Northamptonshire and former Research Fellow – Dr Clare Hickman

Clare managed the Historic Gardens project from 2007 until October 2011. In this capacity she co-authored the Historic Gardens of England: Northamptonshire. She also taught an optional unit for the MA Garden History course at Bristol, which explored the social history of public open spaces. Clare was awarded her doctorate by the University of Bristol in 2006 and this research has formed the basis of a book entitled, Therapeutic Landscapes: A History of Englsih Hosptial Gardens Since 1800, to be published by Manchester University Press in 2012. In May 2005 she won the inaugural Garden History Society Essay Prize for her article on the gardens of Brislington House. This was published in the Society’s journal - Garden History - later that year. Other articles include one for the journal, History of Psychiatry on the visual experience of landscape as part of the therapeutic regime of the nineteenth-century British asylum. .  

Consultant for Staffordshire – Dr Dianne Barre

After early retirement from the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Birmingham, Dianne Barre completed her PhD at Bristol University in 2006. Her area of study was the lost formal gardens of Staffordshire, 1690-1750. During her time at Birmingham she organised part-time courses for the general public, taught architectural history and garden history and also led study tours in England and France. Dianne is particularly interested in the architecture of garden buildings and has enjoyed finding examples and also plans and elevations of little known or unknown buildings for the county book. The Historic Gardens of England: Staffordshire was published in September 2009.

Consultant for Warwickshire – Diane James

Diane James lives and works in Warwickshire, and knows the gardens and landscapes of the county well having lived in Polesworth, Bidford-upon-Avon and Warwick. She has worked in conjunction with Warwick Museum on two exhibitions: Fifties Fantasy: Themes and Motifs from the 1950s and early 1960s, and Prayer and Passion: The Story of Priory Park.  She completed her MA in Garden History at Bristol University in 2007, carrying out research into subjects which included the gardens of the designer W.H. Romaine-Walker, and the influence of the myth of Sir Guy of Warwick on the development of the pleasure gardens at Guy’s Cliffe.  Diane continues in her research of local gardens and is particularly fascinated by the historical threads linking landowners, their friends and relatives, and commissioned designers. The Historic Gardens of Warwickshire was published in September 2011.

Consultant for Herefordshire – Dr Jane Bradney

Jane Bradney completed her PhD at Bristol University in 2008 researching the fashion for Italian gardens across England during the first half of the nineteenth century. She now lectures to students of garden history and heritage management and researches a wide variety of gardens and designed landscapes. Her particular interest in the work of Humphry Repton will find resonance with her role as consultant for her adopted home county of Herefordshire. 

Consultant for Cambridgeshire – Dr Laura Mayer

Laura Mayer fell into garden history after a joint degree in the History of Art and Spanish, at the University of Bristol, led her to spend a year studying the Alhambra’s Islamic gardens. In 2007, she completed the MA in Garden History with a dissertation on Shugborough. This research formed the prelude to her PhD thesis, also awarded by the University of Bristol in 2011, examining the Society of Dilettanti’s patronage of eighteenth-century architecture and landscape. Laura’s article on Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s transformation of Alnwick Castle won the 2010 Garden History Society essay prize, and her book, Capability Brown and the English Landscape Garden, will be published in summer 2011 by Shire. She is keen to pursue her interest in historic landscapes by researching Cambridgeshire, the county in which she grew up.