Landscape architect Joy Hutchinson has made thousands of people laugh and cry with her work focusing on Belfast’s past, present and future.
er designs of memorials marking tragedies like the Titanic and the 1941 Luftwaffe Blitz have moved many to tears while her quirkier creations, like a cat garden beside Belfast Castle, have put smiles on the faces of successive generations.
Joy, from Fermanagh, has just retired after 31 years in the employ of Belfast City Council for whom her other design projects have included Writer’s Square, the memorial to thousands of babies buried in unmarked graves in the City Cemetery and the Connswater Greenway where Van Morrison’s famous Hollow from Brown Eyed Girl was spruced up.
Not surprisingly Joy is proud of the legacy she’s leaving behind but she’s not one to make — or seek a fuss — and she’s quick to acknowledge the role of sculptors and artists in turning her visions into reality.
“I suppose I was a bit like a film director getting all these wonderful people to actually create all the different components that I had in my mind,” she says.
Self-effacing Joy’s admirers have hailed her as one of the council’s most gifted and talented innovators.
“You can’t go far in Belfast without being near one of the imaginative stamps Joy has left there,” says one fan who recommends a visit to Belfast Castle, adding: “Look out of one of the upstairs windows, and you will see bold, colourful, cat mosaics, with a fountain at their centre, bordered by box hedging and surrounded by herbaceous planting.”
Nearby an adventurous playground, she says, is another testimony to Joy’s skills while another striking example of her work is in Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park in the imposing shape of huge granite stones that have been dubbed a mini-Stonehenge and which have created quite a stir since their first appearance.
Joy has also been a massive influence on the aesthetics of the lower Ormeau Road, having designed the tall, decorated earthenware pillars made by acclaimed potter Eleanor Wheeler for the landscaping at the old Gasworks site.
Joy says she decided to become a landscape architect partly due to her family’s love of gardens and also because the job encompassed so many of the other things that were dear to heart — the sciences, art, design, botany, and ecology.
Joy spent four years studying at an art and design college in Cheltenham before working for two years in an office to attain all her professional qualifications.
Joy says: “The thing I liked about it was that it was a problem-solving job trying to make sense of outdoor, and sometimes indoors, spaces and making them better, healthier and more usable for recreation as well as improving the environment.”
On her return to Northern Ireland Joy worked for six and a half years for a Belfast design firm who had contracts at the Westlink and in housing redevelopments in the likes of Sandy Row, Donegall Pass and Ballymurphy where one of the main tasks was to alleviate flooding in the area.
Her next stop was a dream three-month horticultural internship at Kew Gardens in London.
“I lived on site and when I walked out the back, I was in the Botanic Gardens which I had to myself. It was absolutely fantastic, and I was able to learn from real experts who taught me so much, particularly about herbaceous and alpine plants.
“I worked in all the lovely greenhouses at Kew including the Princess Diana conservatory. I got the chance to help develop a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show and see behind the scenes which was astonishing,” says Joy who then came home in 1990 to join the Parks Department at Belfast City Council.
“I really wanted to work with open spaces, and I knew Belfast had some lovely parks with a lot of potential for more.
“I was part of a team of five or six landscape architects and one of my first jobs was at Cavehill Country Park to create trails and new signage.
“All that morphed into the cat garden at Belfast Castle.
“I got a lot of artists involved to do various sculptures and mosaics of cats and hid them around the garden which I thought would hold a lot of interest for visiting children.
“I then went to work all over Belfast on very small and very big sites.”
Joy was associated with the planning of the setting for a permanent memorial to mark the resting places in unmarked graves of more than 7,000 babies at Belfast City Cemetery
Families were also involved in the planning for the Kilkenny limestone memorial known as the Baby Haven.
The City Cemetery was also home to another memorial, this time to some of the victims of the Belfast Blitz carried out by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.
“I was also proud of the Titanic Memorial Garden which opened in the City Hall grounds on April 15, 2012, the centenary of the sinking of the ship,” explains Joy.
“We wanted to come up with a garden and a plinth that would include bronze plaques with the names of all the people who perished.
“We were anxious not to take away from the lovely Titanic memorial statue that was already there beside the City Hall, but which wasn’t in a great position.
“It was my task to design the plantings and we had very cool colours of blues, greys and whites. We flooded the place with hyacinths which you could smell from halfway up Linenhall Street.
“I still get a lot of pleasure from walking through the garden and seeing the reaction of people there. I didn’t realise at the time just how much interest there still was in the Titanic.”
Redesigning the inner courtyard of the City Hall and re-arranging its car park were among Joy’s other projects along with making changes to Woodvale Park and Tommy Patten Memorial Park as well as upgrading the Waterworks site.
Joy was also involved in the improvements to historic but rundown Belfast entries like Castle Arcade, Crown Entry and Pottinger’s Entry in the city centre.
“Some of them were in really bad conditions and we were able to clean them and transform them into vibrant places, to make them safe for people to walk down and enjoy.”
Looking back Joy says she feels privileged to have played her part in helping to make Belfast change ‘from a very disconnected place to somewhere that is more connected and goes right across communities.’
One of Joy’s last projects was on the refurbishment of the Tropical Ravine at Botanic Gardens and now that she’s retired, she hopes to share her expertise and experience as a volunteer with groups like the Woodland Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
However, she also designs on a career as a landscape painter and on expanding her work as an illustrator of books, cards and brochures for commercial companies.
She has also had her drawings used by a company called Cycling for Softies which was one of the first companies to offer holidays on two wheels in Europe.
Joy wants to encourage more people to pursue a career in landscape architecture. “It really is a great job. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.”
For anyone still unsure of what landscape architecture is Joy explains: “It’s a discipline which deals with mainly outdoor spaces around buildings in cities and rural areas trying to improve them for people. It can range from inner city squares to country parks. I got a real kick when people took ownership of a site and engaged with us.”
