PROJECT INFORMATION (1)

The project illustrates the contemporary landscape of Southern Belgium and Northern France, a landscape fought over many times in the last two thousand years but left especially devastated by the First World War from 1914 to 1918. This war left a strip of land only a few miles wide but over three hundred long almost totally destroyed. The villages and woods were razed to the ground by shellfire and the fields left polluted by rotting bodies, human and animal, unexploded shells and a huge variety of noxious chemicals.

Rebuilding and resettlement began immediately after the war except in the worst areas, such as Verdun, which were abandoned and the populations resettled elswhere. Many towns were restored to their former layouts almost as though nothing had happened. The town of Ieper (Ypres) is possibly the finest example of reconstruction anywhere along this front. The fields were cleared and the drains repaired and agriculture replaced slaughter.

While there are monuments to the dead everywhere in this land, and these are crucial to remember what we did here, this is not a living museum but rather a living landscape with a memory. The visitor here must remember that to the people living here this is home and they and their parents have struggled to rebuild normality here even to the degree of rebuilding farms to the same plan as the ones destroyed.

The rebuilding of the towns may have been a magnificent achievement but to me the restoration of the fields and woods to create both a beautiful and productive landscape has been of fundamental significance. The greatest memorials to the fallen are not the stone monuments, however beautifully kept they may be, but those fields and woods where life has been restored and where human endeavour continues.