Draft:Jeremy Purseglove

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Jeremy Purseglove (born 28 October 1949) is an ecologist, landscape architect and author.

Early life and education

He was born in Uganda and grew up in Singapore, Trinidad, and Sissinghurst in Kent. In Kent, his interest in gardening was fostered by Vita Sackville-West and Christopher Lloyd, who was a close friend while he was growing up. He studied English literature at Bristol University and then obtained a M.Sc. in Ecology at Wye College (University of London) before qualifying as a landscape architect at Manchester University.

Family

His father was J.W.Purseglove, a tropical botanist and author of the 4-volume Tropical Crops, the standard scientific work on the subject. He lives in a thatched cottage in Rutland and has two daughters.

Career

Purseglove initially worked for the garden designer, Lanning Roper. Together they worked on Scotney Castle, Churchill’s Garden at Chartwell and the roof garden at Norman Foster’s Willis Faber Building in Ipswich. He also worked for the artist, John Piper, developing his garden.

In 1977 Jeremy Purseglove became an environmentalist in the British Water Industry, joining the Severn Trent Water Authority based in Birmingham. Set up in 1974, the wealthy new Water Authorities were busy dredging and canalizing rivers, principally for land drainage to promote intensive farming. Purseglove soon found that there were many ways to modify these practices and build a wider brief to include nature conservation alongside flood control. He set out to create examples of good practice and to publicise them whenever possible. In this capacity he helped pioneer a new approach to river and flood management, which culminated in his classic book Taming the Flood and associated television series, which he scripted and presented. By the time the water industry was privatized in 1988, a more sensitive approach to rivers and wetlands was being embraced by much of the industry and now this can be seen as standard practice.

Between 1989 and 2014 Purseglove worked for the Civil Engineering Consultancy, Mott MacDonald, based in Cambridge, where he specialised in the integration of engineering schemes with the environment worldwide. He worked throughout the UK and in Africa, Central America, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent on roads, water supply, river engineering and sea defences.

In 1989 he presented a report to President Francois Mitterand opposing the damming of a major gorge on the upper Loire. This together with a television campaign which he fronted, helped to save the gorge from inundation . At Hindhead in Surrey, he led the environmental aspects of the A3 Hindhead Tunnel project, which removed a major trunk road from the nature reserve of the Devil’s Punchbowl. He also carried out assessments for the Chirundu Bridge over the Zambezi linking Zimbabwe and Zambia and also a proposed bridge over the Nile at Aswan in Egypt.

From 1998 Purseglove became Visiting Professor in Engineering Design for Sustainable Development at the University of Hertfordshire. Between 2002 and 2019 he had a regular teaching role on the M Phil in Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge. .

In 1980 he helped to establish the Urban Wildlife Group in the West Midlands, the first urban nature conservation trust in the UK. From 1990 to 2020 he was on the Local Committee for the National Trust’s Wicken Fen, where he served as chair between 2015 and 2020. He worked closely on the Wicken Fen Vision, which was set up in 1999 In 2020 with three others, he formed the Rockingham Forest Vision, which promotes the linking of ancient woodlands in Northamptonshire.  

Books

Taming the Flood >was published in 1988, winning the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize the same year. Richard North predicted in The Independent that ‘Purseglove will be seen as the man who saved Britain’s rivers from the runaway JCB and the deep drainage pump’ . In 2015 it was revised and re-published before being further updated for paperback in 2017. Oliver Rackham described it as a ‘pioneering and counter-cultural work’ while Lord Deben applauded ‘an updated edition of this environmental classic’ . The Sunday Times wrote that ‘Jeremy Purseglove is a sane voice in a panicky situation’ (9). At the height of major UK flooding in 2015, BBC Countryfile commissioned Purseglove to put out a blog on the principles of Natural Flood Management, a strategy which reduces flooding as well as helping nature. In 2020, more than 30 years after its first publication, Mark Lloyd of the Rivers Trust emphasized Taming the Flood’s enduring relevance.

Working with Nature was published in 2019 and revised in paperback in 2020 when it was also shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. This book is based on the years that Purseglove worked for Mott MacDonald, reporting worldwide from the front line of global nature conservation. Reviewing this book, The Planner described Purseglove’s world as ‘tangible, sensual and beautifully described’ . The Geographical wrote that it is ‘An engrossing and eye-opening book, epic in scope, enjoyable, astute, wise and profoundly important’ Reviewing Working with Nature in the New Scientist, Fred Pearce described Purseglove as an unsung hero who writes beautifully.

Television and radio

• BBC Nature 1984, 1985, 1986
• Taming the Flood, Channel Four, 1988
• The Perfect Storm, BBC Radio, July 2014