Lynn Kinnear, who has died of cancer aged 64, was one of the outstanding landscape architects of her generation. Her work ranged from urban playgrounds to natural parks such as Walthamstow Wetlands in east London. She collaborated with a number of leading architects and artists, including the Richard Rogers Partnership. Burntwood school in Wandsworth, south London, which she designed with the architects Allford Hall Monaghan and Morris, won the Stirling prize in 2015. Kinnear’s overriding aim, she said, was “to work with local communities to effect change in their public space”.
Her approach combined adventurous thinking, often inspired by art, with a deep knowledge of plants and habitats. Influenced by continental European landscape designers, such as the Dutch practice West 8, she liked to play the natural off against the artificial. With her Hellings Street Park in Wapping, east London, a 1995 project that helped make her name, she created mounds and valleys out of the material used for running tracks, with a bull’s-eye pattern marked out in strong colours, and a small plantation of pine trees next to a bright blue wall. With a rope bridge and a play fort, this “lumpy landscape” was designed to encourage activity and risk-taking.
