For more than 30 years, John Thompson, who has died aged 74, was the city of Oxford’s landscape architect. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: his magnificent legacy to the city can be seen at every turn – he initiated Oxford in Bloom and the Forest of Oxford scheme, oversaw planting of trees in every crevice and corner of the city, and created enchanting wildlife sanctuaries in Boars Hill, Shotover, Cutteslowe, Grandpont, Wolvercote and Burgess Field. He was a passionate advocate of allowing nature as much freedom as possible by the promotion of indigenous species linking landscape to surrounding buildings.
He was also a collector of modern art and a passionate supporter of Bauhaus, Corbusier, brutalism, Didcot power station, modernism and postmodernism in all its guises. But this paradox emanated from his underlying deep aesthetic – an intuitive understanding of how landscape and buildings should interact harmoniously with each other.
Village cricket pitches, which were perfection to him, led naturally in his mind to sustainable vegetation and indigenous species, hence to perfectly constructed concrete in beautiful urban design.
John was born in Edinburgh, but brought up near Bath, where his father, Gerald, and mother, Eileen, owned a nursery garden. He was educated at St Christopher’s preparatory school in Bath, and at Lancing college in West Sussex. He studied landscape architecture at the Gloucestershire School of Art in Cheltenham and began his career with Sir Frederick Gibberd, helping to design Harlow New Town, in Essex, and landscape Didcot power station. He was very proud of having been able to persuade the engineers there to separate the six cooling towers into two separate groups of three.
John was loved for his unfailing kindness and his joie de vivre. Rooms lit up when he entered, not with a thundering ego, but with a modest self-deprecating presence and gloriously obscene stories. He was a bit like Mr Creevey, the early 19th-century impoverished socialite, who was welcomed into the grandest of country houses because of his talent for puncturing the pomposity of the high and mighty.
He is survived by a brother, Jim, and sister, Mary.
