In April 2012, I was working part-time as a support worker for a student with a disability on the
English module at the University of Sheffield: ‘Storying Sheffield’, which encouraged participants to
narrate their experiences of the landscape. Intrinsic to the course was students vocalising the way
landscape affected their everyday experiences, and being encouraged to analyse the places where
memory and recollections were contextualised. In 2011, I was admitted to a psychiatric intensive care
unit with psychosis. After one month in hospital, I spent two months recovering from this acute and
severe mental health problem before returning to full-time work. Carrying out this research gave me
a chance to position myself as an ‘insider’ (Wallcraft, Schrank, & Amering, 2009), a perspective from
which I could try to contribute to an important field in landscape architecture—the creation of socially responsive environments that are welcoming as positive social places for all. The landscape so often
serves as a backdrop, setting or symbol in stories, it makes sense to reverse this relationship, and use
individuals’ experiences to understand the landscape within which they sit.