Clare Brockhurst

Clare Brockhurst rose from being a graduate landscape architect to managing director of environmental consultancy Waterman CPM within 14 years.

Having graduated in 1991 in Landscape Management at Reading University, by 2005 she had become the youngest ever managing director of a Waterman Group company and its first female managing director. She also became the first woman to sit on Waterman Group’s General Management Board.

She has led projects from small private garden designs to major schemes such as the South Downs National Park inquiry.

Like many other landscape architects her appreciation of the landscape stemmed from her childhood – in her case, growing up in the rural county of Suffolk.

Not content with a fulfilling work life, Clare also has a young family, sits on an after-school club committee and helps to organise her annual village fete.

She says: “I loved the outdoors and became aware landscape is all around you but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. But then I came across the landscape management course at Reading. The breadth of the course was such a mix. It was part history – not the academic study of history but the history of landscape – it was part engineering, part planning and part law.”