Who was the first UK citizen to ‘landscape architect’ in the same professional sense as Frederick Law Olmsted?

Patrick Geddes the first UK user

Geddes called himself a landscape architect in his submission for the Dunfermline park design competition of 1902. His fellow competitor, Thomas Mawson, became the first president of the UK Institute of Landscape Architects (now the Landscape Institute).

After 1914 Geddes changed to using the newer title ‘town planner’ as explained in this video. This link takes you to the relevant part of the video and is transcribed below.

‘The term ‘town planning’ appeared in The London Times in 1906 and was soon popular. This led to Geddes changing his professional title to ‘town planner’. But his approach remained very much that of a landscape architect. He was out of sympathy with the town planning profession that came into being with the Town Planning Institute in 1914. Its work seemed too paper-based, too architectural and too detached from the sociological and geographical character of people and places.
Geddes best-known book, published in 1915, had the title Cities in Evolution. It was a great title and the book has many great passages (as well as a lot of awkward text.) Its core argument centres on the word ‘civics’ and like the term ‘landscape architecture’ Geddes found it in America.
‘Civics’ derives from the same root as ‘city’ and ‘civil’. It means ‘relating to a citizen’. In Ancient Rome a man was given a civica when he saved another man from death in battle. It was a crown of oak leaves. Henry Randall Waite had founded the American Institute of Civics in 1885 and became its president. He wished to encourage good citizenship and cooperative citizen action, as in the early days of the American Republic.
For Geddes, ‘Civics’ combined theory with action of the kind we would classify as ‘community action’, or ‘social entrepreneurship’. It could be for an urban district, for a whole city or for a city region. Geddes prototype was the famous ‘valley section’ with a range of landscape types and occupations. He believed each region should have a permanent but evolving exhibition representing its collective memory and its future development potential. Two interesting aspects of the theory are his demand for local individuality and his desire that cities learn from each other. His city exhibitions contained plans of ancient and foreign cities but, as an advocate of localism and a believer in “the spirit of place”, Geddes was greatly opposed to “anywhere architecture” and “anywhere planning”.

His aim was to engage the citizenry in working towards a local but ideal city, always remembering that, as he wrote, “Our whole life is governed by ideals, good and bad, whether we know it or not. North, south, east and west are only ideals of direction: you will never absolutely get there; yet you can never get anywhere, save indeed straight down into a hole, without them”.’