Kim Wilkie expresses surprise as part of New Year Honours List
Announced on 29 December 2025, The King’s 2026 New Year Honours List recognised 1,100 people for their contributions across all sectors including women’s football, education and literature.
A notable name within the list stands Kim Wilkie, whose efforts were rewarded with a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to landscape architecture.
“It was a complete surprise. I had no idea it was coming at all. It was really nice to be told, because everything that I’ve tried to get across about land, water, history and people mixed with landscape architecture is being recognised,” Wilkie explains.
Throughout Wilkie’s life, his outlook always remains the same: He is guided by the health of soil, water and the long history of humans living together with a natural world since the last Ice Age. After running his own practice for 25 years, the landscape architect now works as a strategic and conceptual land architect often collaborating with architects and engineers around the world.
Having lived in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Baghdad in Iraq, Wilkie finally settled in the English countryside where he feels most at home. “All of those different climates and ways of living, and then being responsible for the land on which you live on made a huge difference.”
“We were always moving, so when we finally came to England and got a little farm, that sense of just belonging in one place and and being completely rooted in one landscape where I still live made a huge impact on me.”
Author of Led by the Land, Arcadian Thames and Indignation, Wilkie not only lectures internationally but he also continues to write about land and place from his countryside home in Hampshire. “This is where I belong,” he declares as he continues to combine design with the practicalities of running a small farm.
Since being recognised within the King’s list, Wilkie reflects on how he’s contributed to landscape architecture. “I hope what I brought is a wider perspective. I am involved in regional forestry policy, farming policy, new towns, urban design. I hope it’s because I covered a whole range because I see them as completely interrelated rather than separate silos.”
More specifically, Wilkie reflects on the work he’s done for the Majesty The King himself. Back in 1994, he published the Thames landscape strategy, which received interest from The King. Since then, Wilkie has worked on a plan for Transylvania and the Saxon villages, the Solovki archipelago in the Russian Arctic Circle.
Reflecting on his career, Wilkie thanks his university professor at University of California, Berkeley for being his inspiration throughout his career. “He had a very clear and strong idea of the role of a landscape architect. He was such a brilliant artist.” Looking back, Wilkie says whilst he taught the class to draw, “he’d say ‘this is a way of looking. It’s not art. Don’t kid yourself here, you’re not artists. You’re actually doing something that’s making it possible for people to live.’”
In response, Wilkie has led a career with a focus on the hydrology, soil and the pattern of human settlement, farming and how cities have evolved. He advises that as a landscape architect, you have to try your best to understand where we, as the human population, have come from and where we might go.
“Good settlements follow topography, water and connection to food, fuel and the outside world. It means starting with the contours, soil and water, combined with an appreciation of the local patterns of human lives on the land.”
“I’m doing quite a lot of new cities at the moment. I’m trying to work out how people will be living by the time the city is finished, which is 30 years time. Will we be driving cars? And where will our energy be coming from? What will the climate have done? Will there be enough water? All of those kinds of things really press upon the idea of the basics of how you design.”
Wilkie intends to continue residing in Hampshire, working and designing in collaboration with the land’s unfolding patterns.