FLIMWELL WWW.WOODNET.ORG.UK/WEC BACKGROUND
LOCATION
Woodland Enterprise Centre, Flimwell, East Sussex
CONVERSATION
This conversation between Oliver Lowenstein, David Saunders, Steve Johnson, Robert Sakula and Will Anderson was held at the Rose Inn in January 2015. David Saunders: I started the Woodland Enterprise Centre here at Flimwell mainly for biodiversity reasons: to bring woodlands that have been previously managed back into management. More and more the project turned to focus on the economic function of woodlands; what it was that drove the sustainable exploitation of Sussex woodlands for centuries and created the biodiversity in the first place. What was missing was a market and over the past 50-100 years we have lost the skills, many skills died with those in the world wars, and of course the market introduced substitutions. In Sussex the decline of the hop pole market had a huge effect as this was a main stay product from these coppiced woods. The pressure was on to try and find a way to rekindle the rural economy using wood products. We are in one the most wooded areas here although England is one of the least wooded countries in Europe. This part of the high weald in particular has positively European levels of forest cover; we’re talking about 30-40% woodland. Sadly the motivation to manage the woodlands has been left behind and they’ve become an amenity backdrop,
In order to do that we sought funding for two things in the early 90s. One was to look at models of good practice elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Normandy. We created a WoodNet partnership which was formed really from my time in the local authority. We brought together woodland owners, timber processers, educators forming a loose partnership of people interested in growing trees and using trees and the local authority who wanted to do rural development. We won European life money to run a three year program on investigating good practice and implementing some techniques back here. We have been going for 15 odd years now. We have WoodLots which is a way of selling smaller parcels of timber from small producers, and the Woodland Enterprise Centre was the final mission. We needed a permanent exhibition of wood culture in the South East of England. The partnership then bid for money under a rural challenge program which was Rural Development Focus, and this site happened to be on the market at the time. Hooke Park was a great inspiration for sure; we had seen what John Makepeace was doing. We launched into a competition and invited a shortlist of architects with a fairly open brief: built from local wood and for a £1000 / m2. Fielden Clegg won the competition. Cutting woodlands in SE into types we are looking at about 25% chestnut coppice and another 20% birch maybe, oak has got an existing market so we don’t research with it. Sweet chestnut rivals oak in strength, the faster it grows the stronger it is, it’s cheaper but smaller in diameter, however manly its more stable than oak, our chestnut cladding and flooring is very stable. Robert Sakula: My burning question is how do I bridge the difference between the cost of building homes conventionally and using your products and research findings? David Saunders: You’ve reached an assumption there. In Scotland where a lot of housing building is going on, the predominate housing type is timber framed, So there are plenty of case studies in commercial development in the UK where timber is the preferred choice. Robert Sakula: Yes, but using local woodlands and natural products that’s a bit more difficult. David Saunders: It is and I think there will be a certain
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The South East of England is one of the most wooded regions of Britain. The opportunity to link timber growing in the SE with the demands of the building industry is regularly noted, but actual initiatives to translate this into reality are rare. An exception is the construction and work of the Woodland Enterprise Centre, at Flimwell, East Sussex, situated in Yellowcoat Wood in the midst of thick High Weald forest. Over the course of the last ten years Woodland Enterprises Ltd, based at WEC, have championed the rebirth and reintroduction of local timber use in construction through developing new ways of using some of the most widely growing trees found across Sussex.
but it is coppicing which creates the rich biodiversity, this is little known.
of clients who will want that. Robert Sakula: So does it just stay a Grand Designs thing? How do you make it more mainstream? Steve Johnson: David knows better than anybody that all you need to do is go across the channel and you see so much timber construction, but it gets buried in finishes. They just see it as the go to material if you want to build cheaply.
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David Saunders: One thing is planning, could planning have any sway over what vernacular styles should be. These could be specified within the planning system. You’re unlikely to get very far with that argument. A second argument is that to get local wood into the supply chain requires that fore-though that Steve described earlier; getting carpenters involved very early in the design process. What is slow and more expensive is if the design has to go to tender. Then a contractor has to get on the phone and start hunting around for local suppliers. Local procurement needs planning, so the contractor just ends up substituting it for Siberian timber. The key is anticipating in the design the type of wood that is specified is achievable at a reasonable rate and is available. It’s possible that many architects over specify wood and expect it to do all sorts of things which is unachievable from local sources. The architect must understand timber life expectancy and the diameter of wood they want to be working from. Get local saw mills, carpenters, woodsmen involved pre-tender and this is the cheapest way to be creative and to plan the project. This is good value for the client but it’s not the normal competitive tendering route. Oliver Lowenstein: A problem that Will and I have been debating, which centres on timber capacity and housing exemplars, is when one searches for example of housing procured from local timber in the South East you come to a complete blank. Steve Johnson: It’s the capacity that is the big question. But timber does keep growing. This is part of the equation; the likes of David being able to stand up and speak with procurers of buildings and say here are the cycles. Where cutting X amount of timber from Suffolk and Norfolk, where replanting this much, we can build up a cycle that can supply you. This should be happening not just with pine, but with sweet chestnut, with birch in the South East.
David Saunders: Thinking about reducing compromise, especially on internal finishes there is a growing interest in final fit out of houses being constructed by the future occupiers using their own sweat equity to reduce costs. This is a different development model that keeps the control of finishes procurement weighted towards the future occupier not the contractor. Steve Johnson: Cross laminated timber is not an expensive material if you use thin depths. If you use it as a loadbearing structure then it is expensive, but here it’s just doing the bracing. This is a high-bred cruck frame and CLT shell. Robert Sakula: We have tried to use CLT several times. Each time we get to that crucial point where you’re actually developing the detail and then you discover you can’t afford it. There is always a cheaper way of doing it. Steve Johnson: Well these building are under £1000 / m2. They are work shop buildings so al lot of developers are going that’s way too high, it should £300 / 400 / m2 for light industrial. Robert Sakula: I suppose we have been looking at it for housing were your using very small pieces relatively with lots of holes. Maybe that’s what makes it so expensive. Although these buildings could very easily be houses. Steve Johnson: These convert into housing really really easily. I can’t tell you how much time this cross lam saves; it really makes CLT a serious alternative for housing.