Island 2000 Trust Blog

This is a seat that I helped to create last week in the shadow of the huge new Selfridges building in the centre of Birmingham.

Superficially the two constructions appear to come from the same architectural mould. Their style is at once retro and avant-garde and they share organic, bulbous lines which mark them out from the angular buildings around them. However, this is where their similarity ends. One embodies a view of a future in which humans are are mere ants milling about within vast labyrinthine systems on which they can have no influence. The other expresses exactly the opposite idea, that humans can shape their own future with their own hands.

The seat was made using a technique developed in Poland by Messrs Brzeski. Straw and liquid clay are mixed by trampling on them in a pit and then put into wooden moulds to form them into light, but sturdy environmentally friendly building blocks which can be used to build all sorts of human-scale structures: houses, bird-hides, mazes … It’s a messy process, but available to anyone prepared to get up to their elbows in clay. In this case it was school children and volunteers who had signed up to workshops organised by The Natural House.

The urge to create shelter is a very basic one and there is something extraordinarily satisfying about being able to do it oneself. I had a great time passing on in Birmingham what I had learned on the Arts Council-funded course in Poland and those who joined in seemed excited by the possibilities it opened up.

I’m planning to do another workshop here on the Island, so if you’d like to find out more about the techniques, get in touch.

We’ve been doing some interesting work on plant colonization of bare greensand slopes and banks at a particular Island site. In part this is to show how use of no herbicides at all in weed control and no imported topsoil or fertilizer in the management of the bits and pieces of left over land in and around a busy industrial site can work with the regular disturbance regime that inevitably operates in such a place to produce very good overall biodiversity. So long as we can prize people away from that desperate corporate urge to tidy and pointlessly prettify everything the world will be a far more biologically interesting place. This doesn’t mean a puritanical drive to expel all non-native species and indeed some of the most exciting places have a real mix of casual and naturalized species in with regeneration from a seed bank left to just get on with things without having a ton of bark and soil improver dumped on it. Anyway, amongst the great things to see in such places (loads at the site we’re surveying where this photo was taken) is this lovely carpet of the lichen Cladonia pixydata with the many little archangel trumpets, properly called podetia. Has there ever been a more beautiful word than pixydata - the statistical information essential to students of the fairyfolk: longevity, global distribution, average family size, diet, major exports, language and dialect, all questions I now of course can’t get out of my head. But it gets better. This lichen is classed as a squamulose species, meaning that its surface is made up of loads of tiny scales. Another spectacularly brilliant word. Forget Om Nama Shivaya, my mantra is now Squamulose Cladonia Pyxidata and I feel much better for it.

Last week on Midsummer’s Evening (the longest day of the year) a crowd gathered to join the “Medina at Midsummer” boat cruise - a tour from the Medina Rediscovered project funded by Heritage Lottery.

Over 60 people crowded into a Solent Jenny boat to enjoy a sedate motor up river as far as the Folly Inn (no, we didn’t stop) listening to the Captain’s commentary on local landmarks along the way. The river is so peaceful, especially in the evening, and there was plenty to look at in terms of boats, architecture, industrial heritage and wildlife.

Everyone aboard had the chance to test their sea legs as we motored back out of the Medina into the open waters of the Solent, where you can really feel the difference from the calm inland waters of the river.

We became caught up in a Thursday evening Isle of Wight Sailing club racing evening, and caught some wash from several large passing ships and a Red Jet, which all added to the exciting finish. The grand finale was a glimpse of Norris Castle, a romantic gothic looking house that can only be seen by the public from the sea. Surrounded on all sides by woodland and water, it really looks like A house from a Daphne DuMaurier novel.

FAMOUS landmarks on the Isle of Wight feature in the “Brilliant Wight Colouring Book- Landmark Edition” which was launched at Dinosaur Isle in Sandown on Saturday (June 23). Families were invited to come along and colour in poster sized drawings from the book which features illustrations of the Island’s favourite landmarks including Ryde Pier, Dinosaur Isle, the lifeboat station at Bembridge and Newport’s Quay Arts Centre.

The book - the second to be published - is supported by the Isle of Wight Council’s Arts Unit, the Island 2000 Trust, the AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) Partnership and Leader Plus via the Isle of Wight Economic Partnership. The book is part of ‘Brill Books’ which is Island 2000’s publishing arm. All the drawings were submitted by Island artists.

The launch featured the images blown up from the book to poster size so that families could join in the colouring in fun and create their own poster to take home. A rare dry morning was enjoyed as families spread out across the front lawn of the museum and got stuck into the free materials to create some rich, lively and colourful interpretations of Island scenes. There was also badge and magnet making available too.

Colouring books can be brought from the Dinosaur Isle museum shop, Tourist Information Centres or from Island 2000 Trust direct and cost £3.50. Many thanks to Peter and the staff at Dinosaur Isle for all their help and support.

Bring Your Binoculars 7th July 2007
Meet an expert from the RSPB at Brading Railway Station for a 2 mile stroll at Brading Marshes looking out for wetland birds, dragonflies and butterflies along the way. The walk will last approximately 2 1/2 hours.

Wear Your Wellies 8th July 2007
An easy walk from Merstone Station along the new Gift To Nature Troll Trail to the fabulous Birchmore Pond - one of the Island’s very best pond dipping spots. We’ll see lots of birds, flowers and butterflies along the way, we’ll sweep the hedges and verges for bugs and minibeasts, and we’ll try to catch sticklebacks and ferocious gragonfly larvae in the pond.

The poetry box at Vestas Blades (wind turbine manufacturer) has now been up for several weeks and poems have been coming in at a surprising rate. The idea is to find interesting ways of reproducing and displaying some of them around the Vestas site. This little one was the first to drop into the box. It has been carved on a stone which we will set into a verge or flower bed somewhere near the factory.

In exchange for giving my dad a hand installing his sculpture (see below) he helped me get the second bronze plaque with a bus stop poem on it into place Apes Down Farm, Calbourne. The poem of the same name laments the evident lack of apes in the area. It has been set onto a big slab of stone which we dug into the verge. This was harder than it sounds because the ground was very stony, but it worked out in the end. Hop on the bus and have a look!

On Wednesday Sam and I went over to the Arts & Business Awards ceremony in Portsmouth. At the door of the new Aspex Gallery we were greeted by a saxophonist who was able to play in the rain while standing on top of a tall pair of stilts, which I felt must be worthy of some kind of arts award in itself. Inside, there were lots of guests milling around, examining an exhibition of tiny cut-out birds and light-sensitive cuckoo clocks.

Because the project to put poems on buses and at bus stops isn’t complete, I hadn’t expected it to win anything, but to my delight it was given the Arts & Business Community Award. Really, the trophy belongs to Southern Vectis, but we’ve got it for the moment. I talked to the artist who made it and she warned me not to put it in the sun as some others of hers have exploded. This makes it even more exciting to have won it while at the same time feeling like a good reason to pass it on.

Not strictly an Island 2000 project this, but I’ll put it in as I think Glyn’s a sort of honorary member.

Today we got up at the crack of dawn (nearly) and set off for Calbourne. Once there, my dad and I cut a big hole in the side of the Blacksmith’s Arms. After a while the hole became just the right size and shape to put in his latest sculpture.

Here it is…… Like most of his sculptures, it highlights some local folklore. This one is the story of a court case which arose from a traffic accident between a farmer in his cart and a rich landowner’s carriage on the Newport to Freshwater road about 200 years ago. It’s a true tale where against the odds, simple honesty wins over wily legal manoeuvrings. If that doesn’t warm your heart you could always pop inside for a beer.

Building a house can be fun. If you doubt this, pack your bags straight away and sign up for one of Mr Brzeski’s construction courses in the heart of the Polish countryside. I’ve just come back from one and am still trying to get the mud from under my toenails…

The technique for building what he calls the ‘Natural House’ involves mixing straw and wet clay with your feet and forming the resulting matted gloop into blocks in wooden moulds. While I was slightly sceptical about the claim that these natural materials allow 85% more beneficial cosmic rays to enter the house than standard bricks and mortar, it was undeniable that it was amazingly easy to make make beautiful, strong constructions with them.

Particularly rewarding to build were the arches. These top most of the doors and windows in Mr Brzeski’s houses. As soon as the key ’stone’ is in place at the top, any supports can be removed and the clay-straw arch is strong enough to be walked and even jumped on. Another fun bit is rendering the walls, which you do by throwing dollops of clay/staw/cow poo at them and then smoothing it all off with a big stick. The roof was constructed from a framework of small-section timber, insulated with more straw-clay blocks and covered with wooden shingles to keep the weather out.

Houses, built using this system are quite labour intensive since you have to make all the blocks yourself, but are simple, beautiful, very cheap, very energy-efficient and can generallybe made using almost entirely locally-sourced materials.

The week’s course was really just an introduction, but I was impressed by the potential for using the simple techniques to build all sorts of constructions in an environmentally sensitive way: mazes, bird hides, teen-shelters, garden sheds, observatories…

To see a wider selection of pictures from our eco-house building and other capers or to find out more about the techniques visit www.thenaturalhouse.co.uk.