THE ARCHITECTURAL Association’s biggest ever legacy will help to fund new buildings and a new MA course at Hooke Park College near Beaminster.
Posts from the “Environment” Category
I WAS thinking the other day about Colin Varndell, because I was trying to draw up a list in my head of excellent West Dorset people and organisations.
By excellent, I mean almost gratuitously obsessed with quality, and with the means and the skill to produce superb results.
The first individuals that came to mind were the West Bexington chilli growers Michael and Joy Michaud, the Beaminster furniture maker John Makepeace, the Bridport tiler Tony Bird of ASB Tiling, the West Milton cider maker Nick Poole, and the Netherbury wildlife photographer Colin Varndell.
Then I got distracted, and forgot all about it, until Dorset Wildlife Trust sent me some images from their new 2011 calendar, all given by Colin Varndell, and all – you guessed it – excellent. Really tremendous. See:
Dormouse, hibernating: January's image on Dorset Wildlife Trust's new calendar Wildlife Encounters. Copyright Colin Varndell.
Nuthatch, February's image on Dorset Wildlife Trust's 2011 calendar. Copyright Colin Varndell.
Otter: Pictured for September 2011 on Dorset Wildlife Trust's new calendar Wildlife Encounters. Copyright Colin Varndell.
Mr Varndell is a long-standing member and supporter of Dorset Wildlife Trust. He said: “Dorset is one of the richest counties for wildlife in Britain. If it is to remain so, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us, as custodians of this natural heritage, to protect, preserve and improve it for future generations. We can all help to achieve this by supporting the Dorset Wildlife Trust.”
In other words, and entirely reasonably, given his own generosity in supplying pictures, he wants people to buy the Trust’s new calendar.
Myself, I think that’s an excellent idea.
The calendar is called Wildlife Encounters and it costs £5. It’s available from Dorset Wildlife Trust at www.dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk/calendar or call 01305 264620.
It’s also stocked by most Dorset Tourist Information Centres, including Bridport, Dorchester, Shaftesbury, Wareham and Wimborne.
PHOTOGRAPHS and stories from along the Jurassic Coast of Dorset and East Devon are being sought to help explain the past and perhaps shape the future.
The last Labour Government gave Dorset and Devon county councils, plus numerous partners, £376,500 to explore how seaside communities might adapt to meet the challenges of coastal change.
Dorset and East Devon Coastal Change Pathfinder Project team members now want people to let them have photographs or written accounts of coastal erosion, flooding, storm events and changing coastal defences in Swanage, Ringstead, Preston Beach Road and Bowleze Coveway, Weymouth, Seatown, Charmouth, and Sidmouth and Pennington Point in East Devon.
1930s Scouts look out to sea, but it's the coastline stretching out west past Eype and Seatown that draws the modern eye.
A modern view from the same cliff path as above. Photograph by Stephen Williams, reused under Creative Commons Licence.
Contributions will be used to illustrate how the coast has changed in the past and provide the basis for visualisations of how it may change in the future.
Project coordinator Rupert Lloyd, said: “Perhaps you have a photograph showing how one of these areas looked in the past, or showing a major storm or landslip? Maybe you can provide a written account of how the coast has changed in these settlements?
“These personal accounts will be invaluable to the project and we would love to hear from you.”
Contributions can be submitted – up until the end of September – by email to a.potter@dorsetcc.gov.uk or by post to The Jurassic Coast Pathfinder Team, Environmental Directorate, Dorset County Council, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1XJ.
Pathfinder Team Note: If you would like your contribution returned please include your postal address. Please note that any information submitted may be used by the project in community engagement activities and future publications. All materials submitted should be copyright free. If you have any questions or require further information, please contact the project team on (01305) 225515.
Editor’s Note: The partners involved in the Dorset and East Devon Coastal Change Pathfinder Project are: Dorset County Council Devon County Council East Devon District Council, Purbeck District Council, West Dorset District Council and Weymouth and Portland Borough Council, parish and town councils, the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Team, Dorset Coast Forum, Devon Maritime Forum, Environment Agency. English Heritage, Natural England, National Trust, Dorset AONB Partnership, environmental groups and local civic societies, RSPB.
A PAIR of ringed plovers have bred in the far west of Dorset for the first time.
The wading birds have raised four chicks at Chard Junction Quarry.
Site owners Bardon Aggregates and Dorset Wildlife Trust turned a disused part of the quarry into a community nature reserve about a year ago.
Bardon Aggregates are still extracting gravel from are another part of the quarry, but when the company heard of the plovers’ nest, quarry manager Tony Pearson ordered an exclusion zone to make sure the pair weren’t disturbed.
He said: “It’s fascinating see how these birds have progressed, considering the natural predators that share the same area, including foxes, badgers, crows and buzzards. We just hope they will become regular visitors now.”
Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Joy Wallis said: “The birds could leave any time now, possibly to winter on the coast, but we hope they will be back to breed here next year.”
Ringed plover. Photograph by Monique Vanstone.
Ringed plovers have increasingly chosen to nest inland on sand and gravel pits, even sometimes on old industrial sites, as well as on coastal beaches.
The species’ future has been concerning conservationists; ringed plovers have amber status, indicating they need places to feed and breed.
Chard Junction Quarry nature reserve is near Chard Junction, at grid reference ST 345045. Open daily, free of charge, it includes a path, bird hides, woods, ponds and establishing grasslands. There is no other nature reserve nature in the area.
Reserve leaflets are available from Chard Tourist Information Centre.
More information can be obtained from Bardon Aggregates on 07730 832767.
A VISIONARY scheme putting West Dorset at the forefront of architectural and environmental education is bursting with new life.
Hooke Park near Beaminster already boasts some of the most extraordinary buildings in Britain (see video), discussed by architects all over the world.
Now the Architectural Association, which owns the 350-acre site, has been given outline planning permission by West Dorset District Council to create many more unusual but influential structures.
There will be a range of experimental wooden buildings for students and teachers, including 12 accommodation units, a construction shed, a hall for lectures, exhibitions and events, a design studio, a seminar room, four offices, a replacement caretaker’s house, and dining and kitchen facilities.
The Architectural Association, the UK’s oldest school of architecture, is planning to use Hooke Park for a new graduate course called Design + Make.
Students will “seek to learn from local craftspeople with traditional skills in woodworking, boat building and construction. The aim is for a reciprocal knowledge-sharing relationship with the local community.”
Hooke Park’s history over the last thirty years has largely been forgotten in Dorset, but it’s fascinating.
It was, for a while, of global significance.
It sought to offer a model for 21st century lifestyle changes.
"Ace": Hooke Park. Photograph by Sam Bush, from his blog And in my hands a camera
It’s a place with a great capacity to excite. Quite coincidentally, the excellent Bridport photographic blogger Sam Bush visited there with friends just days ago. It was, he writes, “amazing… ace… easily the best fun I’ve had in ages.”
A brief history
It’s more than 30 years since the internationally-renowned Beaminster furniture maker John Makepeace first conceived the idea of a new kind of forestry. In 1979 he went on a trip to Longleat with students from his craft school at Parnham House.
Nearly all week, it rained.
They sheltered in an old Nissen hut, and worked with wood freshly cut from a neglected coppice.
Mr Makepeace was impressed by how quick and easy it was to make sturdy useful things, and he began thinking about what could be done with the enormous number of small trees thinned out from commercial forests, which were normally pulped, burned as firewood, used as fenceposts or just discarded.
Surely better uses could be found?
The Hooke Park project began in 1983 in a 350-acre wood near Beaminster as an attempt to teach Britain – and the world – environmental and economic lessons.
Six years later, Hooke Park College opened.
Scuplture by Andy Goldsworthy at the entrance to Hooke Park. The work was sponsored by the Dorset-based charity Common Ground and South West Arts. Photograph copyright Ian Capper, reused under Creative Commons licence.
"Goldsworthy created his sculptures from second-grade timber which had grown on a hillside where the land had been slipping for many years: the trees had bent to compensate" (Jeremy Myerson, Makepeace, 1995). Photograph copyright Sarah Smith, reused under Creative Commons licence.
Central to Hooke’s programme of research and development was the idea of living and learning in buildings that would – literally – grow out of the woods.
And so – for a while – they did. For example, the Westminster Lodge, spanned with thinnings and topped with grass, was funded by the Duke of Westminster’s charitable trust.
One aim was to provide new models for housing and village life in the 21st century, particularly in sensitive landscapes like those of West Dorset.
Another was to inspire and train a new generation of environmentally-motivated designers and entrepreneurs.
Some – like Richard Lee, famous for his shepherd’s huts – are still out there now (Mr Lee is based near Dorchester).
Shepherd's hut by Richard Lee from Plankbridge photo gallery.
Overall, however, Hooke Park College had a patchy record. Its running costs exceeded its income and it was wound up in the mid-1990s in complicated and sometimes acrimonious circumstances.
The Parnham Trust sought to run further courses, but eventually, in 2002, the whole site was acquired by the Architectural Association (founded by “troublesome students” in 1847).
A very exciting moment
The association now aims to resurrect Hooke’s original approach to building, with students and teachers using greenwood poles from the woods around them.
Hooke Park’s new director Martin Self has been busy up in London, but he wrote (in an e-mail) that he was enthusiastic about “a very exciting moment – now that the outline planning is in place and the new academic programme at Hooke is coming together.”
David Hodges, West Dorset District council’s case officer, said that council officers had been in discussion with the Architectural Association before it made the application that was recently approved.
He went on: “This approval will need to be followed by a series of individual applications (what we call the ‘reserved matters’) for the detailed designs of each building once these have been designed by the students before they can be constructed on site. The council will continue to offer advice to the Architectural Association in making these reserved matters applications at Hooke Park as the detailed designs come forward.”
The Hooke Park project was ahead of its time, but it’s been one of those West Dorset phenomena that has gradually spread ideas through the wider culture. Guy Mallinson, a graduate of Parnham House, recently appeared on BBC2′s Mastercrafts with his Woodland Workshop at Holditch over in the far west of Dorset.
As John Makepeace once said: “Now that energy, sustainability and employment are pressing issues, trees and timber offer new economic, social and environmental possibilities.”
The Dorset coast mapped so far
A MAP of Dorset’s seabed from Abbotsbury to Swanage is now on Google Earth.
The DORset Integrated Seabed map – known for short as DORIS – shows the sea floor in enormous detail.
Lulworth Banks sponges & bryozoans: Peter Tinsley - Dorset Seasearch
Reefs and wrecks, rocky ledges and wildlife hotspots can all be studied through images and links and lists.
Never before in Britain has such an advanced map been made feely available.
DORIS began with an acoustic survey, plotting the exact contours of the seabed. Later stages involved hundreds of dives and thousands of photographs to find out more about different habitats.
It’s hoped over the next two years to cover all of the Dorset coast.
Work’s been done so far by Dorset Wildlife Trust, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and Channel Coastal Observatory. The Viridor Credits Environmental Company gave £300,000 through the Landfill Communities Fund.
This map of Portland and The Shambles was produced - like the one at the top of this page - using data from DORIS, a collaborative project involving Dorset Wildlife Trust, Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Channel Coastal Observatory and Royal Navy, with major funding from Viridor Credits Environmental Company. Other partners include Natural England, Dorset Strategic Partnership, University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre.
Peter Tinsley, marine conservation officer at Dorset Wildlife Trust, said: “This map marks a huge step forwards for the marine environment. Already it has enabled us to find important wildlife hotspots and we want to continue pushing back the boundaries of knowledge about a part of the county that still holds many mysteries.”
Dorset Coast Forum’s C-SCOPE project will use DORIS to create a marine plan for Dorset, and it’s an incomparable resource for divers.
A Dorset Seasearch volunteer diver (Dorset Seasearch)
Mr Tinsley said: “Recreational divers can now choose an interesting or unexplored spot from the map, take the GPS co-ordinates and head straight to it.
“We are particularly keen for volunteer divers to help us to continue the surveying so that we can fill in more habitat information.”
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency is going to use the map to update navigation charts, and the Channel Coastal Observatory will provide information to coastal engineers.
Lisa Nelson, general manager of Viridor Credits, said: “We are delighted to have been able to support such an interesting and unusual biodiversity project. There is still so much to learn about the seabed and the marine environment. I know that the DORIS map will make a huge difference to everyone from scientists to leisure divers and be quite fascinating for older children.”
You can see the DORIS map in Google Earth at http://tinyurl.com/dorismap with linked photos appearing as you zoom in.
NB: You need to have Google Earth dowloaded on to your computer, from http://earth.google.com/intl/en/download-earth.html
Divers interested in helping to record Dorset’s underwater wildlife should contact Dorset Wildlife Trust on 01305 264620 or see http://www.dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk
Editor’s Note: I love the fact the map is called DORIS. I remember the painter John Skinner – who was obsessed with the Dorset coast - once remarking: “A man came up to me in the street in Bridport and said ‘Did you know that Doris was the mother of the Nereids?’”
Nereids being sea nymphs…
John Skinner lived in Bothenhampton, and had a studio in Abbotsbury. He moved to Dorset so that he could paint the sea. I seem to remember that for a while he was anxious about swimming in it, off Chesil Beach, because the currents might pull him under, but his fearfulness was eased by the Wytherstone art collector Sir Michael Culme-Seymour suggesting to him that the tugs he felt were simply Nereids wanting to play.
And to think that Doris is generally regarded as an un-artistic name!
First things first
ONLY the village of Walditch near Bridport boasts a real place called Jellyfields.
It’s a 3-hectare Local Nature Reserve off Lower Walditch Lane, with grass, woodland, stream and small pond and it’s managed for West Dorset District Council by Dorset County Council’s Countryside Service.
The NEWS is that a resurfaced path is being officially opened at 10am on Tuesday, June 1.
Volunteers, countryside rangers and Dorset Wildlife Trust staff have all worked hard (see picture by DWT’s Emily Brown) at tidying the place up.
It’s all part of a project, says the county council, that will “see the development of the site as a local education and community participation resource”.
Ok, enough of that.
The Jellyfields Mystery
The mystery is – why is it called Jellyfields?
Margaret Milree, the assistant curator of Bridport Museum, urged me a while ago to write about Jellyfields. “It would be just your kind of thing,” she said. “And you could find out why it’s called Jellyfields.”
Well, I haven’t, not for sure, but I’ve spent quite a long time thinking about it and I’ve got plenty of ideas.
As Dorset County Council are also now asking why it’s called Jellyfields, here’s just a small selection of possibilities.
I thought it might be somewhere that somebody once found a buried hoard of jelly moulds, or built a giant jelly castle.
I thought it might be somewhere famed for its fecundity as a source of jelly-making materials.
I thought it might be somewhere that people felt scared – as if they were turning to jelly.
I thought it might have been a good spot for courting – “jelly” is old slang for a pretty girlfriend.
I thought it might have once belonged to someone called Jellaby (colloquially shortened to Jelly).
Perhaps it was just muddy and slippery like jelly.
Shooting stars
In the end I decided that it probably had something to do with algae and falling stars.
I’ll explain.
Nostoc
There is an alga called Nostoc that swells up like jelly on dry soil after rain. It was called Star Shot or Star Jelly because people used to think that glutinous colonies of Nostoc were the trembling remnants of falling stars or meteors.
As Dryden once wrote: “The shooting stars end all in purple jellies.”
At the moment, I have no proof that Nostoc is the reason for the name of Jellyfields, but I like the idea for its very West Dorset combination of poetry and science.
If you have any other notions, I would love to hear them, and I am sure that thousands of readers would too.