Wooden world (1)
A recent visit to the open-air museum at Finsterau in Bavaria reminded me of the importance of wood as a building material in many cultures. In the forested uplands of Bavaria and the neighbouring Czech Republic, farmhouses, outbuildings, even churches are made almost entirely of wood. Indeed from Germany to Scandinavia, wood is seen as a good and appropriate building material. In England, though, people tend to look down on wooden houses, and if you can find a wooden house and stand in front of it for a while, it’s not long before someone comes along and starts making remarks about ‘sheds’ and ‘shacks’.
Of course, builders have used timber in England for centuries. Think of all those timber-framed cottages in the Unmitigatedly English Midlands. And weatherboarding is traditional in the southeast. But since the rise and rise of red brick, wooden buildings have been relegated to the minor leagues, along with structures made of corrugated iron.
So I was pleased to come across this wooden bungalow, spic and span and far from ‘low-status’, on a walk in Worcestershire. Looking well amongst the cow parsley, it’s quite isolated, so I’ll protect the privacy of its owners by not revealing its precise location. Perhaps it was built between the two World Wars, when there was a flurry of interest in wooden, often prefabricated buildings. One of the most celebrated of these was the Cottabunga, manufactured by Browne and Lilly of Reading, who promised to deliver its prefabricated parts, ready to erect, to any goods station in England or Wales, for a payment of £245 - 10 shillings.
Such buildings got a bad reputation, not because they were badly built or inadequate as houses, but because their easy-to-build technology enabled ordinary people to become their own builders, expressing themselves in the process in ways that weren’t always to the taste of middle-class aesthetic arbiters. So wooden bungalows got lumped in the minds of these commentators with houses made of old railway carriages, caravans, and tin huts. Such structures were easy targets for people who wanted to fulminate against plot-land developments and their ilk.
All of which is a shame. As the traditional builders of Bavaria and Bohemia knew, wood can be good. Solid, easy to erect, good looking, and long-lasting if properly maintained, houses like this offered an attractive alternative to a brick box in the suburbs. Long may they survive.
