The Green Wood Centre

Posted by Tanos on Thu 5 Mar 09, 1:15 AM

Tags: bridgewood, forestry

I went to The Green Wood Centre in Ironbridge at the weekend, partly to see what it's like and partly for the Small Woods Association meeting being held there. It was quite an eye-opener.

First, I had a walk round Ironbridge itself, named after Darby's famous Iron Bridge across the gorge of the River Severn. From the middle ages to the last century, the area was increasingly industrialised, with iron smelting first powered by charcoal from the surrounding woodlands, and then the process of smelting with coke made from coal was invented here. There are now ten museums of industrial history in the immediate area, including a Beamish-style reconstructed Victorian town. The factory making cast iron Aga ovens is still in production though.

The bridge was the first structure made of iron, and turned the metal from something for making cooking pots with, into a building material. But as a first its design was guided by existing wooden bridges, and as you can see, it's basically put together using carpentry techniques, including mortice and tenon joins, just made of cast iron rather than timber.

Then on to the Green Wood Centre, which is also the home of the Small Woods Association, and is one of the centres of hardcore forestry in the UK. They're active in promoting coppicing of woodlands, whereby trees are cut back to their stumps or "stools" every few years, producing a harvest of useful poles of varying thickness; and all of the buildings apart from the original 19th century railway station on the site have been built from local woodlands. They're all heated using woodfuel, with a wood burning boiler and a buried hot water main to the radiators in each building.

The centre was started in the 1980s, and merged with the Small Woods Association a few years ago. The SWA meeting was the first woodlands meeting I've been to, and covered the practicalities of woodfuel (which expanded enormously last year due to the price of gas) and changes to the Forestry Commission grants system. Not so practically useful for me at the moment, but it did suggest some options for the medium term I'd not thought of.