Today, Thursday, was wet from the start: drizzle was falling as I cycled up the Madingley Road to get onto the cobbing site by cycling past the Institute of Astronomy - this is a slightly shorter route from my house. A new Karen, Karen Guthrie, was there in the barn - not the same as the first Karen, Karen Wydler, who was there on day one. Karen Guthrie is one of the artists directing the project along with Kirsten. Since she was on a visit to Highpoint Prison to discuss an art project involving the prisoners, Kirsten was not here today, so Natalie and Karen were in charge.
After a cup of coffee we tramped up over the hill towards the site. John wanted the tipper truck driven with some cob onto the site and Mary did the driving, after putting a handful of dry straw onto the seat of the tipper in order to stay dry. Li was worried about the rain. "It will all collapse, it will all fall down" she said. "We should work longer tomorrow instead". She waited till the rain stopped (temporarily) before joining us on the build. We looked at the little row of houses. I could see something this morning that I had somehow missed yesterday: the ridge of the roof that I had put onto the house wasn't straight - it was dropping towards the back of the house. I put some more cob on the roof and aligned it using a spirit level, and added a bit more "wall" to another house, bringing up the wall level to the point where the pitch of the roof could begin.
Natalie was working on the block of flats for which we had created a platform on Wednesday. She arranged straw bales along the far side of the platform where the flats would be multi-storey. We spent the rest of the morning mixing up cob to a sloppy slurry to get a smooth finish on the existing platform and packing cob around the base of the straw bales and in between the bales to stabilise them. It is important with cob not to try to build too high in one go, particularly if you are building vertical surfaces - otherwise the semi fluid mass will slump and collapse. This becomes particularly likely when the cob is wet, and it was collecting water from the rain, both sitting on the tarpaulin and once built into the models. Levelling the platform was very similar to working with wet concrete and we drew a timber across the surface repeatedly, with a sawing motion, to fill in any cavities and leave a smooth finish.
Karen set us the challenge of finishing the terrace of houses before the end of Friday so more cob was put onto these. The house that Shaun had been meticulously building received a generous dollop of extra cob from an unknown hand. This added height to the structure but also made it bulge out at the top, rather like a mushroom. Shaun looked at it with a pained expression. "I'm going to sort that out before the end of the day".
It was lunchtime, and we were told that it was a hot meal, but John was keen to empty a load of cob from the skip so I stayed out to take two loads of cob down to the working area in the tipper. The cob slumped nicely out of the bucket and as I drove it back towards the skip I saw Al walking up the hill. "Your baked potatoes are getting cold!" he called. But John had one more task in mind - using the tipper to to load some more water into the skip for another cob mix. This was soon done - I had to be careful to drive the tipper slowly so as not to let waves build up and slop out the water on the way to the skip.
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| John loads the tipper with a fresh consignment of cob |
The baked potatoes - in the end I ate two, because there were some spare - went down a treat, with beans, cheese and vegetables on the side and a hot cup of tea. We were all pretty soaked. Biky Wan came along from the Northwest Cambridge development project and explained what was intended for the project, in particular in phase one, and some of the details and scale of the buildings involved. Phase one will include accomodation for 300 students and a primary school and multi-functional community facility will be built so that meetings and concerts can be held on the site. There will also be accomodation for visiting academics, which will help Cambridge University keep up with other top universities around the world in terms of providing accomodation for visitors, something it currently struggles to do because of the lack of housing space in Cambridge.
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| John's doberman, Ralph, gets a bit of attention in the barn |
I always find Madingley Road a bit of an obstacle and a hazard when trying to get from the West Cambridge site over to the Bullard labs, so given that the two sites will be quite closely integrated, I asked if there were plans for a bridge or an underpass to connect the two. Biky said no, but she would pass the suggestion along. Shaun asked about the self-build area that is part of the planned use of the site and Biky said that it would benefit from the ecological aspects of the planned development, such as non-potable water recycling, to give a good potential for ecologically small footprint constructions.
Karen was getting concerned about the time so we thanked Biky and prepared to get back on the site. I brought the tipper truck down to collect the breeze blocks - about 30 of them - that were delivered yesterday. I couldn't get right up to the barn because a gate was locked so I had to carry them all over to the tipper and heave them into the bucket before taking them over to the site. The plan is to use them as formers to create a narrow gap that is part of the building design - a 1.2m wide gulley running down the length of some of the blocks of flats. Together with Natalie I wrapped the blocks in cling-film to make them easier to release from the cob and set them in a vertical row like black teeth along the line of the gap. As a final flourish Natalie wrapped the entire row in a final band of cling film.
Li had found the rain a bit much and went home and Mary - who seemed pretty surprised that we were working at all in the rain, but valiantly worked on herself anyway - was only there for the morning so we were a bit depleted in numbers, but Natalie, Shaun, Reece, Karen and myself worked on as the drizzle drizzled on, finishing up by putting some more cob on top of one of the big models of flats. There were divergent plans indicating the height of this building, so we can't complete it till we know for sure how high it will finally be.
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| Karen after the day's cobbing |
When we finally packed up and got back to the barn there were some warm chocolate brownies waiting for us. These looked curiously similar to the model buildings we had been working on all day, although on a smaller scale. Shaun - who had inadvertantly sampled some of the cob mix earlier in the day - confirmed that the brownies tasted far, far better than the cob. We all ate all the brownies we could, and there were still plenty left over. Thanks Cindy!
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