What do a planning officer, a bodger, an aspiring cob wall builder, a wedding dress designer, a visual artist and a National Trust Regional Director have in common?

The answer is they all had hands-on involvement in the Footprint project, an innovative and inspirational new development which has taken place at St Catherine’s Woods, near Windermere in the Lake District National Park.

Work began on the Footprint in early April 2006, the first straw bale building in Cumbria, and the first to be built by the National Trust.

Thanks to a generous legacy to the property, for educational work, the opportunity arose in 2002 to create a small indoor base. Our school visitors to St Catherine’s can now use this small but beautiful building in poor weather (rain in Cumbria is an obvious issue for us).

Not a 'normal' classroom

In planning the building, rather than constructing a ‘normal’ classroom type space of modern day conventional building materials, the team at St Catherine’s wanted to do something different.

From the outset, their educational visits have been underpinned by an aim to inspire and promote environmental sustainability. So, as well as being something which would be fit for purpose, be attractive and work well with its surroundings, they wanted the new building to be of low environmental impact.

This aspiration has been realised through a combination of design to make use of natural light and space, and through the use of as many renewable, or recyclable materials as possible, many locally sourced.

As well as straw; local timber, used tyres, sheep’s wool insulation and lime and clay render has been used in the construction.

In this way, the building itself is a learning opportunity, supporting the future educational programmes at the site, by demonstrating sustainable development in practice.

The use of straw for walls meant they had to be raised, roofed, rendered, hardened and painted before the first frosts of autumn. We worked closely with a Cumbrian based, conventional construction company and a specialist straw wall building and training business to achieve this.

The very nature of the building process for straw walls was unusual, in that it offered opportunities for practical involvement. So we looked for a hands-on labour force of volunteers to help us out during the schedule by offering training courses in car tyre foundation building, straw and cob wall building, lime and clay plastering and finishing.

As well as the generous bequest which enabled the Footprint to get off the ground, the project was additionally supported by the Lake District National Park's Sustainable Development Fund.