12 C O N T E X T 1 3 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 4 Our strange relationship with timber Originally timber was building. In Old English, the word timber meant a building; the process of building; or building material generally. Fair enough: in pre-Conquest England construction was generally in timber, apart from important churches and royal residences. After a while, though, people started using other materials and were annoyed when an order from the builder’s merchants for timber led to a delivery of stone. So it made sense to use terms more precisely. Now timber means wood and we all know where we are. We have a strange relationship with what was for centuries our principal building material. Buildings that were too obviously timber-framed looked old fashioned by the 18th-century, so anyone who could afford it would face their Tudor mansion with stone, brick or plaster. Later the Victorians made being old fashioned fashionable. Medieval timber frames that had long been decorously hidden under plaster were stripped bare, and painted black and white. Cities and towns like Chester and Rye suddenly looked like the timber-framed places they had been built as. Since then, Tudorbethan has become a favourite national style, the timber being structural, nailed on or painted. Today, though, when houses are built with timber frames, as many are, the habit is to disguise the fact beneath brick, or perhaps flint. By contrast developers are convinced that some timber facing on a facade will make the planners significantly more likely to give the building planning permission. Within a decade or two thousands of square metres of this ill-chosen, poorly detailed and badly maintained timber cladding will have fallen off. Timber in historic buildings will succumb to dry rot, wet rot or wood-boring insects. Many of the timber-framed buildings in towns were destroyed by fire. But the historic timber builders knew their timber and how to build with it. Oak, the most common building timber in medieval England, will last for many centuries. It is more durable than most types of English stone. This issue of Context focuses on timber conservation and repair. Robert Demaus (page 13) looks at methods of repair – many of them themselves historic – that retain as much historic fabric as possible. Brian Ridout (page 17) has some surprising things to say about ventilation. Toby Murphy and Iain McCaig (page 19) describe repairs to the awe-inspiring 15th-century barn that John Betjeman called the Cathedral of Middlesex. David McClimond (page 24) gives a joiner’s perspective on repairs to Mount Stewart, County Down. Rebecca Milford (page 27) reports on the refurbishment of a house in North Somerset with an intact medieval hall and solar roof structures. Matthew Price (page 29) tells the story of what he found about a small timber building in Fife that he has since had listed. Nathalie Sorensen (page 32) and her Canadian family moved and reassembled a timber kit house that had previously been moved and reassembled in around 1778. Darren McLean (page 35) has some advice on how to repair wooden windows. Richard Harris, Wen-Shao Chang, Peter Walker and Jon Shanks have conducted research into traditional timber joints that will help structural engineers make better predictions of the behaviour of traditional frames (page 39). Finally Ian Weir (page 44) writes about what happened when potentially disastrous damage was discovered to timbers in the roof of the Victorian gothic Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.
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