Wild Hut 9

Location:
Pacific Quay, Govan, Glasgow



M-frame Hut

I always thought ripping a toe nail off would be a fairly negative experience and indeed it was. I was heartily pulling on my woolly socks in a rather brisk manner when I felt the toenail catch on the inside and felt subsequent blood. I had previously bruised this toe nail during a long distance hike through the Highlands but hadn’t expected to part company with it so soon. It detached from one side and was swinging rather freely. I tried to pull it off but it was still organically deep-rooted on one side. I managed to stop the bleeding, Sellotaped the nail down onto the nail-bed and popped on my wellies. I wasn’t going to let this minor inconvenience disrupt my enjoyment of the icy-cold rain and wind waiting for me outside!

I walked through the downpour to the Media District on Glasgow’s River Clyde where there is a large expanse of overgrown wasteland yet to be developed on its south bank. After passing a stream of office workers who were leaving for the night I made my way over to the darkest corner of the quay. The only good thing about torrential rain I discovered is that it makes for fewer awkward conversations as I’m usually the only person mindless enough to be wondering around in it. As darkness fell I noticed a huge pile of pruned branches which had been discarded over the fence from the neighbouring residential development. I decided to make the hut entirely out of this rotting pile of brown leaves, twigs and cut branches.

The Build:

As I was frequenting the newly branded “Media” District (home to BBC Scotland HQ, STV, rats and seagulls amongst others) I decided to build an “M” shape hut structure. I arranged some branches on the ground in two triangular forms and bound them tightly together. Within each triangle I placed further bracing which formed the “M” shape. It also gives the sleeping platform some mid-way support which is ideal as I usually fall right through the bed each time like a comedy sketch show.



I stripped the twigs from various branches to form cross bracing members which allowed the structure to be free-standing. I then lashed some further branches along the length of the roof like a large ladder-frame. All the discarded brown leaves and twigs were then used to tile to roof (much like a traditional debris shelter).

This was a particularly quick process and the roof was water-tight in around half an hour. One thing that wasn’t water tight was my wellies! The continual rain had streamed down my trousers creating vast cold reservoirs in each foot. I took them off and poured out the contents. It was a delicate business putting them back on though as the sticky-tape had become wobbly...much like my toe nail.

I just had the bed platform to create and set about finding springy bedding material. As I pulled hard on a branch I felt something sharp cut deep into the top of my index finger. The blood quickly mixed with the rain and ran down my hand for the next hour. The bleeding wouldn’t stop as the rain continually diluted the open wound. I started to wonder if I should start another project called “100 different ways to hurt yourself in the dark”. It might also be an slightly easier project! The hut was complete in around 3.5 hours, my quickest hut yet.

Roughing it:

I pulled my sleeping bag out and rolled it across the bed platform. It was obvious that winter would soon be on us and the summer had passed as quickly as it had arrived. It felt fairly cold although reasonable, the weather forecast suggested there would be lows of 8 degrees. I put my full weight on the sleeping platform and for the first time ever – no cracking, nothing breaking...all quiet below! The structure seemed to tighten under the weight and remained firm. I squirmed into my sleeping bag and looked out across the water as the bright lights on the BBC HQ performed a colour-changing sequence.

The hut’s roof material was also a minor success as the rain seemed unable to penetrate the dense canopy of dead leaf-litter. The rain stopped in the night and the temperature dropped. I watched people passing close by, and ambulances screeching past a lot more than usual. I thought it must be an strategic “arterial route” they use to-and-from the Southern General Hospital. Luckily that was my last boring thought for the evening and I fell asleep fairly quickly. I set my work alarm for half 7 and awoke to a still-calm morning. I gathered my things and made my way back through some deep puddles along the quay wall. Back home I used some “second-skin” liquid bandage for my cut finger which stung much like the original accident itself! Every time I return from a night of building huts my brain always feels refreshed, as if washed clean by the cool rain.

Wild Hut 2

Location: Graving Docks, by Ibrox, Glasgow

On the south bank of the River Clyde, (almost opposite the new Transport Museum by Zaha Hadid Architects) is a derelict series of vast concrete basins, a relic of Glasgow’s proud ship-building heritage. These docks are hundreds of meters in length and contain murky brown reservoirs of stagnant, soupy river. If the tens of thousands of beer cans are anything to go by – either someone was planning to build a gleaming aluminium ship from recycled metal, or this place had harboured some of Glasgow’s thirstiest alcoholics for what must have been a considerable time.

There were also tent like structures scattered throughout this overgrown dockland. They made me wonder what kind of people used this place as a makeshift home. Whoever they were, it was obvious from the junk scattered around the tents that they loved drink & drugs and weren’t too bothered about cleaning up. These areas were tarred with the worst kind of litter – a human slug-trail of lighters, tinfoil, vast bonfires and mountains of beer cans.

All this made me wonder, if anyone could show these unfortunates how to build a proper drug-den it was me!

Hut Construction:

I decided at this point that I would need to find my own part of the dock away from all the junkie’s gazebos. After following an evolved path through a thicket of dry bushes, I found a flat site on the river bank at the most westerly end of the peninsula. There were vast piles of cut stone which I quickly decided would make the perfect walling material.

As the blocks were fairly rectilinear (other than some amorphous blobs of black tar which bound many of them together), they were fairly quick to build with. I formed a coffin shape series of walls, 4 courses high and around 2m in length. This only took around half an hour to build and formed the base-walls of a basic hut structure.

I decided I would try to find natural fallen branches and build a roof that is within the spirit of the project, rather than use the vast amounts of factory cut timber which I had noticed scattered around the docks. Due to a lack of mature trees though, it took a considerable effort to find enough branches. I kept it simple and just framed out a basic structure with the few branches I had found. 

After constructing a simple pitched roof structure with a hipped-gable, I noticed that the surrounding grass was very short and the bushes were pretty bare. It quickly dawned on me that finding suitable roofing material might be a struggle. The hut at this stage was beginning to remind me of a traditional 'highland croft', and so I was suitably inspired to thatch the structure with vertical twigs which became the supporting layer under a heavy moss covering.

(This was actually a quick process and after a couple of hours the roof was complete. If it was breezy, I would have probably bound the roof structure to the base walls, but as it was a calm night the weight of the branches, twigs and moss was enough. I gave it all a quick shake and it seemed fairly sturdy and heavy.)

Roughing it:

It was around midnight when I decided to head to bed. The chorus of children’s voices screaming from the Govan tenements had stopped a few hours earlier, after a similar chorus of wailing parents had called the children home from their windows. A police helicopter hovered past on an hourly cycle. It circled the housing scheme and returned to the landing pad at the same trajectory each time, which coincidently was around 80 feet in the air directly above the shelter. I wondered if they had an infra-red heat sensor which could see me lying there on the banks of the river at -2 degrees on a Saturday night. Even if I wasn’t breaking any laws, I’m sure they could have locked me up on grounds of insanity.

The sky was clear (other than clouds of helicopters) but the stars were diluted by the orange light pollution of the adjacent buildings. The hut’s roof and the surrounding docklands became draped in a white frosting of sparkling ice. I could feel my breath condense on the collar of my sleeping bag and drip instantly back onto my face. I pulled my hood up and moved the sleeping bag down as to avoid these ice cold drips.

It made me think that sleeping rough in the winter was less about dealing with rodents and insects and more about dealing with ice and condensation. The night was crisp, calm and silent. I fell asleep fairly quickly and slept right through until 7am.



When I finally woke, I sat for a while on the river bank, admiring Glasgow’s new riverside museum opposite. This newly built piece of spaceship architecture was inspired by the Clyde’s historic ship-building sheds, echoed through a series of modern sharp pitched roofs. For a very brief moment I felt separate from society. How can striving for less mean so much and why did I feel content lying so primitively in this wasteland? I gathered my thoughts and my sleeping bag and slipped back through the gap in the fence which I had entered.