Wild Hut 11

Location :

Old Partick Central Station, Glasgow

I had the good fortune to meet up with a chap Toby Clark from the John Muir Trust Awards who was interested in the wild huts concept and was keen to give it a try. The accessibility of the project initially grabbed his attention and how people could engage with wild spaces in urban areas as well as rural. We agreed to build a '2 person shelter' one month prior but had failed to anticipate the onslaught of freezing weather conditions. It felt like madness but we gave it a bash.

It was on a dark cold winter’s evening after work when we met in a west-end bar to discuss our build and where we might go. The ruined remains of Partick Central Station are sited just behind the bar and this seemed as good a place as any! Toby heartily agreed but suggested that after experiencing the freezing temperatures that day he was ‘anticipating’ the experience rather than looking forward to it.

The station was built in the 1890s by the Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire Railway Company, it sat on a line that ran along the north bank of the River Clyde from Stobcross to Dumbarton. The station was renamed Kelvin Hall in 1959.

Passenger and goods services to the station ceased in 1964 when it closed as part of the Beeching cuts to rail services across the UK. The station building was later used as a workshop and an auction house before lying empty for a number of years. The remains of the platforms and track-bed, which were underneath the station building, have been removed but the railway's route is fairly discernible. The station's goods yard served as a site for travelling people and as a scrap merchants.

The site had been empty and awaiting redevelopment when in 2004 it emerged that the supermarket chain Tesco wished to develop a 24-hour operation there, in the face of local opposition STOP. Tesco had the station building demolished on 28 January 2007, before planning permission had been given for the development from Glasgow City Council.

We ventured out into the frozen air and passed through an open gap in the fence which led along the old railway tracks. We spend a short while exploring this forgotten landscape and regaining our bearings. It was like an island: marooned on 4 sides by high walls, roads, bridges and the River Kelvin. It was strange to find such a pocket of overgrown wildness so close to the busy west end and Glasgow’s bustling Byres Road.

The Build:
The hut concept was two free-standing mono-pitched structures which were mirrored and could be bound together for increased rigidity if needed. As the freezing rain steadily fell we gathered the fallen branches which lay strewn throughout the dense thickets. Due to limited tools - Toby accumulated the better structural timbers as I wrestled with bundles of tangled branches. We stacked our materials under the sheltering road bridge and assembled a series of A-frames which we used as the primary structural components.
This was a fairly time consuming process but we had the basic structures complete and in place by around 11pm. After the rain had passed, the stars and moon burst through the shifting clouds and the temperature began to plummet much like our energy levels.

We decided to take a break and stop for a well earned beer. To my infinite joy I had somehow managed to burst open a can in my rucksack which drenched all my spare clothes with freezing cold Stella Artois. It was probably a better smell than mud and sweat, but would increase the chance of hypothermia if worn! I offered some soggy spare socks to Toby but he gracefully declined in favour of his life.

The hardest part of the build was yet to come as this involved gathering bails of cut material to use as roofing tiles. I knew from experience that this would be time consuming and Toby wasn’t entirely looking forward to the process. It was around 2 hours later where he confessed that bailing wasn’t for him. Gathering grass for hours on end on a freezing cold winter’s night is numbingly monotonous and requires a steely mindset.

I hadn’t seen Toby in a while and decided to take that opportunity to stretch my legs and see how he was doing. Through the mist I noticed Toby had a new friend in the form of an inquisitive fox! It seemed to take an interest in what we were doing and was happy to come close in search for scraps. It darted around playfully and watched our progress for the next hour.

A cormorant flew overhead, heading upstream. It occurred to me that these spaces have a role in providing sanctuary for life of all kinds. It would be good to recognise the importance of these informal spaces: they seem to have a more exceptional capacity to harbour wildlife than our manicured parks.

Roughing it:

Around 3am we were ready to try out the structures and unfurled our sleeping bags over the frosty branches. Passers-by glanced down from the adjacent bridge on occasion but we remained undisturbed. Toby noticed that the frozen forest glistened like the stars and it was difficult to differentiate between them. We slept until around 7:30am where we both woke with cold feet. I looked down to see my sleeping bag had a glaze of frost which covered my projecting feet.

By 8am the blue morning light had saturated the sky as the city streets sprung to life once again. We passed through the fence and looked down at the hut from the adjacent road bridge. It stood like the mystical jungle shelter from a lost tribe. After mild reflection we soon saw sense and headed straight to the nearest café for a fried Scottish breakfast.



Wild Hut 6

Location:

M8 Motorway, Glasgow 

I was walking home from the subway when I noticed a gnarly pile of pruned branches in the corner of the park. On further inspection they were all broken branches from the winter storms which had never been cleared by the local authority. I looked around for a possible ‘hut’ opportunity but the thorny hedges which bound the park were far too dense to walk through. The trees looked slightly more substantial just to the west of the park although quite a distance from the wood stock-pile. I wandered over to the taller trees and followed a muddy trail through some rhododendron bushes. Only yards from the park I arrived at a fairly sinister looking place. There were computer monitors arranged like dining chairs with an upturned metal bin for a table. There was a thick, sheltering tree canopy above with plastic bags and beer cans scattered around like misplaced ornaments. It was the perfect alcoholic outdoor living space only yards from the park.

Just beyond this was a narrow ‘shelter-belt’ of tall trees which separated the residential tenements from the noisy M8 motorway. I decided that this could be a suitable place to build a hut...although I would have to wait for the cover of darkness to transport the pile of branches which were a good distance away.
 


M8 Motorway (left) & Paisley Road West (right)

The build:

I waited until 8:30pm before leaving as the darkness seemed to be suitably cloaking. I walked into the park fairly nonchalantly and noticed it was comically busy for such a cold dark night. There was a chap in the middle of the park playing a saxophone and a series of dog-walkers all watching with interest. I walked past this spectacle gazing at my phone in order to look busy and disinterested. I had only just walked past when 2 police officers entered the parks western gate at a fairly slow thoughtful pace. The path curved round towards them and I was in no mood for explaining to them why I was carrying an axe and a sleeping bag whilst strolling in the park. I decided I needed a quick plan-B to avert their attention. In an effort to cause a ‘minor distraction’ I stopped and turned towards the saxophone player and started shaking my head disapprovingly. The police officers picked up their pace and headed straight for the substantial crowd which had now gathered. I used this opportunity to slip into the cover of rhododendron bushes.

I just gathered sticks in the narrow band of woods until the people dispersed and the streets fell quiet once again. I then made about 10 trips to-and-from the log pile in the park. I sorted the sticks into ‘structural’ and ‘non-structural’ (which translates as ‘wood which can support the weight of my fat bum’ and ‘wood which cannot’). I leant all the wood upright against a metal fence (in order to ‘de-slug’ them) when suddenly they all decided to slide sideways. A branch came down with some force and struck my forehead and neck. After the initial shock and pain, my first thought was...’how am I going to explain my bashed head at work tomorrow’?

I mopped some blood from my brow and made one final forage for timber over the fence to the park. I picked up the few remaining sticks when a late-night dog walker passed only a few feet away. I decided the best thing to do would be to drop the sticks and start looking at my phone in a desperate attempt not to look like a crazed ‘stick-collector’. I leant back against a tree and waited for quiet in the park once again.

  

  



The hut concept was fairly simple. I started with a long braced tripod shape - which I overlaid with shorter sticks to form a rigid sleeping platform. I then bound together clumps of road-side grass and arranged them on the timber frame like tiles, always starting from the bottom. The hut was complete by 1am and perched like an alien spacecraft at the edge of the motorway.

 

Roughing it:

I was standing upright - hopping around on the grass verge in an effort to wriggle into my sleeping bag when I noticed 2 highway service vehicles parked opposite with orange lights flashing. The back vehicle had a huge neon arrow alerting motorists to use another lane. It wasn’t at all obvious what they were actually servicing (line painting...road sweeping)?...but they were watching my attempts at a complicated ‘sleeping bag manoeuvre’ – whilst hopping around the embankment like a alien-slug beside it’s timber craft. When I finally lay down on the sleeping platform, the orange lights soon disappeared along the motorway.



Hut beside the M8



Giant haulage vehicles and buses screeched past every few seconds only feet away as I lay surrounded by grass and twigs. I drifted to sleep until 7am when my phone alarms went off with annoying regularity. I gathered my things and slid through the shelter-belt of trees once again, joining the streams of commuters in the park heading for  work. This hut type was particularly robust and unassuming, I wish I could say the same for my bashed forehead!

 





Wild Hut 5

 

The Location:

Kinning Park, Glasgow

There is a children’s playpark close to my home, skirting Glasgow’s ‘media district’. I would often see groups of people abnormally disappear into a gap in the dense thicket behind the playpark. They seemed to be a mix of dog walkers and youths (who incidentally are about the only people nowadays who ever seem to stray from the prescribed pathways and pavements). One odd character trait I’ve noticed is that most of them bring carrier bags full of alcoholic beverages. I often wonder why alcoholics don’t just drink in the house rather than frequent these byways through urban wastelands. It would make the woods around Glasgow a lot less sinister. 



 

I left home around 8pm in the rain - arrived at the playpark soon after and plunged into the bushes just beyond. I was instantly soaked through, and the ground was a dark sticky clay. After a few meters I arrived at a gap in the park’s wire fence where the path led through to a much more substantial forest beyond.

'Private’ wasteland like this (not maintained by the local authority) never appears to get cleaned up. The ground had a blanket covering of scattered beer cans, bottles and plastic bags. The path became more substantial and I soon noticed a huge concrete pipe projecting from the ground with what looks like a discarded tent just beside. There were plastic cups eerily laid out on the concrete - full of rain water as if people had just left. The place was fairly rancid by anyone’s standards. It was a Saturday night though and would be getting dark soon. I was fairly sure no one would be passing through here again tonight. I decided that the level grass just beyond the pipe would be suitable for a shelter and the forest which I had just passed through should have enough timber material scattered around.

 

The Build:

I already had in my mind the type of shelter I wanted to build. I took inspiration from the typical garden “swing-chair” available in most garden centres. They have an A-frame structure at each end with a swing seat and fabric canopy. It’s this basic idea I wished to translate into a 'shelter type'; two A-frame structures with a bed platform and roof canopy stretched between.



The inspiration - raised sleeping platform with canopy



I searched the forest by head-torch for suitable structural timbers. It took around two hours of scrabbling through dark bushes, mud and tall grass to find enough timber for the structure. Groups of youths passed fairly frequently on-route to a wild night-out in town. They seemed to pass strangely close, just over a high wall which bound the forests eastern side. Searching for building material is a strange process. There were many occasions where I thought I simply wouldn’t find the branches required for such a build. It feels strangely rewarding to uncover a slimy, slug-covered log, buried deep in some bramble bush in the depths of night. It gives your life a whole new set of primitive priorities - if only for a short time.

  

I lashed the A-frames together and strung the spanning branches between. The whole thing seemed really sturdy. The skin on my index finger had 3 stinging cuts from dragging logs through thorn bushes. The blood was all washed clean though by the incessant cold rain. I used all the smaller branches (which I had pruned from the structural timbers) to spread across as a sleeping platform. I decided that using lots of small braches rather a few large would make for a more comfortable sleep. Rather than a formal lashed “ladder” frame as a bed, I just lay as many branches as I could find to spread my weight equally across the frame. I lay down on the structure and it seemed ideal.

I built a basic canopy frame above with some lighter timbers and strung out a series of Broom bushes across as roofing tiles (I had learnt after a recent visit to the “Highland Folk Museum” that old Scottish dwellings from the 1700’s used broom bushes as part of their roof construction). They were quite irregular in shape so the roof took on a more free-form aesthetic. It took around 3 hours so gather enough bedding and roofing material so the structure was complete around 1am. The rain hadn’t really stopped all night and I was actually looking forward to a good sleep by this point.

Roughing it.

   

 I really liked this structure type. It was free-standing (surprisingly), with a raised sleeping platform to keep me off the boggy ground. The roof structure utilised the A-frame uprights - everything seemed interconnected. (One could add a full-height wind-break to one side if the conditions were particularly breezy.) It ticked allot of boxes for me. I pulled my sleeping bag over and rolled into the hut quite gingerly, as not to put too much of my weight on one particular area. After a few creaks and small cracks (and myself writhing around like a eel…trying to get into my sleeping bag) I settled down for the night. The rain was particularly heavy and lots of drips found their way through the roof structure. It did a fairly good job though of keeping the majority of water off. I was pretty tired and the mattress of twigs was pretty comfy. I pulled my head under the sleeping bag to escape the biting midges. I feel asleep amidst the distant screams of party-goers who were heading home for the night.

 

A-Frame structure with the Scottish BBC headquarters beyond.

I woke to a calm and bright morning around 8am. There were men sitting by the concrete pipe on strange metal drums which weren’t there the night before. All at once I felt extremely vulnerable. I slid out the sleeping bag quietly and stood up in the deep wet grass. I started taking some quick pictures when an older chap suddenly noticed me and stood up.





They had a dog of some description which started barking but I couldn’t actually see it. I stuffed my sleeping bag into my rucksack quickly…twisted into my saturated trainers and followed another muddy trail which led to the nearby road. I looked back to see they had both stood up and were showing considerable interest in the structure…which looked like some mechanically rearranged wilderness. On the short walk home I started to wonder what they must have thought. Sleeping rough in makeshift shelters never gets any easier to justify, even to a group of confused alcoholics.