Pioneering the Potential 2026 – October & November

^{Gwynfaen – photo Stride Treglown}

Rob Wheaton, Stride Treglown – Gwynfaen timber housing development: set in South Wales’s Gower peninsula and with 144 timber frame housing units built from Welsh wood, Gwynfaen is the largest local timber residential project in the UK to date.

Project architect, StrideTreglown’s Rob Wheaton, will explore how this project managed to ensure local Welsh timber could be specified as a key material on Gwynfaen, both immediately relevant to Human Nature’s plan for Phoenix Lewes’s own all-timber urban district.

Finbar Charleson, dRMM – Charleson is research lead at dRMM, one of London’s industrial timber pioneers, and will talk about the architects role in Building from England’s Woodlands research project, and other ongoing collaborative research into indigenous timber, next prospective steps in growing its take up, and the projects R&D examples that were shown at its V&A Museum exhibition, Make-Good: Building from Forests.

^{Make-Good: Building from Forests, the V&A Museum exhibition – photo dRMM}

Matthew Woodcock, Partnerships & Expertise Manager, Forestry Commission – Matthew is a forester and senior manager at the Forestry Commission’s Alice Holt Forest, Farnham Southeast HQ. As a long-term FC regional manager Matthew comes with many years of experience in forestry and wood culture across the Southeast.

Matthew will be talking about the Forestry Commission’s evolving approach to the potential of locally sourced timber in the region, and specifically, regarding beech hardwoods, with around 60, 000 ha’s of stands currently coming to maturity.

^{Friston forest – photo Oliver Lowenstein}

Further

Growing the Regional Wood and Timber Culture

Growing the regional wood and timber culturehas been a major theme of Fourth Door’s wood and timber culture focus since the early 2000s.

Coming soon

^{Design Museum Gent – photo Johan Dehlin}

Ben Bosence, a specialist in clay, earth and soil-based materials, is a co-founder Local Works Studio, a materials studio working out of Barcombe, Sussex, comprising designers, researchers and hands-on circular economy specialists, focusing on the creative use of site-based materials, local manufacture and processing. They provide sensitive, collaborative design, innovative craftsmanship, and holistic strategies for participatory shaping and improvement of our environments.

Local Works Studio have been working with the Design Museum Gent – which re-opened at the beginning of the month – on a specially developed Gent Waste Brick (made out of local waste material and reducing the bricks carbon footprint by two thirds.) A collaboration with the museum’s architects, CamodyGroarke and Belgian materials specialists BC Materials, this is the latest in the studio’s ten years of research and live projects focused on developing circular low to no carbon material strategies and solutions.

Further – BC Materials on the Gent Waste Brick.

^{Photo Cinzia Romanin/Thomas Noceto}

^{The Triangle New Story Garden – photo Jan Kattein Architects}

Alice Hardy is Global Generation’s Community Build Manager. Alice is an Architect & Lecturer at University College London with a background in sustainable development and community participation in the built environment. She has worked as an architect including with the Triangle’s New Story Garden designers, Jan Kattein Architects, where she developed skills in site management and previously with Studio Weave. Alice’s particular interest in how communities can be involved in the design and construction of the built environment and how this can foster and nurture new connections and partnerships.

New Story Garden (the Triangle) is the first permanent home and hub for the community organisation, Global Generation, so named after its site sandwiched between two converging rail lines at the northern edge of the Kings Cross redevelopment. After many years of temporary gardens, the Triangle New Story Garden, designed by Jan Kattein Architects, opened summer 2026, and is the latest stage in Global Generation’s mission to provide mixed community programmes fusing urban food growing, self-build and carpentry, cooking and eating together with story-telling, creative writing, reflection and mindfulness.

^{Making earth bricks on Global Generations Triangle site – photo Jan Kattein Architects}

^{Photo – Thomasso Riva}

Neil Thomas is co-director of and co-founder of the boutique engineers atelier one, who have been developing expertise in bamboo engineering and design in partnership with Ibuku, co-completing several projects including the Arc (the Green School’s gym building) Lumi Shala, a yoga and gathering space, alongside projects in the Philippines, Mexico and most recently the Pangolin Shield temporary pavilion in London. Alongside their Bamboo work, atelier one have been engineers on prestige international projects ranging from Singapore’s Gardens By the Bay to stage set design for U2’s 360 and PopMart world tours.

Will Cottrell is an artist living in Lewes who was inspired by bamboo’s aesthetic, structural and cultural possibilities after participating in the Ibuku/Green School Bamboo U course. Cottrell has been exploring the materials since returning from Bali, recently showing his work in his autumn 2026 Lewes ArtWave exhibition and the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill. He has also been working with atelier one on the Isle of Wight pavilion, completed in August this year.

^{Divorce Engine: Will Cottrell}

The evening will also explore the potential and perils of growing bamboo for Britain’s broader built environment context in a time of a warming climate and research indicating temperature’s may reach 45 degrees across England by the 2050s.

^{Bamboo U workshop in 2025 – photo Bamboo U}