Time was when Britain’s domestic and smaller scale architecture was visibly one of timber frame, the wood used in green form and often infilled with wattle and daub.

As communities expanded, land ownership issues forced buildings together and then upwards. The obvious danger of such rapid urban densification expressed itself forcibly in the Great Fire of London in 1666, after which the London Building Acts altered the palette of construction materials allowable on buildings in close proximity.

What was good for the capital was good for other communities and, as a consequence, the architecture of towns progressively changed to masonry construction, a process accelerated by industrialisation and mass migration from agrarian lifestyle to urbanised existence. 

So much for history, but it is an important preface to what exists now – a nation of small towns predominantly built in brick or stone. Or at least, that was where we got to before two world wars instituted demographic and political changes that transformed so many of these into mere dormitories to larger conurbations. Combined with other changes, such as the closure of rural railways, this has been a trigger for decline and in recent years huge amounts of energy and money have gone into attempts to impose more positive interventions. Invariably, however, these led to alien building forms – and the resulting edge-of-town business parks and out-of-scale shopping malls have done little to re-energise traditional market centres or nourish community spirit. Many small towns have lost the homogeneity of materials and forms that gave them their character.

Benefits
So what has all this got to do with timber construction? Well, recent years have seen more and more inner city construction in wood: not just timber frames concealed by other materials, but buildings on whose exteriors the richness of modern timber construction is visibly expressed. Filtering this down to small towns has been a slower process and one in which local planning and building control officials have often proved a conservative brake. But here again, changes in environmental and ecological demands and resultant procurement legislation as well as off-site, modern methods of construction, are beginning not only to show through but also to have perceptible benefits for towns leading the way. 

One such is Berwick-upon-Tweed. Long since a dormitory to Edinburgh and Newcastle, the town nevertheless retains a strong medieval urban form of market squares and closes, albeit the architecture has been in need of a makeover due to an historic lack of investment.

The Berwick Workspace is the first response to tackle the decay, one of a series of regeneration initiatives commissioned by the Berwick-upon-Tweed Borough Council and Northumberland County Council under the ‘Berwick’s Future’ flag. The primary objective was to create a facility for small businesses, but the clients also saw the new centre repairing a key piece of the town centre and potentially catalysing further development.

Medieval yard
The Borough Council already owned a group of redundant buildings around a mediaeval yard off the Marygate, Berwick’s main market street, and their footprints form the template for the new development. A defining factor influencing the building’s form was also the desire that the project should recover the yard, with the centre’s entrance positioned to reconnect the site to the town and provide a sense of commercial bustle and vitality.

Enter Malcolm Fraser Architects, a practice well versed in introducing new architecture into old town environments. With contractor Gleeson Construction, the practice has not only delivered to the councils’ brief, but produced an exemplary sustainable building that makes a simple environmental statement on its exterior.

The main frame of the building is steel, but all of the external walls between are timber frame so that ‘breathing wall’ principles could be employed. And timber purlins feature in the roof too.

Aside from the use of local stone at ground level, the internal courtyard elevations are also faced with large expanses of vertically-fixed, UK-grown larch cladding from Russwood. The timber is untreated and will in time weather to a greyer finish, but it is the elegant continuous cill detail that provides the centre with an almost classical ordering of base, piano nobile and attic storey while at the same offering notional firebreak value.

Continuous surface
Project architect Calum Duncan was keen to avoid the notched details often associated with larch cladding and plumped instead for a simple ‘board on board’ treatment that inverts the traditional form of assembly of a narrow board to the front and a wide board to the back. The resulting use of a simple rectangular wide board to the front surface and narrow to the rear gives the appearance of an almost continuous surface with narrow ‘shadow gaps’ between boards.

Protection
The continuous cill or drip details are a response to the need to protect the ends of the larch. By dividing each façade into three planes, the flashings produce a slight stepping forward from one to the next that in its effect is not dissimilar to the protection afforded by deep, overhanging eaves. It is also a way of avoiding joining the lengths of timber and weathering problems at those points. The other reason for the approach is to deliver evenness in weathering.

The building’s internal timber stud partition walls are infilled with hemp batts, as well as Pavatherm Plus and Diffutherm woodfibre boards applied within the external walls and roof.

The important issue here, however, is not the number and type of timber products specified by Duncan, but the way in which timber has been considered as a contemporary construction material capable of raising the Berwick centre’s architectural quality.

This is a welcome departure in the regeneration of small town UK, demonstrating that new development can be designed in ways more suited to our environmentally-conscious times. In this context, timber has rediscovered its small town metier.