Tigers don’t actually seem to do that much full-throated roaring. They mostly confine themselves to deep
gurgling, like an idling ’67 Mustang. Nevertheless, it’s still a disconcerting noise to hear in the sleepy Kentish village of Smarden.
Why this corner of the Garden of England has the soundtrack of the jungles of Sumatra is because it’s home to the Wildlife Heritage Foundation Breeding Centre (WHF).
The UK’s biggest big cat breeding operation, the Centre forms part of a global effort to maintain the populations and gene pool diversity of some of the rarest animals on the planet. Besides several tiger species, residents include lions, snow leopards, cheetahs, lynx, pumas and pallas cats.
It’s an impressive place doing impressive work, with the enclosures housing 30 animals over a 26-acre site. But what it has lacked until now is a visitor centre in keeping with the standard of the enclosures and capable of catering to the mounting numbers who want, as far as health and safety allows, to get up close and personal with the animals – and consequently help keep WHF’s revenues growing in line with expansion plans.
“We’re currently completing another enclosure for clouded leopards and we’ve bought another eight acres and hope to build six more,” said chief executive Mark Edgerley.
The Centre, it is stressed, is not a zoo and isn’t open for the public to just drop in. But instead it offers ‘ranger days’, where visitors can help with feeding and other work, “big cat encounters” and photography days. These are all increasingly popular, but they’re not cheap and the encounters, in particular, are popular with local disabled organisations and hospices, providing all the more reason to build a modern, high quality visitor centre. “What we’ve done until now is use our old office building,” said Edgerley. “But it’s increasingly not up to the job, with ‘encounter’ bookings alone last year hitting 1,500.”
Coming up with the style and structure of a new centre, was not straightforward. The WHF wanted the design to give visitors the idea they were stepping into the feline residents’ back yard. And, naturally, the materials had to be 100% eco-friendly. Planners also insisted the building fit in with the peg-tiled, weather-boarded local vernacular. The end result, designed by Cyma Architects of Ashford, is a distinctive hybrid; an all-timber African lodge style structure sitting on stilts, with feather edge softwood cladding and a Kentish russet red roof.
Such a non-standard building clearly needed a non-standard builder and fortunately the WHF had just the man in volunteer worker Dave Perkins, a craft carpenter and cabinet maker. He put his own business on semi-hold for the year-long build and became all-in-one project manager, joiner and co-designer on the project.
Key to the structure are the 150mm diameter machined round poles, a maximum of 4m apart, which form the foundation and a central element of the framework. “This is the wildlife lodge construction approach,” said Edgerley. “The poles are in CH24 pressure treated pine and go through the building. We’re leaving them exposed inside as an integral part of the design and they sit in stainless steel shoes bolted to four-foot concrete piles”
“As the timber is out of ground contact and there are drain holes in the shoes, there should be no issues with moisture,” said Perkins. “But if we have problems we can jack the building up, take a pole out and replace it.”
Initially, the rim and floor joists were going to be in standard solid timber joists, but then builders’ merchants Wolseley donated some 75x300mm glulam beams.
“They gave us eight tonnes of them and we’ve been able to use them to span up to 5.5m,” said Perkins. “Some were water stained, but this is out of sight and doesn’t affect their strength.”
The rim joists are attached to the poles with 200mm timber locks and the floor joists fixed to them with joist hangers and timber locks on 600mm centres, with 40x80 noggings every 200mm.
“It really is an over-engineered solution for the scale of the building,” said Perkins. “But it gives us a very solid structure.”
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Work in progress |
In fact, he added, the combination of the glulam and the ability of the pole structure to absorb ground movement has meant very little remedial work has been needed. “We’re on heavy clay, but we’ve had next to no cracking in the plaster,” he said.
The rest of the framework comprises 40x80mm CLS stud wall panels with 12mm OSB sheathing, WebUV15 breather membrane and 100mm of glasswool insulation sandwiched between the OSB and internal plasterboard. The roof of the building had to achieve a balance of aesthetics, to meet planning constraints, and practicality.
“If we’d used conventional peg tiles we’d have needed heavier trusses and a higher pitch, and we wanted the profile to be lower than the tree line,” said Edgerley. “We eventually used Armourglass felt shingles, which are lightweight and flexible and look right.”
This option enabled Perkins and his team to use 40x150mm softwood for the rafters and 40x80mm for the ridgebeam. Finally the ceiling joist timbers are 50x150mm and the 4.5m support beams 50x200mm, with the roof space insulated with 250mm of Ecowool.
The WHF did not insist that all the timber came backed with environmental certification, but it’s still confident this is a thoroughly green building. “It’s all temperate softwood, except the flooring which is an engineered board with a 4mm American white oak veneer on a softwood base, so we’re pretty sure it’s all sustainably sourced,” said Edgerley.
Reinforcing its eco-credentials, the centre has double-glazed timber-framed windows from Viking of Finland and will use a Hunter wood-burner boiler to provide heat and hot water. “And part of the land we’ve just bought is poplar coppice, so we’ll be pretty self-sufficient for fuel,” said Edgerley.
The finished building – and it should be complete in October at a total cost of around £130,000 – will house a lecture room, shop, café, kitchen and toilets. The plasterboard walls in all areas are painted white, with the ceiling beams, as well as the poles, left exposed. And, in another unique design quirk, Perkins has run rope along all the joints between timber and plasterboard. It forms a theme with the rope rails running up the access ramps outside, he says, and is “great for hiding gaps”.
Externally, the building has softwood decking on all sides, which, like the cladding, is untreated. This also sits on the 150mm poles, which additionally support a glazed screen and provide the columns for an awning with a retractable tarpaulin roof where visitors will be able to sit in all weathers, sup a coffee and listen to the tigers gurgle.
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The structural poles fit in steel shoes on concrete piles |
