Warning! Shards of glass in baby/toddler area of 9-acres pla

Wed 20 Dec 2006, 18:00

Not bad and gives a flavour, and well worth dropping in on en route back from Witney with the kids, for example.

The whole thing was a community led initiative that went up over a few days with a lot of people pitching in to help with the construction. Its a bit of a sad comment that it had to be imported from the USA, no one within UK or Europe could produce the equivalent, I assume at some sort of price level...?

Charlbury is undergoing one of those "demographic generational shifts" at the moment, I suspect. There seem to be a lot of babies and toddlers around.

A lot of kids who have lived around here (The Green) are now 18+ or nearing that frontier, and off to college, work ... away (which also raises the issue of enforced moves out due to the high housing prices and lack of a proper housing cost mix, rental accommodation lack due to the British obsession with "ownership" at particularly young ages in particular louses up any rational community development patterns since the 80s, but that can be moved off into another discussion...

Anyway, I've seen this sort of thing before in other areas. There can be a pattern emerge of a decade, 12, 15 16yr "gap" between peaks and troughs of young children in many areas as the housing turnover operates (flown nest syndrome parents downsize and/or retire, move out, whatever). Varies a bit due to nature of housing type, price ranges, types of employment etc. but such a pattern is not uncommon within those ranges.

If the Community Centre lot could drop their pretensions of a "landmark site" and just go for a utilitarian building constructed with lots of varied spaces etc...

Preferably out of deeply ecological materials - straw bales, cob wall, rammed earth, "earthship" or whatever and using scrap/recycled materials.

At a saving of some 75-80% of projected construction costs and a lot, lot more room. These techniques are CHEAP, safe, lend themselves to community involvement in the construction as the skill levels of a lot of the basic work needed are low and GREAT fun to participate in ;). And VERY long lived (there are rammed earth and cob buildings around that are a thousand years old, and straw bale up to 150 yrs old and still going around whre I come from in Canada, with most excellent insulation and fireproofing qualities - the outside of the bale simply chars and then won't burn, if the combustion gets past the plaster/render layer in the first place).

Then there would be plenty left over to give the next generation of sproggets a wonderful playground and a heap of other facilities, and quite a bit left over for everyone else.