A beautiful ride through the Oxfordshire countryside, just 50 minutes south of the city, outside of a small village called Long Wittenham, where 800-year-old thatched cottages and a heritage parish church rest, you will find the Sylva Foundation. The organization was co-founded by Sir Martin Wood and Dr Gabriel Hemery as a tree and forestry charity. With the aim to provide research and education facilities, supporting sustainable woodland and forestry management.

I was shown around the grounds by Joseph Bray as he took his new students on a tour of the site. Joseph Bray is a teacher of furniture making, with a long-standing career at Rycotewood school of furniture, where he was head of course and teacher to the degree students, he was also my teacher while I studied there. He had just received a new lot of students, just 2 days into their 8-week course when I arrived, they were getting their introduction to the Sylva foundation as was I. With 20 hectares of land, the foundation has several current research projects. Tree planting on-site is normal, with hundreds of sapling and juvenile species racing for light in an area of land consisting of 325 plots designated for planting trees for the future, this is Sylva's 'Future Forest'. Native species of trees are grown alongside native species with foreign genetics and a variation of exotic species from tropical climates, the intention is to see how different tree types fare against the quickly changing climate and the threat of global warming, pests and disease. A woodland of Kyrgyzstan walnut (Juglans regia) is also on-site, with research going into the silviculture and growth control of these trees. Many successful programs and research have come from the site, like the research into the quality of produce from chickens, when reared in a forest as opposed to a field. There is a focus on re-wilding, with successful wild-friendly 'edible' hedrow, surrounding the community orchard, making amazing habitats for native species of animals. Just standing on the grounds, you can hear and sense the affluent existence of wildlife here.

You can donate to have your own trees grown here and be the proud owner of a 10x10 meter square of land with up to 25 trees competing for adulthood. On average, it takes 25 saplings to successfully grow one tree. Follow this link to become a friend of the Sylva Future Forest.

Curiously, nested in the centre of the sapling fields that make up the Future Forest, you will find a very convincing replica Saxon long-house, named the ‘House of Wessex’. In 2016 the remains of an Anglo-Saxon long house were found. As a result, from different sources of funding and a voluntary effort, including expertise from timber framers across the country, they built an accurate replica of what would have existed here back in the 7th century exactly on the footprint of the remains found. Focusing on methods of construction that would have been implemented during the time of the original build, the long-house was built entirely with tools and techniques that the Anglo-Saxons had at their disposal. The result is an entirely timber-framed and thatched building, complete with a carved architrave. Coppiced willow makes up the latticework of the roof, with willow ‘staples’ keeping the thatch in place, the walls are a mix of hay, mud, and dung.
The finished building captures the imagination because it gives a real insight into what life in the 7th century might have been like. The ingenious methods of construction make for a convincingly sturdy build. Beams sculpted with an axe or adze, following the natural curves of timber members, or Crucks (crook frame), locked together with varying different types of joints, like drawbore mortice and tenons. The work is crude, only due to the methods employed, but beautiful for the sake of the methods used. Every detail of its construction is honest and shown, there are moments in its structure where the natural strength of wood is visibly exploited, such as the fork in a tree trunk, used as a vertical support beam for a joist. Everything was made just with the sort of hand tools used in the era, it would have been a fascinating exercise to join in with the construction of this project.
Although the Sylva foundation is Primarily a forestry research charity, they offer schooling and tuition in furniture-making, woodwork and also hosts an incubation facility and hotbenching spaces for fledgling furniture makers who want to make a business out of what they love. Holistically, the foundation recognizes that there is a need to bring produce and resource together under one campus. This is a response to the idea that we as a society are being disconnected from the material provenance of our day-to-day objects. We are less appreciative of what it takes to make something out of, for example, wood. The hope is that if we can study and research forests, alongside education into what happens to a tree when it is felled and pulled from a forest, we may grow to appreciate the need for well-kept and managed forestry in the future. Sylva hopes to reconnect people to forests, using avenues such as product design and manufacture, agroforestry research, and education. Engaging with people in multiple areas comunally. There is even an active forest school on-site for the local primary schools.

The furniture education facility, run by Joe, and helped by Phil Gullam is hosted to help students to enter the furniture-making industry. It teaches people the skills needed in order to make furniture to the standard that is needed in this country. Focusing heavily on the professionality of furniture making, the workshop, where classes are hosted, is organized like a manufacturer’s outfit. Complete with up-to-date industrial-scale machinery. Students are guided through their course, from the very basics of making in wood, right the way through to making batch-produced items of furniture, often supplying a real-time market, such as commissions from Joined and Jointed. So, the quality of products that the students are producing needs to be assured at a high standard, replicable and uniform in their quality, using Jig work and machine training to prepare the students for the sort of work they might be fulfilling in their career, all necessary skills.

This is no mean feat, however, with the combined making and teaching expertise of Joe and Phill, together with over 40 years of experience. Both with experience directly in the industry and with formal teaching; Phil was teaching and assessing qualifications for wood occupations for more than 15 years. While Joe has already been responsible for teaching one generation of woodworkers and furniture makers from Rycotewood school of furniture. They were both my tutors while I studied at Rycotewood.
Joe and Phil are able here to pack a large amount of practical knowledge and skill into short courses because they have no need to fulfill criteria or navigate curriculums set by an exterior body of legislation, they are totally free to design courses fit for what they think a student of woodwork might need in their future career. They are free to be in the workshops full time as they nurture the skills of their students in their vocational form of study, having minimal distraction since they set and designed the program with their own velition.

Their tag-team works, when I approached their classroom, Phil took the time to chat with me and introduce me to what they were doing, while Joe carried on interacting with their students. They were making trivets, a practice I am all too familiar with.; the trivet, Joe uses to demonstrate hand-cut joinery, with a lapped dovetail and bridle joints, this small, but dexterous-to-make object was exactly what I was taught on, in the first lessons of my schooling.
Funnily enough, when I entered their classroom, it was the second week of Phil’s tenure at Sylva. Which makes it the second time I have been present when Phil started a new job in teaching since I was one of his first students around 9 years ago.
The school at Sylva Foundation is going from strength to strength, with the addition of the modern machine room, their fresh workbenches, and hand tools they are set and ready to teach the practicals of bench joinery and cabinetry. But their ambitions don’t stop there. With plans to incorporate lessons on how to properly season and store freshly felled timber, grown locally or on-site, promoting the use of locally sourced materials. They have a residency program, sponsorship and scholarship available with funding and sponsorship from the industry, they hope to keep tuition costs as low as possible. In a country where funding for the arts and support for practical studies is diminishing it is important that places like Sylva flourish; these are places that don’t rely on centralized government support to keep afloat, they are Autocratic, and we need these places in order to counter growing austerity, to preserve skills for future generations.
For further reading into the importance of woodland management and the Sylva Foundation follow this link.
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