The studio building starts to emerge……. the miracle of manual labour….. Climbing, crawling, burrowing, crouching, cutting, lumping, thumping, barrowing, , hauling, craning, cutting, cracking, sawing, stacking, digging, shovelling, grafting, loading, …………..excavate, underpin, calculate, formulate, levelise, stabalise, ………..
The ground works begin: Derek, Geoffrey, Paul and Nige
Geoffrey and Paul planning….
light failing, evening falling and the underpinning goes on
frost biting and the fire burning
The ground, dug out, the wall is needled, propped, and each brick teased out down gently. 6 tons of bricks left above, eventually to be supported by steel, to become the foundation for our yoga wall
the red bricks from the old brick wall of 1905 brought down, cracked by hand to become this beautiful terracotta foundation for our floor
5 months in and the lime arrives, Paul and Chris begin
3 weeks ago we knocked through from house to studio landing, a very big moment for me, worrying as it meant packing up our yoga mats, blankets, to make way for the new.
7 Months in
….bricks, soil, soot, sand, dust, concrete, oak, oil, glass, lime cement, lead, accoya, cedar, steel, nails, galvanised hopper, lime, lime putty, lime wash, limestone, and a beautiful space carved out of graft for us to enter in the gap between the buildings…..
… as Paul and Chris have worked the magnificent magic of lime plastering to transform the place, we can see how fresh light is there in different ways, in places we could have never imagined, surprising at this time of year too as the north facing roof windows with the perfect chamfered edges, and the straight line of the party wall, chiseled and honed straight by hand. Geoffrey’s new oak roof, where light was not there before now shafts, in and the lime wall just below coming together with it as circles, lines, triangles and squares of reflected light are coming in through now with clarity on the lime walls.
It is very pleasing and quite extra-ordinary to think a condemned damp dangerous building is a place Geoffrey and I, and future yoga students, artists, and other people will want to be”
Duncan said
“It’s a tremendous achievement and will be a really beautiful building and a great transformation from dereliction to jewel”