Into the woods: why high flying Londoners are falling hard for forestry

London has fallen hard for forestry, with urban high achievers retreating to plant trees, build fires and throw axes to unwind. Samuel Fishwick tests his mettle and lives the lumberjack dream
Touch wood: Samuel Fishwick, goes urban axe-throwing
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures L

After a tense working day, the last thing I’d hand a Londoner is an axe and an invitation to throw it. Whistle Punks in Vauxhall, though, is a better location to bury the hatchet than many; once a seedy railway arch, it’s been repurposed into a bright, white-walled “urban axe-throwing” club with four wire-mesh cages, each with a plywood target at the end of it.

It’s already become so popular that Whistle Punks quickly abandoned a short-term lease in Whitehall to expand here more permanently. Initially, I find it’s impossible. A scoring system of one point for an outer ring, three for the inner ring and five for a bull’s-eye scores me a whopping nul points after 20 minutes, my axes bouncing from the target and flopping around on the floor like sad fish on a boat deck. However, after switching to a two-handed overarm throw, I find my centre, halfway between monk and cold-blooded psychopath (on which note: no, you can’t bring a picture to paste on the target, and no, you can’t bring your own axe).

“This is really about Zen,” says Whistle Punks co-founder Jools Whitehorn, who has somehow turned this death wish into a successful business model in London, Manchester and Birmingham over the past year, with no injuries along the way other than “a few splinters here and there”. “The only two things that exist are you and the bull’s-eye. That’s how it should be.”

To hand it to Whitehorn — and to jump on his cosmic bandwagon — there’s a strange serenity in flinging axe at wood. The whistle-thunk from the city’s railway arches is not the only bellwether for a return to basic culture. If you go down to the woods today, the biggest surprise is the number of bankers, brokers and traders who are coppicing, camping and generally living the lumberjack dream. This month, The Times reported on a growing number of “woodlotters”, amateur woodsmen and women renting manageable plots of woodland from £6,000 to £10,000 an acre.

The best thing is “there’s no phone reception” at their £45,000 four acre sweet chestnut wood in Kent, revealed one, who set up a firepit, a mud kitchen for his children and a viewing platform. “The kids love it, they have the freedom to explore.”

Moreover, a small library’s worth of books has appeared on woods and woodcraft. The Little Book of Building Fires by Sally Coulthard, The Art of Fire by Daniel Hume, and Playing with Fire, by Paul Heiney explore the history of fire-building. Oak and Ash and Thorn by Peter Fiennes, The Hidden Life of Trees , by Peter Wohlleben and The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, explore our disappearing woodlands and their culture, while The Little Book of Shed by Joel Bird chronicles the art of whittling your own little cabin out of trees. If the publishing industry is anything to go by, we’re all branching out.

“I wanted to record all the ways of making fire, particularly the traditional methods, because they’re fast disappearing,” says Daniel Hume, an expert on bushcraft who by day is an instructor at Woodlore, Ray Mears’ school of wilderness bushcraft.

“We’re not out on the land any more, interacting with the landscape, fixing things, cutting things, bending wood, shaping wood. Most of our lives are spent looking at a computer screen in one form or another. The idea of a throw-away society is a cliché — but that’s where we are. That’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just the way things have evolved.”

For Sally Coulthard the appeal is difficult to pin down but it’s something to do with feeling “capable” again. “So much of today’s technology — whether it’s our smart phones or car engines — is invisible and totally incomprehensible to the outsider,” she says. “If my laptop breaks, I haven’t a clue how to fix it. But manual, practical technologies and skills — such as fire-building — are tangible and real. You can watch, copy, learn and practise. You can pass these skills on.”

The sense of loss is felt keenly among those who still roam the forests, like Peter Fiennes. There are more ancient trees in Britain than in the rest of Europe put together, he says — but, at 12 per cent, less woodland cover than any country on the continent other than the Netherlands and Ireland.

A huge public outcry erupted after the Coalition Government announced it was selling off the national forests in 2010. “That got me wondering what was up with our woods? They always seem to be under threat: development, greed, neglect,” he says. A Londoner, he spent a year visiting the country’s woodland to learn about their “literature, folklore, poetry, the question of ownership and conservation”.

We love our woods partly because, if we have been lucky, they remind us of our childhood, and our childhood stories, like Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Narnia — you can actually see all those woods. But as everyone will say, we are now all too disconnected from nature, and we are losing our love for it, other than through Countryfile.” A recent study found that children are better at identifying Pokémon characters than plants and animals, while another found that a third of adults are unable to identify a barn owl. “Just one visit can be enough to inspire a life-long love of woods. And we don’t tend to destroy things we know and love.”

The craze for shed-building is growing

Joel Bird thinks that the craze for shed-building is a valiant attempt to bring woodcraft back into the cities. “People want to use their hands again. I’d put it down to people wanting to find a meaning in their lives. When you’re working with wood there’s an immediacy, a feeling that these things have always taken place, for thousands of years. Therefore there’s a sense that we’re connected to our ancestry in some way.”

By way of contrast, we spend our working lives navigating tools like iPhones and computers that have been part of human life for only a few decades. Instant gratification is its own worst enemy. A typical shed, Bird says, takes 18 days to build — a welcome change from one-click Amazon purchases. “The more you learn about something, the more deeply invested you are. When I look at a piece of wood, I can look at the grains, see the seasons, see where there’s a hard winter — you know what the knot means. And you just get a relationship with it in the end. There’s something about wood that makes you feel closer to it than other materials because it was once living. You can see its story a bit more.”

Or you could just throw an axe at it for half an hour. That’s how I would chuck wood.

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