Work complete on straw classroom

Builders made walls out of 500 straw bales

Building work on a pioneering eco-friendly classroom of straw and tyres has been completed in Cumbria.

The Footprint education base, at St Catherine's, near Windermere, is the first building the National Trust has commissioned made of straw bale.

The £230,000 centre's foundation has been made of recycled tyres and walls of lime and straw and wool.

The centre, due to open soon, will be a classroom for hire and available for groups to book as a venue.

The centre has been designed to use natural light and have a low impact on the environment.

Teardrop shape

Constructing the walls for the project involved using 500 bales, which were hardened and painted using modern building techniques.

During building work the trust ran courses on the techniques used such as making foundations from tyres and concrete.

Gareth Thomas, who was in charge of the construction process, said: "The benefits of this type of building are that it is renewable, there is a surplus amount of straw in this country and it offers brilliant insulation.

"People have compared the inside to a church and the outside to a boat. It has a teardrop shape to follow the sun around to light the building."

Eleven concrete pillars had to be used to take the load of the building, but 38 other pillars were made of car tyres and clay, which would otherwise have gone to a landfill site.