WOW! Barn Builders on Cinder Moor
Leeds 2023 and the WOW Festival have brought together 300 women and non-binary people for a giant construction project to build a barn on Cinder Moor and I’ve volunteered to be one of the Barn Builders.
Full disclosure, this isn’t the first time I’ve built a traditional timber frame building. Seven years ago, armed with two books bought from the internet and some basic woodwork skills, I set about designing and building a workshop in my back garden. It took me a year and I learnt a lot along the way, but that’s a story for another day.
The point is I know the power of building things yourself. I look out of my kitchen window every morning and see something that I have built and it makes me happy. Like, ridiculously happy.
On Monday evening (24 Apr 2023) the Barn Raisers came together at the Reboot Camp to meet each other and collect their safety equipment and, I tell you, that room was full of happy people - the excitement could have charged up all the power tools in Leeds for a week.
People from all over West Yorkshire had signed up. Novices had already spent a few hours at Leeds College of Building getting to grips with hand tools and their growing confidence was visible. I bet there will be a few trips to B&Q* after this project. Those with a little more experience had completed training in putting up mobile access towers to reach the higher bits of the frame.
It was impossible not to feel the impact this project is having already. Photographer Lizzie Coombes was taking everyone’s photo portraits and I think we all stood a bit taller for being part of the project.
Raising a barn is a collective endeavour. I spent a year working on mine alone, literally chipping away, but I needed people to come together to turn it from a pile of oversized matchsticks into something whole.
A barn is a gathering place and a shelter, it is a beautifully crafted and purposeful structure built by a community. It is magnificent in its own right.
It is a barn.
Here’s to the 300 Barn Raisers, to Castle Ring Oak who have designed and cut the frame and to the teams at LEEDS 2023 and WOW.
The weekend can’t come soon enough!
Find out all about the Leeds 2023 WOW Festival here.
*Other tool stores are available. One of my favourites is Geo Spence in New Wortley.