WHO

Castle Climbing Centre

THE BRIEF

The Castle Climbing Centre has extensive grounds of which much has been converted into food growing areas. The Castle has a great eco philosophy, a strong recycling policy and a desire to positively engage with community.

Garden staff wanted to improve the perception and contribution of the garden by the office staff, climbers and increase visitor numbers.

To achieve this a commercial size oven to be built in an outdoor kitchen / teaching activity area.

To keep costs down, they built their own plinth structure. When the oven was complete, they built the own round pole reciprocal living roof kitchen / activity area.

THE OUTPUT

A commercial cob oven for use on open days, generating revenue from the sale food on open days and feed the volunteers and attendees to courses in the garden.

THE OUTCOMES

• We used recycled materials to fit in with their eco policy, clearing the garden in the process

• We engaged climbing trainers and office staff to build the oven. This was important as some staff never used the garden

• The team felt confident to use its cob skills to build a cob bottle wall and have other cob plans to follow.

• The space is regularly used throughout the year to fundraise on open days, offer teaching programmes

• Cob in the Community was invited back to run a course on how to build a cob oven in a day, permaculture and natural building.

The Garden has supported the Castle Climbing Centre achieve numerous awards including the Sustainable City awards for Sustainable Building, Sustainable Procurement as well as the Green Thinking Award.