Being Niche, embracing Scarcity and always World-Class
Where architecture serves ecology, access preserves ground and the journey becomes the destination
Subject:
Design
There's something profound about walking through a canopy you previously only looked at from below. The scale shift. The perspective change. The realisation that the forest has layers - literal, living layers -you'd never properly seen. And there's something equally profound about building the structure that gives people that moment...while ensuring the forest itself barely notices you've been there. That's the work we do. That tension - between bold vision and ecological humility - is where we've lived for two decades.
Whether you're an estate owner wanting to share your woodland differently, or an attraction moving 50,000 visitors a year through protected terrain - the principle is the same. The forest doesn't have to stay distant. Access doesn't have to mean damage. There's a third way. And it feels like "sky-walkway".
There's something that happens about three minutes into walking on one of these things that I keep meaning to write down and then forgetting about, and then someone takes me on another one and there it is again.
You start off self-conscious. Wooden deck under your feet, handrails either side, a slight bounce because the good ones all have a slight bounce. You're aware you're up. That's the bit operators tend to design around - make people feel safe, manage the vertigo, get them through the height question.
But somewhere after the second or third turn, when the canopy has closed in and the ground is properly far away rather than worryingly far away, you stop looking forwards and start looking down. Not nervously. The ground has just become interesting in a way it isn't when you're on it.
I don't quite know why this happens, only that it does. The same patch of woodland floor, viewed from twelve metres up, does something different to your attention than it did an hour earlier when you walked across it. Deadwood that's been stepped over a thousand times is suddenly a system, a thing rotting back with mosses and fungi doing visible work on it. There are paths the deer have made that aren't visible from the deer's own height. You can see the shape of the woodland, the way water has actually moved through it over years - none of which is available from the path.
A woman from a forest park rang me a couple of years ago and said something I've been chewing on since. She said the walkway hadn't increased their visitor numbers as much as they'd expected. What it had done, she said, was change what visitors talked about on the way back to the car park. They'd stopped talking about the café. They were talking about things they'd seen in the woods - things they hadn't been seeing on the ground trails, even though the things had been there the whole time.
That's not really a metric you can put on a planning application. Doesn't stop it being real.
The other thing I'll say, briefly, is that the structures themselves work best when they almost disappear. A bad walkway announces itself from the car park. A good one is something you'd struggle to photograph afterwards, because the camera doesn't quite know what the subject is meant to be. How that gets done isn't my end of the studio. But it's worth knowing it's not accidental.
Somebody asked me last month whether I thought walkways were a fashion or a fixed thing. Honest answer, I don't know. They'll probably go in and out of favour like everything else. But the underlying business of it - that you can sometimes solve an access problem by lifting the route up instead of cutting across the ground - that bit isn't going anywhere.
The forest park woman is back in touch, incidentally. They're thinking about a second route, taking in a stretch of wetland they've never been able to open up.
I think they'll do it. I haven't even quoted yet.
