11 JULY 1992, Page 20

AN ENGLISHMAN'S

HOME IS HIS MUD HUT

Ross Clark discovers that

Mrs Desiree Ntolo is following an old British tradition

IT IS NOT only the opponents of petty- minded bureaucracy who are ranged against the decision of Redbridge Borough Council to demolish an African mud hut built by Mrs Desiree Ntolo in her Dagen- ham garden. Mrs Ntolo, born in Cameroon, has spent six months digging and stamping the clayey earth to a cement- like consistency, and shaping it into the walls of a refuge where she might escape from a council flat she likens to an 'open prison'.

While Redbridge Council has ruled that the hut is In danger of collapse' from the English rains and is 'not in the council style', Mrs Ntolo has won sympathy from various quarters, ranging from a neighbour who, in traditional Essex style, welcomed the building as 'a bit of culture', to a female journalist who appreciated Mrs Ntolo's need for somewhere to escape from her six children.

But the most touching support for Mrs Ntolo comes from Bill Baker, building supervisor at the National Trust-owned Killerton estate near Cullompton in Devon. He has spent most of his life main- taining 200 thoroughly English mud huts —

'We must do lunch together again, sometime. . called 'cob cottages' in the vernacular. Although cob has long died out as a form of construction, Redbridge Council ought to know that there are still thousands of mud buildings standing in the English countryside, many of them dating back to the 14th century and beyond. What is more, they are happily occupied by ordi- nary 20th century Englishmen and women.

I met Mr Baker, a sturdy, bearded Devo- nian, in the estate yard at Killerton. The rain was torrential, almost African. The cobblestones were stained red with Devon soil.

He put his foot upon a small mound of sodden earth flecked with straw.

'This, as you can see, is mud,' he said. 'It's basically cob.'

Like a television cook, he showed me some he had made earlier: two blocks of dried earth, crumbly like clay, with strands of straw protruding from their edges. I dug in my fingernails and began to scrape the cob into dust.

'It doesn't seem all that solid,' I said.

'It'll take you a hell of a time to crumble the whole block away,' said Mr Baker.

I agreed, and put the block down. To convert the raw earth into cob, all that has to be done is for the earth to be `puddled' — to be wetted and trampled upon, rather like the kneading of bread. Then the cob is simply left to be baked bY the sun. Straightforward though it might seem, the manufacture of cob evidently requires too much physical labour for modern Britons.

'We had some youths on a manpower scheme walking round and treading it down,' said Mr Baker, sadly, 'but we were wearing them out. So we converted an old dung-spreader into a mixer. A farmer lent us half a dozen cows, so we've got them walking around doing the work now.' The building of a cob cottage is a similar procedure to the construction of Mrs Ntolo's hut in Dagenham: walls, two to three feet thick, are built up in layers, 18 inches at a time, inside a wooden frame. The edges of the walls are chopped off with a sharp shovel. Although the frame ends up buried inside the cob wall, the construction is fun- damentally different from the more famous 'wattle and daub' inasmuch as the cob is load-bearing; in wattle and daub walls, the daub (mud and dung) is merely plastered to a wall constructed of woven twigs and branches. The roofs of cob cottages are usually thatched, the thatch projecting one to two feet beyond the wall in order to deflect Water away from the cob.

Cob itself is not usually left exposed to theair; semi-waterproof limewash' Is applied to it. This rustic form of plaster, made from burned limestone and plaster, can be dyed in all manner of colours, from

yellow to pink to green.

'There is one cottage down the way where they never bothered putting lime- wash on,' said Mr Baker, 'and that's still standing after several hundred years.'

Could Mrs Ntolo's hut last as long?

'If she's mixed up the mud properly with a binding agent like straw', said Mr Baker, 'I don't see why it shouldn't last. I quite like the idea. Throughout the world there's mud buildings, no matter what country you go to. The climate doesn't matter.'

Despite their record for handsome longevity, mud houses cannot be guaran- teed to last.

'There was one village the other side of Crediton which just crumbled back into the earth,' said Mr Baker. 'They had bodgers in those days too.'

Otherwise cob cottages are at the mercy of modern door-to-door salesmen. Mr Baker showed me a photograph of one cottage which had collapsed, an entire wall having failed.

Somebody had sold the owner a tin of 'waterproofing'. This merely prevented moisture from leaving the walls. For sever- al hundred years, water had been soaking through the thatch into the top of the walls in winter, then evaporating through the side of the walls in summer. Once the wall had been 'waterproofed', the mois- ture built up until the cob reverted to wet mud. 'Cob walls have to breathe,' emphasised Mr Baker. 'You could nearly say they're living things, couldn't you?'

Soon we drove down to the village of Broadclyst, to see a cob cottage that the National Trust is currently restoring. The house, Marker's Cottage, was lurid yellow, like the cheaper brands of vanilla ice- cream. It was topped with a thick thatch roof due for replacement.

Perched on a high bank opposite was a row of brand-new houses, pebbledashed, it seemed, in a feeble attempt to make them blend with the 14th-century cottage, no doubt according to building regulations. One resident had gone even further by installing plastic fake leaded lights.

'Modern rubbish,' remarked Mr Baker.

We entered the cottage to meet the resi- dent caretaker, 75-year-old Jan Newman. He showed us around the half-modernised rooms, from a bathroom complete with smoked-glass shower cabinet to a staircase with an old window frame so consumed by woodworm that the vertical slats resembled termite mounds.

'I suppose you can say we down in Devon are a bit behind the times,' said Mr Baker. 'We've neglected to knock all our old cot- tages down.'

I wondered whether, if Redbridge Bor- ough Council's bulldozers were to neglect their demolition work, my descendants might be seeing the walls of Mrs Ntolo's mud hut 600 years hence.