In the past 100 years the UK has accumulated over 26,000 hectares of brownfield sites from shifting industrial activities — often inaccessible and disconnected from local life. Looking to the notion of a common nature as inspiration, the project speculates on restoration strategies that involve both people and nature in creating a sustainable, productive and recreative rural landscape.

The project seeks to establish a one-hectare woodland common within a gravel quarry and inorganic waste landfill site that spreads across 100 hectares by the East Tilbury coast.

The common introduces access into the site and initiates a century-long programme to turn the disturbed soil into a permaculture forest through the common management of the East Tilbury community. The building performs two roles: it, firstly, houses facilities for forest management and wood processing and, moreover, it acts as a community hub that provides indoor and outdoor spaces for locals and visitors alike to gather, rest, participate in restoration work and take tours across the strange landscape.

By transforming a hundredth of a dormant site into a vibrant social landscape, the project seeks to re-aestheticise ‘waste’ land and materials in order to rekindle a common interest in caring and living with the landscape.