‘It’s like Dunkirk for the construction industry!’ The small team rescuing London’s precious building materials

Joel de Mowbray reached breaking point with UK construction in south London in 2020. He was working on a lovely building project, part of Lambeth council’s scheme to make streets more pedestrian-friendly. De Mowbray was installing a public wooden seating area in an underused stretch of street. “The council were doing treeworks the entire time we were building, felling trees right next to us,” he says. “But we had to go to Ashdown Forest for our supplies. That felt bonkers to me: they were creating the exact material we needed next to our site.” Everyone with experience of the building industry has similar stories. The ambition is to renovate existing buildings rather than demolish them and to reuse as much material as possible. Instead, the construction industry produces around 62% of the UK’s waste. A lot gets recycled but a lot also ends up in landfill. “There’s what I call street logic – you see a tree being felled and have a use for that wood – and then there’s institutional logic which is dictated by insurance, safety standards and company liability. There’s a very rigid system but there’s no incentive to change.” De Mowbray is different, though. After the south London experience he founded Yes Make, a design collective milling urban trees to provide local timber for building projects. “We converted a 1980s electric milk float into a logging vehicle to mill and transport wood. We got a reputation for salvage and were invited to the old Smithfield meat market when the building was stripped. We took away 12 tonnes of mahogany, teak and afromosia that was going in the skip.” Still, he says, he remembers looking at the site and thinking: “We’re just tinkering around the edges.” Now, though, he has got to the heart of the matter. Yes Make has joined forces with Resolve Collective, which provides recycled materials for cultural institutions, and the architecture and research practice Material Cultures. Together they have opened a hub set on a 20,000 sq metre indus…