Sunday Times Editor goes off-grid

One’s manly dream home

Nick Rufford, Associate Editor of the London Sunday Times (salary $270,000 a year), has come out as a secret, part-time off-gridder. Here is his story:

There comes a time in every man’s life when he needs a shack: something he can build with his own hands; somewhere to escape the daily rush. The Scandinavians have long acknowledged this need, and have elevated the shack to a magnificent construction – often made from whole logs and set in a pine forest, complete with sauna. Amid tranquil surroundings, the owner can shut the door on the outside world, contemplate important things and not answer the phone.

In Britain, where our expectations are modest, we often settle for a shed from B&Q and take refuge in the garden. There’s no sauna, just a few tools and some rusty tins. It’s second-best – and we know it. Land on this crowded island is scarce, and the planning rules are draconian. Even so, I have found that, with a little persistence, it is possible to construct a proper wilderness cabin, the kind any Scandinavian would be proud of – even the blond, reclusive one from Abba.

I started the project two years ago, spurred on by reading Henry David Thoreau’s classic, Walden. First published in 1854, it details the author’s stay in a cabin near Walden Pond, in Massachusetts, and how he learns to live self-sufficiently.

Now that I have a cabin of my own, I don’t know how I ever lived without one. It is a place to fish, sit and watch the water, read, drink beer and bond with nature. It has no postal address, so unwanted callers don’t come knocking. I never open the door to find final-demand notices on the mat; and, in this ecologically conscious age, it is also “off grid”, with no mains services – water, gas, electricity or phone.

I scoured an area within a two-hour-drive radius of The Sunday Times offices in Wapping, east London – a reasonable distance for a weekend commute – and eventually found a ramshackle cabin on the banks of an estuary in East Anglia. It was one of about 90 cabins strung out along a sandy beach, accessible only through locked gates down an unmade road. Local planning rules allow you to live there only from May to October.

Most of the cabins were weatherbeaten; a few were flaking and leaning drunkenly. Mine was nearing total collapse and rotten beyond repair. There were treads missing from the wooden steps; the water tank was about to topple off the roof.

The previous owner had planned a new cabin, but had run out of money – and his wife hated the place, he told me. He sold it to me for £70,000. When he handed over the keys, he had tears in his eyes – but they may have been tears of relief.

My intention was to demolish it and build my own cabin. What the previous owner had failed to warn me was that such changes would need to be approved by a committee of neighbouring cabin-dwellers, understandably suspicious of new development. They weren’t unfriendly people, just protective of the unspoilt beauty. So I took six months, during which I hired a surveyor and an architect to draw up plans to show that my new cabin would blend in.

The next hurdle was the local planning officers. Planning officers the world over feel overworked, and often don’t have time for hobby builders. Log cabin? Environmental project? Yeah, yeah. Just put it in writing and get off the phone.

So I did, and I waited. And waited. The weeds grew up through the floorboards and the veranda gave way altogether. The roof fell in during a rain-storm, and the water tank came crashing through.

Then, I thought I saw, flitting in and out of the holes, the thing that builders fear most: a bat. Bats are more dangerous to new developments than termites. Conservation rules require that, once you have them, you must down tools and cease work altogether.

To complicate matters further, my cabin was in a site of special scientific interest. The planners had asked for a report from an ecologist to help them decide whether it would damage any flora or fauna. I felt sure the ecologist would find a bat colony, and my project would be as extinct as Thoreau.

Fortunately, the creature I saw was a solitary twilight visitor that didn’t return. The ecologist gave me the all clear and, a few weeks later – a year after I’d bought the site – planning approval arrived through the post.

I won’t burden you with details of the actual construction. Suffice to say that because my plot was above a beach, steel and concrete piles had to be sunk and a supporting grid laid on top. Now, I’m a journalist, but I studied civil engineering and taught it for a while at university 20 years ago, so I thought I would be well prepared.

How little I knew. Everything these days has to be triple the necessary strength. By the time the foundations were finished, the latticework of steel and timber would have made Brunel proud. If East Anglia were hit by a tsunami, it would be one of the few buildings left standing.

I learnt a lot in a short time. For example, you need to use load-bearing timber with minimal knots, denoted C24. Steel near the sea must be galvanised or it rusts in seconds. Never use sea sand in reinforced concrete; it contains salt, which corrodes the reinforcing rods. Another thing: when you cut off the tip of your finger with a cement trowel, amazingly, it can grow back.

The most important thing is to find a builder who knows what he’s doing. I hired Andy Gates, an excellent local craftsman who could turn his hand to anything – carpentry, steel fabrication and plumbing.

So, nearly two years into the project, with the foundations almost complete, I had to decide what to build. My original idea was to construct a cabin from scratch, giving myself the satisfaction of living within walls I had built with my own hands. That was before I had familiarised myself with building regulations – another set of rules policed by the local authority. It quickly became apparent that it would be easier to buy a cabin in kit form. Not least because buildings that can be easily assembled or disassembled are classed as transportable and can therefore side-step some (not all) regulations.

Proper log cabins can cost anything from £20,000 to £180,000, depending on size, quality of timber and origin. Those from eastern Europe are cheaper than those from Scandinavia, but not as good. The internet is crowded with importers, but many are tiny operations writ large – and can’t deliver what they advertise.

Eventually, Norwegian Log Buildings, which, despite the name, is based in Reading, came up with just the right design and spent a long time liaising with the building-control officer to avoid the worst effects of regulations that might otherwise have required me to, for example, build brick cavity-insulated walls (yes, in a log cabin).

I’m still installing power and heating. Electricity for lighting and a portable fridge is supplied by a 12V car battery, which, when the system is finished, will be recharged by a wind turbine of the type used on boats. Water from a nearby freshwater supply will be heated by solar panels and the pump powered by photo-voltaic cells.

The project, including the land, has so far cost me getting on for £130,000. Finally, one day last month, two and a half years after I started, I arrived to find the roof on, the windows installed and the decking built. It was a beautiful day, sunny and breezy. Out on the estuary, the waves were rocking the moored boats. As Thoreau said: “You live in your home, but your home also lives in you, so build it well.”

So much more than a beach hut

People who wouldn’t dream of spending, say, £125,000 on a Lamborghini Gallardo will spend that and more on a cabin. At Mudeford, on a spit of sand between Christchurch and Hengistbury Head, huts are for sale from £130,000 (www.mudeford-beach-huts.co.uk).

Bylaws usually ban sleeping overnight in beach huts, but in Mudeford you can, for seven months of the year, hence the price. For a hut for day use only, visit www.beachhutworld.com. At Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex, they sell for about £7,000.

To build your own, you first have to acquire the land. That might set you back between £10,000 and £100,000. On top of that, there is often an annual licence fee of about £400.

My cabin (excluding land) costs, as follows:

Architect £1,000 (Iain Bramhill)

Piling £10,000 (Micropiling Southern Ltd; www.micropilinggroup.com)

Engineering design of foundations £3,500 (Richard Jackson PLC; www.richardjacksonplc.co.uk)

Construction of foundations, decking, balustrade £10,000

Log cabin (in kit form) £40,000 (Norwegian Log Buildings; www.norwegianlog.co.uk)

Solar panels and heating £2,600 (Solarventi; www.solarventi.co.uk)

Total (without land) £67,100