English heritage

Summary
• There has been a sawmill on the EWT site since the second world war.
• The company is a sawmill and merchant and a supplier of round timber and woodland management services.
• It specialises in the supply of waney edge hardwoods.
• It is working on a live stock database, which will identify individual boards.

English Woodlands Timber (EWT) recently took delivery of a case of smoked garlic – not to ward off demons (hard to imagine at its idyllic West Sussex site, anyway), or to suffuse its kilns with a certain je ne sais quoi. It was simply a thank you from one of its customers in return for oak sawdust and shavings from the machine shop.

It’s an entirely typical gesture from EWT’s loyal – and, it’s fair to say – grateful customer base but if it gives the impression of a quaint, bucolic sawmill producing niche products for local bodgers, then a turn around the site and a quick look at the newly acquired Weinig six-sider and Joulin handling equipment should set the record straight.

If not, then a tour of the comprehensive website (englishwoodlandstimber.co.uk) detailing the company’s stocks of structural oak (fresh sawn or air dried), kiln-dried or air-dried hardwoods and softwoods, exterior cladding, flooring and decking profiles should dispel the image.

Social media

And further proof, if needed, is EWT’s enthusiastic use of social media. Blogs, posted at englishwoodlandstimber.wordpress.com, announce the arrival of new batches of timber – fresh sawn London plane (lacewood) with an intense “raspberry ripple” colour and grain, or highly sought-after English walnut and Scottish elm, for example.

It’s certainly a far cry from the company’s origins back in the 1940s when its location in the heart of beech-rich woodlands made it the ideal supplier of Lee Enfield rifle stocks for the war effort.

That mill later became the Sussex Sawmill Co, supplying beech to the furniture industry, before relaunching as EWT in 1986. Since then the company has had two core functions – sawmilling/merchanting, and woodland management and round timber sales.

This latter aspect of the business is what gives EWT its “depth”, said managing director Tom Compton, a forester by training. The company doesn’t own any woodland but manages 8,000-9,000 acres for private individuals and estates, covering planting, harvesting, timber marketing and volume assessments, Forestry CommissionWoodland Grant Schemeand felling licence applications – in fact anything the owner requires. The woodlands aren’t necessarily managed for commercial timber production although the company is always busy cutting softwood for sales in the round.

EWT buys its own timber on the open market, with much of its native hardwoods locally grown and felled – a batch of oak from nearby Petworth is a case in point.

Quality hardwood logs

The net is cast wider in the search for the best possible quality hardwood logs, however. “By best quality we mean sound, but also large dimension,” said Mr Compton. “Taking oak as an example, it is so readily available from European markets in standard sizes but, while we still offer that European oak, there is demand for the traditional, home-grown hardwood log of good dimension.

“A lot of our competition don’t offer it. And it’s not an easy business. You’ve got to fund your stock for two or three years for proper air drying, so you have to have a lot of other trading going on in the meantime. But as a small company it’s something that we can do to differentiate ourselves.”

The bespoke furniture market is the usual destination for these large dimension logs and it’s a core part of EWT’s customer base, to the point where logs – and even standing trees – will be singled out for particular end uses. “Two-inch pippy oak is cut specifically for table tops, for example,” said Mr Compton.

This focus on its customers’ ever more demanding requirements has intensified over the last five years or so. “We’ve managed to retain our niche position sawmilling English timber but we’ve also responded to the changes in the way people now trade,” said the company’s Sarah Farmer.

“Ten years ago people still bought stock,” she continued. “A joinery company might buy stock, put it in its workshop and work jobs off that. Now they’re buying stock for specific projects and so not only are we pricing on individual jobs but we’ve changed our machining set-up and are doing a lot more cut to size, planed all round for those same customers. It’s saving them labour and time as they’re getting to the end product much faster.”

Shifting this work back up the line to EWT and machining a semi-finished product also reduces waste for the customer, she added.

Waney-edge supply

Not all customers want all the edges knocked off their timber, however, and another important area of market differentiation for EWT is the supply of waney-edge material. It is even extending this to species previously stocked as square edge in order to provide more of a one-stop shop alongside its native timbers. A stack of waney-edge American black walnut stands in the yard as evidence.

“Joiners who really know their wood are able to see their preferred cut rather than have an edge put on it by someone else who may take less regard of the grain,” said Mr Compton. “And they will use the slithers for other things. They will utilise the whole board and are prepared to take the time to do that.”

EWT accommodates these customers still further by storing its sawn timber as boules. “Many cabinetmakers prefer to see the log ‘intact’ so they can match colour, grain and length,” said Ms Farmer.

And the company plays the boules long game. “We have some special logs cut to six or seven metres long with nice width in 41mm that someone will use as a stair string in two or three years time,” said Mr Compton.

Stock database

While customers are always welcome to hand-pick their English ash, cherry, lime, cedar of Lebanon, sycamore or yew, to name but a few, from the yard or the new 6,000ft² warehouse – and they travel from far and wide to do so – the selection process is about to become that much easier thanks to a mammoth project EWT is undertaking to catalogue each individual board for display on its website.

“Each individual board has its own unique characteristics so we’re going through a process of effectively identifying each one,” said Mr Compton. “It’s partly for our own stock management purposes but we’ve invested in software that will allow us to display not just dry information about length and width, but also a photo for customers to download.”

Key information in this live stock database – which Mr Compton said will be ready in time for Timber Expo – will include each board’s provenance. “Not only will customers be able to click on a board to see if it suits their purpose, they’ll also be able to see which forest it was from and when it was cut.”

Again, it’s this differentiation – the fact that the timber hasn’t all arrived via an anonymous container – that sets the company apart and, said Sarah Farmer, provenance is now part of the story – and not just for reduced “timber miles” or environmental certification reasons, although, with both FSC and PEFC chain of custody, EWT has the latter covered too.

“If you’re buying an £8,000 refectory table for your house you want to know something about it,” she said.

Construction customers

One end use for EWT’s timber where environmental certification does tend to be a prerequisite is construction. The majority of the company’s construction customers are self-builders, but small-scale developers of the 10-house per project type are a growing market.

For this sector the product portfolio includes species such as fresh sawn Douglas fir, larch, western red cedar, elm, oak or chestnut for exterior cladding, shingles or shakes.

Douglas fir is also popular for structural work and often comes from the forests of the Cowdray Estate surrounding the mill.

Structural oak is offered custom cut in fresh sawn or air dried from stock. Much of the structural oak is imported from France, strong trading links with which enable EWT to respond to the most demanding specifications. But this doesn’t dilute the company’s passion for local produce.

“The clue is in the name,” said Mr Compton. “English Woodlands Timber describes our business perfectly – and it is exciting to be offering such good quality English stock.”