Portsmouth High School wanted to develop their forest school programme and had designated a section of their playground particularly for this initiative. As the forest school programme encourages hands-on outdoor learning, making and lighting fires is a popular and important part of this programme.
However the school also wanted to provide for some kind of shelter as well as having an outdoor classroom facility. So we combined the two and created a fire pit outdoor classroom and shelter!
This is a 5m octagonal shelter which is manufactured out of high quality premium grade cedar with an attractive cedar shingle tile roof. But it has a special ventilation hole in the roof where the smoke from the fire can easily exhaust out from. To stop rain coming in through the hole (and probably putting the fire out!), we have built a special two tier roof system which is essentially a “hat” that sits over the hole with ventilation panels on the side. We have also applied two coats of a special fire retardant intumescent varnish to the underside of the roof for safety reasons.
Inter-post benching allows for a class of 30 children to sit round the fire at any given time. The school hopes to add to the shelter in the future by adding a water butt and roof guttering system for rainwater harvesting to water the planters nearby.
