CALAIS: A HOME FOR WINTER

Thank you to everyone who has donated money towards our noble cause. We have raised £7,452 so far. Please help us reach our target of £10,000 in the remaining 4 days of the campaign, by following the link below and help us provide shelter for people in Calais this winter.

https://crowdfunding.justgiving.com/joe-friday

Thank You.

Thank you. The Team.

We have been testing and perfecting our design with the available materials and budget. We are finally arriving on a design we are content with to roll out on mass scale. The 20th shelter has now gone up and inhabited! That was our original target for the second visit, so it is wonderful to have reached it. We've housed approximately 80-100 people, a least a third are children.

We have been working with Eva, a Spanish women who lives on site, who has been liaising with the different communities and ethnicities on site to try to allocate these houses to the most vulnerable and evenly amongst the different groups of migrants. This ensures fairness and placates existing tensions that sometimes flair up between the different nationalities.

A massive thanks to all the people who have given their time and effort so far. L'auberge de Migrant for funding the wood and supplying the workshop, Médecins Sans Frontières for their increasing input and assistance. To all our friends, old and new including Eamon and Barney on wrapping the fames. Sam Dooley, Joe B, Emma, Jody, Finn, Austin and Chris L on the chippie and build teams. Scottish David for coordinating installs and transport. Brid and the vents crew. Lee, Fred and Angus for setting up the workshop with me.

Definitely focused now on setting up a London workshop to give all the London crew an opportunity to contribute to this project without having to come all the way here for 3-4 days. We are hoping to find a free workshop space (A big dry open space with some plug points in London please) to run the rest of October and some of November.

Building 100 by Christmas is in the forefront of our minds and plans! That would house 400-500 which is getting on for 10% of the Jungle population.

Bring it! Thanks for your continued support and interest in this mission.

Family with there new shelter

Xavier has freelanced for MSF for a decade and been to war zones and refugee crises on 5 continents. To great surprise he was really impressed with the design he had seen on camp, our first shelter, the one designed on a scrap of paper in France's answer to B&Q. The 3 main recommendations he wished us to make, we had already added, being insulation, ventilation and to consider a more robust roofing solution. We naturally agreed on corrugated tin sheeting. We hit it off immediately, and he is really happy to assist us in sourcing materials and financing them, which is fantastic. He knows what is needed and it appears we are part of his plan to help house the people of the Calais Jungle.

MFS having a tour around our workshop

On the first visit to Calais, we met and begun working with Ben Guillespie, to design a shelter for a pregnant Eritreans lady with funds raised by a wonderful women from Birmingham called Hayley. Ben and Hayley were the first two British people I met in the jungle (Calais Migrant Camp).

We went to the local equivalent of B&Q and on the back of a scrap of paper in aisle 3, we hashed out a rough design on the materials they stocked and built it. Since then we have constantly improved and adapted the design.

The first shelter was the basic wooden frame clad in Damp proof membrane (DPM) sheeting. It had an assortment of pallets and a flap for a door, which was assembled there and then. We now have a fully functioning workshop, with 2 chop saw stations, 2 panel assembly stations, 3 cladding stations, a loading bay and organised all our materials and tools into racks and bays.

The evolution of the shelter's design very much serves as symbol for the overall project. Started as a one step initiative, this has, with the support of L'auberge de Migrant and so many donors and volunteers grown into a functioning shelter programme housing families in the Calais Jungle.

The shelter consists of a timber frame worthy of a permanent home, albeit a single room on a single story. We clad the external face of the panels in 300 micron thickness DPM, and the internals with aluminium foil insulation fabric. Today we received our first shipment of a triple layered foil, which will increase the insulation factor by 4 times on the previous material! The roof is now made out of a separate (5th) panel to mean the basic structure can now be assembled onsite in approximately 20 minutes. The floor still needs tweaking as pallets struggle on uneven ground to give a desirable base surface and need covering as they leave a big draft! But we are looking at creating a single piece rigid base plate to sit the structure on and must find a design which takes less than 30 minutes to install on uneven ground. We then glad the assembled structure in tensioned tarpaulin to stop the wind stressing the DPM plastic cladding so it can concentrate on keeping the water out and the tarp controls the wind. We finish with a door, which has a lockable sliding bolt, and a window is being incorporated into as many as possible to allow natural light in. The front and back panel have closable vents to allow a degree of natural air for fresh air and combating condensation problems likely in a plastic clad space.

We have begun joining shelters together in pairs, which saves a side panel, and allow the spaces to insulate each other and foster communities in this organically sprawling mini town. We would like to build them in rows of 5/6 huts ending with a communal cooking kitchen to again help encourage community empowerment and self-organisation.

CAD Drawing

Loading the prototype on the Dept. of Awesome Car

High Vis is always necessary

Joe Friday explains the plan ahead

Securing the Prototype Shelter to the roof

Emily holding the Shelter up as its erected. NASA grade insulation in the interior of the shelter

The team working hard putting the Shelter up

Pallets for the floor, to keep the shelter off the ground and away from the mud

Prototype built and ready for its first family to live in

Shelter in the camp