As an 11-year-old growing up on Tyneside in the 1970s, my mecca was the model kit shop for hobbyists on Nile Street, North Shields. It was a round trip of four miles on foot from our house but it was a regular Saturday morning expedition. Run by a mother and son, the shop was chock full of model railways, plastic kits, radio-controlled planes, glues, paints and balsa wood – from floor to ceiling. Buying an Airfix kit was a must. The company's vast array of model planes was the subject of much discussion, catalogue browsing and indecision. It is the British de Havilland Mosquito that for some reason lingers in my memory (Figure 4.1). Maybe it was a harbinger of what was to come because the Mosquito was famous for being made from timber, known affectionately as the “Wooden Wonder”. It was pretty obvious that the flimsy aircraft of the First World War were made from wood but surely the more robust, bigger and faster aircraft of the Second World War were made from “tougher” materials? No. Wood remained a key structural component of many aircraft including, in addition to the Mosquito, the Russian Ilyushin il2 and the German Focke-Wulf TA154. In the 1940s it was acknowledged that wood was a strong enough material to build aircraft that could fly at 400 miles per hour and be subject to huge g-forces. A signal perhaps of wood's potential as a structural construction material?

Of course, wood has been used to build homes for thousands of years. But the majority of these buildings have always been relatively small, as in not particularly tall – the one- and two-storey homes of rural and suburban North America: think “Little House on the Prairie”, the family home of “the Waltons”, through to today's aspirational clapboard homes of Cape Cod or The Hamptons. There were exceptions. For instance, and still standing today, the 67-metre-tall Yingxian pagoda in China built in AD 1056 is a wooden structure. The Norwegians have the 29-metre tall Heddal Stave Church built in the early thirteenth century.