Whats this then?

[The Medway Handyman]

Working in a 1960's (?) built house today with a lot of partition walls removed & under the plaster/render was this;

seen the like, what the kinell is it?

[itsdoingfunnythings]

Quatermass ?

or straw ?

[John]

My house 1992 build has similar in the upstairs internal walls. It is a bas***d to get any good anchoring on. The stuff in my house was made by a company called Stramit

I know because when we had a leak in the old shower the straw just soaked up the water and eventually it was spotted due to a musty smell in an unused spare bedroom. When I removed the straw wall to replace with PB etc for the En-Suite refit the word Stramit was clearly visible on the surface.

HTH

John

[nightjar]

There was a type of particle board made from straw as an attempt to do something useful with a material of which there was a large surplus*. It looked a lot like that.

• Apparently, enough to cover the M1 from London to Birmingham to a height of several feet, which some people thought was a good suggestion.

Colin Bignell

[Bruce]

It looks very much like "Woodwool".

Not to be confused with the soft material of the similar name (wood wool) used to stuff teddy bears and other soft toys, or to pack delicate items for sending through the post, it is a stiff board made from waste wood strips bound together with cement and pressed into shape.

Uses included roof and wall cladding. It was often used as permanent formwork for suspended concrete floors. I have a feeling that this use was restricted or after problems with some of these structures which were concealed by the woodwool. But it was very popular and there will still be a lot of it about.

Some links:

[Andy Hall]

Well, once you get past Rugby, it;s all over anyway.... ;-)

[The Wanderer]

As someone else said, Stramit board. Cursed stuff, seemed like a good idea at the time.

My last house (architect-designed and he lived in it for some time - there's a novelty!) had the stuff as a base for the flat roof. It was just starting to give problems around the chimney and vent pipes when we sold it.

[George]

This house, was it on an estate type of housing? my recollection of that stuff is roundabout the 70's because it was a cheap sound insulation.

[nightjar]

It would be the first section, junctions 2 to 18, which was considered to be the London to Birmingham motorway until further bits were built from 1965 on.

Colin Bignell

[Rod]

Some answers already. My school had what was grandly called "The Music School" - built in the first half of the sixties. All the practise rooms had ceilings made of this - open and visible. I think it was also used in some of the walls.

I always assumed a) it was a compressed straw product b) it had sound absorption properties.

Was that the Swedish or the Norwegian Kinells you mentioned?

[Mary Fisher]

"nightjar .me.uk>"

Then it was supposed to end here, at Leeds. Now it's extended even further.

[<me9]

It has puzzled me for years that the M1 was described in early days as the London to Birmingham motorway. Perhaps it's really the M6 and the M1 leaves it at Rugby.

[Rod]

I always thought that the M1 was sort of going towards Newcastle (old A1) and sort of going towards Birmingham and they didn't want to pay for two motorways. So it ended up going to Leeds.

[tony sayer]

In article , The Medway Handyman scribeth thus

I've seen that in my parents old concrete house built just after the war looks like wood shavings mixed in with some sort of cement...

[Roger]

The message from contains these words:

The southern end of the M6 was a relatively late addition (late

60s/early 70s?). Prior to that the London/Birmingham route was M1/M45/A45.

[Tony Bryer]

Yes, it looks like woodwool to me. The problems you refer to came to light at New Malden House, a tower of about 12 storeys (IIRC) in SW London. The floors were made by using woodwool slabs as permanent shuttering, reinforcement and concrete on top. What happened was that when the concrete was poured, the woodwool acted as a lovely vibration soak, leaving the concrete far from compacted, but, as you say, this could not be seen as the woodwool was not removed.

[Bruce]

Thanks, Tony.

Those were the days ... failures due to improper use of woodwool and high alumina cement, alkali-aggregate reaction (a.k.a. "concrete cancer" ... !

With woodwool, the concrete needed extra careful compaction. I think the biggest problems were with slabs that incorporated downstand beams, and it would have been difficult to ensure proper compaction. The biggest problem of all was that you never got to see the concrete, as the woodwool was left in situ. At least when you stripped traditional formwork, problems like this could be identified and remedial action taken.

Ironically, modern concrete mixes require far less compaction and they would make woodwool a very sensible alternative to conventional formwork. But once a product has a bad name, that's it.

[Peter Johnson]

My house, built 1988, has it, or something like it, in the bathroom, en suite and cloakroom walls. My last house, also built 1988 but by a different builder, had it in the bathroom walls.

[Tim S]

Peter Johnson coughed up some electrons that declared:

I think I saw something similar comprising the flat roof substrate at CenterParcs in Belgium (Erpeheide). Possibly a denser/stringer version?

[ARWadworth]

To get past Leeds to the A64 around York? The A1 M1 link road? A fair bit of the motorway (inc M621) was renamed as the junction was created.

It now means there are 6 lanes of standing traffic at rush hour where the A1, M1 and M62 roughly join each other instead of the three lanes of standing traffic that we had before.

Is that progress?

Adam