I spent several years living in Benders: bent pole structures covered with a tarp on the 1990s road protests. We built them on platforms in the trees and on the ground. We were there to protect the trees by putting our bodies in the path of Costain (Ecostaion) and the Department of Transport. We may not have stopped the building of the bypass, but the Tories secretly shelved the road-building program because moving benders was expensive.
The Bender has a long history among the poor, the Traveller community, and the protest community. Among the protest community, they were and are ubiquitous. The bender is warmer in the cold and cooler in the heat than a consumer nylon tent. The consumer nylon tent was originally designed for mountaineers and backpackers. Today, many Nylon tents are palatial, cost hundreds, and last a couple of years before something breaks irreparably. Unless you are a skilled fixer, it’s trash.
The nylon tent for the homeless person is like a sticking plaster with glue that doesn’t stick. There are more broken, abandoned homeless tent homes on the bits of land in between places than there are lived-in ones. They are an eyesore and a hazard to clean up. I have been on litter picks to clean up abandoned homeless tents without coming into contact with the tent or its contents. We take metal bins to the site, and the tent and its contents are handled with tongs and Kevlar gloves, binned, and sent for incineration. The major risk is uncapped used needles, sometimes left as a trap/deterent to others.
The Sanitised bender
Source: https://ystradfflyr.org/bender-tent/ “We wanted something we could build ourselves with only a few days of preparation, put up for two weeks at Pennsic, then store for 50 weeks of each year before being set up again”
Including cutting and snedding the hazel poles, I can build a bender in a few hours: “We wanted something we could build ourselves with only a few days of preparation.” The combined skills of coppicing and hedge-laying are used to select the right poles for cutting to build a bender. In less than an hour, these are cut, sharpened, and formed into a bent pole structure, either woven or tied, and then covered with blankets, cardboard, and tarp. Alternatively, thatch, as in the example below, was built by the author in about 4 hours.
The thatched bent-pole structure is possibly the warmest in winter and coolest in summer setup for the skilled homeless person living on the edge of a city. This design and structure can be expanded and raised in height. It is perfectly camouflaged from the air, and if the position is carefully worked and the inhabitant is careful about going to and from the structure, then that camouflage is better than any DPM camo tarp.
“We built dens when we were kids”, not like this:
- A den in which you can have a fire
- A den in which your fire can’t be seen from outside, even at night
- A super-insulated den that is windproof
- A den containing a fire you can cook on
- A palatial den that costs nothing and demonstrates excellent survival skills for all weather
This structure is 1.5km from the nearest large supermarket, 3/4km from the nearest small shop. 50m from a standpipe, 300m from a road, and 3km from a city centre. Ideally, the resident is better off using a bicycle to access it and get around than a car. The advantage of a bicycle is stealth, and it trains you to lighten the load.
This shelter is not anywhere people go to drink alcohol; it’s too far from the city for most homeless people to be interested in. It’s on land with zero economic value and owned by Railtrack. It is unfenced and mostly waist-deep in nettles for 3/4 of the year. The nettles are food, tinder, and a deterrent to most people. There are no birches growing here, so nettle is the best option for your tinder.
As long as your entry and exit are well hidden, no one will find you for months, possibly years.
The Bender:
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A physician examining a gypsy child with a stethoscope outside a tent on the side of the road. Halftone by Swain after W. Small, 1898.
1898 By: William Small and Swain.Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Bender Structure is an important part of Traveller history and heritage:
And Land-Based Protest History
The Bender has a long history of use among the Hippies, who have always been the defenders of the land from the destruction of predatory capitalism:
Bender structure with chimney on the Gotan Diggers Community, on the Newbury Bypass Protest. The Gotan Diggers community was a protest gardening community inspired by Gerard Winstanley’s Diggers in 1649. We used gardening as a protest to show that land buried under roads was not productive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/27/mining-activism
Rough-thatch historic coppicers’ and foresters’ temporary huts. Note the trimmed materials stacked against the huts. The Bender is a feature of the pre-industrial peripatetic land workers’ homes:
Tinker’s Bubble © Nick Cobbing
For a survivalist, homelessness can be a grift, or it can be the gift that tests skills to the limit. Are you really going to shit in plastic bags, wash with wipes, and shower in other people’s homes? The alternative is the challenge of self-reliance and real survival skills, which remain to be seen.
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