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When Paul Watson was invited to test-drive the new Saab 9-3 BioPower Convertible he didn’t hesitate. “I’m very interested in cars and had been aware of Saab and its BioPower range, but I didn’t really know what to expect. Having recently become a parent for the first time, my attitude towards the environment and the world in which my son will grow up has made me much more aware of some of these fundamental issues. So when Saab said that I would also be driving the car to one of the most eco-friendly buildings in the country it sounded like the perfect combination.”
Paul is a senior designer at one of the UK’s leading creative design consultancies, Dew Gibbons, and his eye for detail is such that when he first saw the new car in its striking Lynx Yellow colour he immediately picked up on its very individual design characteristics. “I could see how strikingly designed and contemporary the car looked – it’s very cutting edge and the lines at the front have a lot of character. I could also see the Scandinavian influence through the use of clean, uncluttered lines. I couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel: it just looked like a car that would be fun to drive and with the environmental element as well I felt it was going to tick all of the boxes”.
The day began in Bury St. Edmunds in the east of England. It was a beautiful, cloudless morning (it didn’t last!) and our first stop was to fill up at one of the nearby bio ethanol or E85 pumps. Our ultimate destination was to be Welney in Cambridgeshire, a little further north and east in a remote and rather bleak part of the country. The new Visitor Centre at Welney – part of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s collection of sites around the country dedicated to the preservation and observation of wildfowl in their natural habitats – had only recently opened. Designed by one of the UK’s most prominent architectural firms, Allies and Morrison, its distinctive, natural forms and range of ecologically sound materials and functions have already made it a flagship building for sustainable living.
En route to Welney, Paul was enjoying the noticeable extra power that the bio ethanol fuel had provided. “I could definitely feel how responsive the car was. It was more immediate and really fun to drive. I could really feel in control. The car has fantastic performance but at the same time I knew I was doing something constructive by driving a car fuelled with bio ethanol. Why would you not want to embrace that technology?”
As we drove up the long approach road to Welney it was clear that the building we had come to visit was something out of the ordinary. The main building was conceived as a solid volume echoing the local barn vernacular and strong lines of the surrounding landscape. Once inside you get an immediate sense of space and light with large windows and smaller apertures looking out over the wide spaces beyond. Built using frost and rot-resistant Siberian larch cladding the deployment of natural wood material for the entire structure gives it a real affinity with the landscape it inhabits. But what really strikes the first-time visitor is the new pedestrian bridge linking the Centre with the Observatory beyond. Formed as one continuous true arc it takes visitors out into the wetland areas where, on a winter’s day, you can see more than 7,000 visiting Whooper and Bewick swans from Iceland and Russia. It is an extraordinary spectacle.
Paul Watson was taken aback when he first saw the Centre. “I was attracted by the idea of linking the building and car but I had never seen anything quite like this. It’s an imposing structure with its texture and colour and it has a wonderful affinity with the landscape. In a strange way, being somewhere as remote and unspoilt as this makes you want to be more responsible.”
Julie Ward, the Centre Manager, is understandably keen to describe the Centre’s eco credentials. “All of the staff here are very conscious of environmental issues. From recycling rainwater and drawing heat from the earth to recycling children’s packed lunch waste into three different bins – it’s all part of the way in which we want to encourage people to learn about nature and the environment and how they work together. Lifelong learning is very important and explaining the importance of our wetlands not just for birds but for fish, invertebrates and insects – the whole cycle is so important”. She stresses the importance of managing the wetland areas – cutting reeds, looking after grasses, all of the things that make the wetland environment suitable to visiting birds. “If we don’t get it right we risk changing the whole eco system,” she adds.
 Click here to sign up for a test drive
Dew Gibbons can be found at: www.dewgibbons.com
Paul Watson was driving the Saab 9-3 Convertible with the 2.0t BioPower engine (200 bhp)*. Top speed: 225/220 (M6/A6) 0-100 km/h seconds: 8.2/9,3 (M6/A6)
*BioPower is available in certain markets. Performance figures with E85 fuel. There are as yet no agreed EC directives governing the measurements of CO2 emissions from bio ethanol engines. We can therefore not show any detailed emission figures for BioPower engines.
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