New Head At The BBA

The new principal at the Boat Building Academy on furniture, boats and the beauty of clinker.

- Steffan Meyric Hughes

Lyme Regis, self-styled ‘pearl of Dorset’, might be best known for its gentility, Georgian houses and, of course, as the site of Louisa Musgrove’s death in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, but with Storm Brendan in full force, it looked savage. On the A35, a lorry lay on its side, blown over in the high winds, and two road signs were twisted off their legs. Above Lyme Regis, the sea was marching. Outside the Boat Building Academy on the seafront, two passersby were bent double, walking slowly into the teeth of it. Inside the shelter of the main building, the shop floor was alive with industry, as boatbuilding students clustered around their build projects. Upstairs, Will Reed, who took the job of principal in June 2019, after a long tenure held by Yvonne Green, was sat in his office.

Will did not have the typical died-in-the-wool upbringing of the second-generation sailing enthusiast. He grew up in landlocked Oxfordshire, and the first taste of fun on water came on the canals there, on the family’s narrowboat. “Just chugging around, really! We had a lovely time,” as Will puts it. “A bit of sailing” followed in his teens, but by that point the woodworking bug had him firmly in its grip. “It all started on a day out to a country craft fair when I was seven or eight, and I saw a treadle-operated pole lathe. I went home and built one myself, with some help from my dad – and it worked!” By 10, Will knew how to dovetail joints. When adulthood loomed after A-Levels, Will chose furniture design and manufacture for his degree, then took a job as a technician in a college in High Wycombe, teaching and helping students to set up the various tools and machinery of the trade, while gaining some post-graduate teaching qualifications. The marine side of things re-entered Will’s life again in the early 2000s, after discovering