The BBQ Block concept started with a practical problem at Bison Hill Grill events. We needed a serving surface worthy of the food we were cooking. The gap between taking something off the fire at its best and putting it down on a surface that looked wrong was a genuine issue — not because it affected the food, but because it affected the experience. Live-fire cooking deserves a proper place to land.
We’d been using standard plastic chopping boards. They worked. They felt entirely wrong.
The Local Woodland
We contacted a woodland near Reigate about surplus oak. The Surrey and Kent countryside holds significant managed woodland — timber that’s harvested, milled, and either used or left to air-dry depending on demand. We found, through that contact, a fallen oak that had been milled into planks and left to air-dry. The tree had come down naturally; the planks were already cut and drying.
We visited the woodland to see the timber in person. This is the kind of sourcing decision that requires a physical inspection — you can’t assess timber quality from a description. What we found when we got there was something we hadn’t fully anticipated: the live-edge slabs.
What Live-Edge Means
A live-edge plank retains the natural curve of the tree’s outer edge — the bark line, or just below it, where the profile of the trunk is still visible. Conventional woodworking removes this to produce clean, straight-edged boards. Live-edge retains it. The result is a board where one side has the geometry of the machine — straight, precise — and the other side has the geometry of the tree. Organic, irregular, specific to that particular trunk.
When we saw the live-edge slabs at the woodland, we knew immediately that this was the design language of what we were building. Each board would be different from every other board. Not slightly different — genuinely different. The same species, the same process, the same function; a completely unique object.
The Brief
From that visit, the brief crystallised: take this material, handcraft it into a serving and carving surface, finish it food-safe, size it for outdoor use, and let the natural character of the oak be the product rather than something to minimise. No two identical. Every one traceable to a specific piece of timber from a specific woodland a short distance from where we operate.
The development work that followed — milling, drying assessment, finishing tests — built on that brief. But the direction was set the day we stood in the woodland and looked at a fallen English oak that had been waiting to become something worth making.
