subject: Traditional Uk Tent Styles [print this page] The following article covers 4 traditional UK tent styles that are no longer generally available. This is mainly due to technological changes and developments in the camping and tent manufacturing industry. The tents covered in this article are Pup Tents, Ridge Tents, Square Pole Tents and Sibley Tents. These tents are all generally single-skin tents.
The Construction of Traditional UK Tents
All of the tents mentioned in this article were made of a canvas fabric and used a substantial amount of guy ropes to keep the tent ridged. These guy ropes numbered up to 18 on certain tent types and had to be positioned and tensioned precisely for the tent to stay correctly pitched. Because of this some form of training was needed to erect the tents and they were not popular with casual campers in the UK. All four of these tents used tent poles made out of metal, but the pup tent poles could be substituted with wooden poles.
Ridge Tents
Ridge tents are also known as wall tents in the UK and could sleep up to 8 (and sometimes more) people at a time. They usually had a rectangular floor ranging in size from 8ft x 10ft in the smaller tents to 16ft x 20ft in the larger tents. The general height of all Ridge Tents was between 6ft and 9ft. The side walls of Ridge Tents were approximately 3ft high.
Ridge Tents used a single upright pole at each end and each was joined to a horizontal ridge pole. Bigger Ridge Tents often had an additional upright pole in the middle to help support the ridge pole. Ridge Tents also had two additional storm guy ropes that could be added if high winds or stormy weather was encountered.
Pup Tents
Pup Tents were simply smaller versions of a ridge tent and were intended to shelter 2 or 3 people. Its floor ranged in size from 4ft x 6ft up to 6ft x 8ft and the ridge height ranged from 3ft up to 5ft. Earlier versions of the Pup Tent had a single upright pole at each end, while later versions had two poles at each end arranged in an 'A' shape.
Square Pole Tents
Square Pole Tents were often used for family camping in the UK during the early parts of the 20th century. This type of tent used up to 9 poles and guy ropes to erect and needed an experienced group of 4 campers to set it up in about 10 to 15 minutes.
The Square Pole Tent used tent poles ranging in size from 5ft on the outsides to 12ft in the centre. This gave the tent plenty of headspace over a floor area of up to 15ft.
Sibley Tents
Sibley Tents were bell shaped tent that had a circular floor of between 10 and 15 feet and used a single central pole of about 10ft. Guy ropes were connected every 2 ft around the top of the walls.
The Sibley Tent had to be carefully tensioned to hold the pole upright otherwise the tent was unable to keep its shape.
