I have mentioned the Manor Garden Olympic Allotments before
But photographer Jan Stradtmann has some great images of the sheds before they were destroyed to make way for the games.
More about the Manor Garden Olympic Allotments.
Of course you can view our sheddies wonderful allotment sheds here.
These are artfully crafted photos, all atmospheric lighting and interesting textures. As sheds they’re laughable accretions of domestic debris, like the home of some giant east-London caddis flies. They are quintessentially English allotment sheds. They haven’t been built as much as grown, nourished by whatever came to hand from skips.
And then you realize that it’s all gone. Those funny sheds weren’t funny sheds, they were a part of what decent honest people did in their spare time, and had done for years and years. I appreciate a good shed as much as the next sheddie, but knocking down the sheds is no great loss in itself, it’s what it symbolizes. The lives the allotmenteers had on their site meant nothing to the olympic developers, they we little people that didn’t matter. It’s shameful.