Today in the Times, Kate Muir writes about sheds, sheds week and interviews my good self.
Across the nation, in back gardens and allotments, excitement is in the spring air, for now is the time to enter the Shed of the Year 2009. Your shed need not be expensive, but it has to show ingenuity, eccentricity or cack-handed exuberance to win, if previous competition entries are typical. We shed-lovers — the technical term is “sheddies” — are fascinated by the art and science of hut erection. We can easily spend a couple of hours ogling readers’ sheds online. The Shed of the Year competition is our Cup Final, our Olympics, our Miss World competition.
This report comes to you by laptop from my humble shed in Cricklewood, North London. It’s painted allotment-regulation green, and has a red velvet baroque chair which I found in a skip, and metal shelves which cost a fiver when Woolworths closed. At £99 from Homebase, and 3ft wide, it is the smallest shed on the allotments and was built by drunks on a dim winter afternoon three years ago. It goes without saying that my shed, like all much-loved sheds, is an escape hatch to a different world.
Unlike my life, my shed is simple, calm and wellorganised: tools hung on nails, seeds in boxes, gardening gloves in pairs: everything where it should be. My shed is prosaic, a glorified allotment locker. I shall not be entering it for Shed of the Year, even in the “Normal Shed” category, because there are far greater works out there, many bordering on the insane.
So why not Share your Shed NOW
Over at the Gaurdian, Shed Judge Alex from Shedworking pens his own piece about Shed Working.
Over the last decade we have witnessed the miniaturisation of the office workplace. A cramped outbuilding which once housed lawnmowers and pots can now comfortably be insulated from the cold, fitted with its own electrics, and link you to anywhere in the world. It’s an alternative workplace revolution. It’s shedworking.
So the broadsheets have sheds covered from from all angles this weekend….
