Reforesting Scotland’s Thousand Huts campaign has been systematically assembling the legal basis for a revival of hutting, with campaigning and targeted lobbying with local councils and Holyrood. Results so far include the inclusion of hutting in the Scottish Planning Policy for local planning authorities, Stirling Council proposing to include huts in their local plan, and a Scottish Government consultation on exemptions for huts in the building regulations. Last month saw the launch at the Scottish Parliament of the Thousand Huts campaign’s own “New hutting developments: Good practice guidance on the planning, development and management of huts and hut sites”.
This document is aimed at planning authorities, hut owners/builders, and hut site developers, and ties together the strands of historical context, hut design and siting, environment impact, planning and building regulations, and issues surrounding hut and site ownership. At 27 pages, each section is very concise but together they give a very comprehensive overview of what’s involved in reviving hutting.
I’m always trying to find connections and commonalities between the different traditions of huts, cabins, sheds, and chalets, and so I was really pleased to see this paragraph in Professor Peter Roberts’ foreward:
Huts have a long history of providing informal space for many uses; just think back to the pioneering Plotlanders in inter-war Southern England, the historic role of the caban as a place for debate and learning in Welsh quarries and mines, or the longstanding Dutch love of their ‘cottages’ set alongside canals and in allotments.