Hutters.uk – Iain's blog about hutting
Huts, cabins, sheds, and chalets
Last Sunday Channel 4 showed the third episode of this year’s Shed of the Year competition, with the “Pub” and “Budget” categories.
For me the Inshriach Distillery, The Shed, Cliff Hanger, and mountain shed were the stand-outs this time.
Next Sunday, the fourth and final episode has the “Cabins/Summerhouses” and “Workshops/Studios” shed categories.
Last Sunday Channel 4 showed the second episode of this year’s Shed of the Year competition, with the “Unique” and “Historical” categories. For me the Treehouse and Anglo-Saxon Garden House stood out, but the Corrugated Cottage above all reminded me of the kinds of buildings put up by hutters and plotlanders in the 1920 and 1930s. A few of them still survive today – although more often in wood rather than corrugated iron. #shedoftheyear was trending again on Twitter during and after the programme, with thousands of people posting tweets with that hashtag, as I blogged about last week. During the week the tweets have continued, and some of them have linked to stories and blogs that are well worth a read: https://twitter.com/SandraLoy1/status/615238304401854464 https://twitter.com/MBWITW/status/615839926454722560 https://twitter.com/unclewilco/status/615083786049617920 Next Sunday, episode three has the “Pub” and “Budget” shed categories.
Last Sunday Channel 4 showed the first episode of this year’s Shed of the Year competition, with the “Normal Sheds” and “Eco Sheds” categories. “Eco” included Cormac’s Bothy (follow the link for lots of photos) which is a handbuilt, round-log cabin in the Scottish Highlands. #shedoftheyear was trending on Twitter during and after the programme, with thousands of people posting tweets with that hashtag.
Twitter lets us get a sample of what the audience thought, and many of the comments about Cormac’s Bothy were what hutters might expect:
That highland bothy shed is just the most magical building I've ever seen! It's like a dream! #shedoftheyear
— Elisabeth Anderson is at @velobetty@toot.bike (@velobetty) June 21, 2015
Others questioned whether the entrants were really sheds at all!
If these are sheds then I'm stumped? #Eco sheds? Nope log cabin, green house and something resembling toilet block! #shedoftheyear
— Linzi Wilkinson (@iamlinzi_) June 21, 2015
On Monday, Patrick Barkham’s Guardian story was getting retweeted with the #shedoftheyear hashtag too:
How the garden shed could solve our housing problems | Patrick Barkham http://t.co/FxlbkE0IOT
— Patrick Barkham (@patrick_barkham) June 22, 2015
During the week the tweets have continued, with a mixture of people watching on catch-up, and other people using it to reach target audiences, whether that’s Cuprinol or Yale advertising their products, people proudly showing off their own sheds, or exhibitors at events like Woodfest Wales:
From @WoodfestWales to #shedoftheyear #cabinofthegreenman all started @WoodfestWales @MrGeorgeClarke @Channel4 pic.twitter.com/ZnUsKtyWPw
— woodlaw carvings (@woodlawcarvings) June 23, 2015
Next Sunday, episode two has the “Unique” and “Historical” sheds categories.
You may know Jonathan Meades for his quirky and often brutally frank documentaries about architecture, and in the first of his 1990 series “Abroad in Britain” he visits a then-surviving plotland community in Bewdley on the river Severn in the West Midlands. Early in the programme is this striking aerial scene showing the huts, cabins, and chalets along the riverbank and going back into the countryside, accompanied by Howard Davidson’s sweeping music:
Meades clearly loves the place, and sees it as part of the wider twentieth century struggle between planners, academic architecture, and commercial developers on one side and ordinary people wanting some rural land to build a weekend retreat on.
Where suburbs were so often filled up with fake versions of rural buildings that just yielded another form of urban uniformity, the huts, shanties, cottages, and chalets of the plotlands are an authentic vernacular architecture.
Central to this is the idea of bodging. That is turning the available components and materials into the thing you need:
The idea of DIY has been traduced by the ubiquity of places such as this. The letters DIY nowadays constitute a sort of lie. You do it certainly, but you don’t really do it yourself. You may perform the physical act of hammering … but all you actually do is assemble a kit of parts, which obviates the necessity of bodging, and it obviates too the necessity of thinking. Kits are agents of uniformity. The true bodging tradition depends on having the nouse to realise that everything under the sun is mutable. That every object is fit for transformation from its original purpose. So every railway carriage is a potential luxury shack.
Meades conducts the whole programme dressed in his trademark dark business suit, and where required by sunshine, dark glasses. Here he is rowing down the river Severn in this outfit. To be fair, he does have a pair of black wellies that he sports in the intro and where necessary when trudging across fields to examine abandoned huts.
The programme has lots more of images of the buildings themselves:
Looking today on the Google Maps aerial images and Streetview, it does appear as if many of the huts and chalets are still there, near the Northwood Halt station on the Severn Valley railway line.
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