Shed Man!

When you think of a shed, I’d guess you come up with a small wooden edifice with a lawnmower, a couple of kids bikes, and a stack of perilously piled up flower pots. That’s the traditional British shed and we all have them. However, the shed as location of genius and endeavour is quite another thing. Did you know Peter the Great planned St Petersburg from a wooden cabin? I’ll bet you weren’t aware that award-winning inventor, Trevor Bayliss invented his wind-up radio in a shed. The creative arts are not excluded: Dylan Thomas, Roald Dahl, and Rudyard Kipling all produced masterpieces from shed locations. Not only that but composer Benjamin Britten's garden study (shed to you and me) is considered so important that it has been classified as a Grade II listed building.

In more recent times sheds have become popular with media types and those known to work from a shed include Andrew Marr, Alison Pearson and Kirstie Allsop of Location, Location, Location fame.

Brighton based John Davies is Shedman – he’s a writer, poet and filmmaker who, in 2002, had his first artistic shed-related experience. He proposed setting up a shed in the Booth Museum in Brighton and was amazed at the number of people who came along to see him. He decided he’d tapped a great resource of British cultural life and since then, as well as appearing on Gardener’s World, he’s toured the country with his Shedman project, creating residencies and workshops to explore the nature of sheds and the environment. He’s currently writing a book about his Shedman experiences.

Full shed photograph by Spiralz, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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