In praise of sheds

 Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm pays attention to sheds.

You can find all kinds of books about the ambience of great houses. But most books about sheds tell you how to build them, rather what it’s like to be in a good one. This is more like it:

 

There are many of us for whom the shed is a natural habitat.

 

The writer Robert Macfarlane, a friend of Deakin’s, said Deakin put sheds and an old railway wagon on his land. He’d write and sleep in some of them. In Notes, Deakin reported that he’d been afield, “inspecting sheds and their cobwebby contents.”

His main shed held his woodworking tools. Theatrical lights were strung from the ceiling. A pair of anglepoise lamps focused on the lathe. 

He once spent part of a day in one shed, which held a collection of molding and architraves, beams that fit between pillars or posts. 

 

I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.

 

That seems to me an essential feature of the psychology of shed ownership: the ability to overlook needed repairs. 

Deakin’s sheds include at least one photograph of a famed woodworker, a legless Windsor smoking chair and a stained-glass window. Do all sheds need decor? I think so.

There’s a peculiar kind of luxury that sets off fantasies in men who ought to know better: Rolex watches, Corvette cars, Montblanc pens. I’m immune to all that but daydream of sheds. 

• Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp., 36, 22 and 39-40.