It's that time of the year when the generous senior management team allow everybody a few days of almost paid leave to enjoy the sunshine at glamorous locations of their choice. While we're all away, please do enjoy some of the previous 8,000 posts from the last 20 years and we'll see you again soon.
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New research from King’s College London suggests more than one in six fathers would quit if forced to work in office full-time, and that working from home in garden offices and other home environments could improve family wellbeing, gender equality, fertility, and staff retention, but only if fathers can use it without stigma or career penalties.
The report, led by King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) based at King’s Business School, finds that fathers increasingly value working from home because it allows them to stay committed to paid work while being more present in family life. Yet the report warns that formal access is not enough. Fathers may be allowed to work from home on paper, but workplace cultures, visibility expectations and assumptions about commitment can still make it difficult to use in practice.
Key findings from the report show:
The report argues that fathers working from home can change how families manage the pressure points of daily life, from commuting and school routines to childcare and household work. It can also help with worker engagement, productivity as well as allowing employers hold on to staff who might otherwise look for roles that fit better with family life.
“Flexible working was never a mothers' issue," said Professor Heejung Chung, Director of the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership and co-author of the report. "It's time we stopped treating it like one. Post-pandemic fathers have discovered something their own fathers never had, the school run, dinner time, the chance to actually be there supporting family well-being and financial stabilities.
“What is more, when men are involved, not only do their ideas of what it means to be a man changes but so do their children’s. A generation is growing up with a different idea of masculinity. Remote work isn't just reshaping offices. It's reshaping families and the future of gender roles.”
Shiyu Yuan, Research Assistant at King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership and co-author of the report added: “What employers may have not fully grasped is that working from home is not just nice to have or a cost to be managed, but something must-have and a reason for people to stay. For fathers, it is now a part of the family infrastructures and the coping strategy they rely on to be achieve both their career and family aspirations. Taking it away would disrupt family life, increase stress, and damage the engagement and loyalty of their most experienced staff.
“However, simply providing flexibility is not enough. Without tackling the stigma associated with flexibility, fathers may be fear of using it, or feel forced to use it in ways that protect their image at work while damaging their and their family’s wellbeing.”
Image courtesy Warwick Buildings
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This garden studio at the end of a recently built two bedroom house in Leyton, London, was designed by architect Joe Burke. It runs the full width of the back garden and the Shedworking staff were particularly taken by the horizontal design which works so well with the wooden facade.
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Woodlands Home & Garden Group’s consumer-facing brand Tiger has reached a significant milestone with the opening of its 30th UK show site.
The latest site - opened at Sam Turner & Sons in Northallerton - joins a nationwide offline network spanning Scotland, the North of England, Wales, the Midlands and the Home Counties. Tiger now operates sites in partnership with British Garden Centres, Blue Diamond, Caulders, Dobbies, Yorkshire Garden Centres, Klondyke, Cherry Lane, alongside independent operators and standalone destination sites.
New sites launched this year sinclude Ashton, Basingstoke, Dundee, Grantham, Great Yarmouth, Hinckley, Linlithgow and Morpeth.
"The physical retail environment remains incredibly powerful for considered purchases like sheds and garden rooms," said Stuart Davison, Commercial Director at Woodlands. "Our research shows that while many consumers enjoy our online shopping experience, a lot customers want to see, touch and compare our quality buildings in the flesh."
The show sites run alongside Tiger’s digital platform which includes online configurators allowing customers to design bespoke buildings and a virtual showroom to browse the collection.
Originally founded in Yorkshire over 110 years ago, the business is now owned via an Employee Owned Trust, employing more than 230 people across manufacturing, head office, logistics as well as retail.
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The future of Charles Dickens's shedlike writing chalet looks a lot brighter thanks to a major financial lifeline from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Set in the gardens of Eastgate House, just off Rochester's High Street, it will receive a £240,000 grant to help develop plans to restore the architectural treasure and open it up to the public. Medway Council is contributing £40,000, while project partners from the Rochester and Chatham branch of the Dickens Fellowship are contributing £5,000.
Now more than 160 years old, this Grade I-listed structure, situated in Eastgate Gardens, is extremely fragile and at serious risk of being lost.
Dickens worked there on several of his novels including Our Mutual Friend, The Uncommercial Traveller, and his final, unfinished, work The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He also rehearsed there before his numerous public appearances and lined the second floor with mirrors to help him prepare.
The chalet was given to him as a present from actor friend Charles Fechter in 1864 when Dickens lived at Gads Hill in Higham. It arrived at Higham Railway Station on Christmas Eve 1864, in 94 pieces packed into 58 boxes, an early example of prefabricated design and was moved to its current location in Rochester in the 1960s.
The project will conserve and restore the Chalet where organisers plan to develop a programme of events for residents, schools, and visitors to explore Dickens’ creativity and his contemporary relevance as a social campaigner. If development plans are successful, they will unlock a further funding of £1.2m from the Heritage Fund.
Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: "I’m pleased we are adding the Charles Dickens Writing Chalet, the writing nook where he wrote his last novels in peace and tranquillity, to the writing heritage we’ve funded over the years."
Image: Nick Johnson/The Imageworks
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A nice case study from Modern Garden Rooms who built this garden office with storage for a client in London. It replaced an existing garden shed with a much larger and more useful building for the compact garden, with an integrated shed for storing garden tools.
It's a 6m x 3m build combining its two most popular models, the concave garden room and the cube room. Inside there is a main room with an internal doorway leading to a smaller room at the back. The windowless shed/storage room was built to the front with its own access via a 'hidden' door. Features include 300mm decking and French doors.
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You've got until June 30 to catch the three marvellous mirrored beach huts on show at the Worthing Fringe Festival. The 'A piECE of our Mind' installations is built by ECE Architecture, this is what they say about them:
The three miniature mirrored beach huts are playful, creative and deliberately rooted in place; designed to celebrate Worthing, spark curiosity, and invite people to see the town through a different lens. As they move across locations throughout June, they encourage residents and visitors alike to explore, pause, connect and take pride in their surroundings.
The moveable huts were made with locally sourced materials including from Covers Timber & Builders Merchants in Bognor Regis, and will be auctioned for charity at the end of the month.
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While we are obviously very much here to bang the gong for shedworking and garden offices (and other microarchitectural marvels), Shedworking has always been a supporter of third place working, the idea that you don't have to be sitting in a 'traditional' office to get your work done (we were perhaps the earliest exponent of pubworking).
So we've been following with some interest how Surrey County Cricket club have trialled its 'Work From Oval' experiment this summer, encouraging people to come and watch some County Championship matches at the Kia Oval and bring their work along too.
For example, tickets for the late April game against Essex cost a very reasonable £15 and more than 100 people took advantage of the offer, making use of the various wifi upgrades during pre-season and the set aside work areas with desks, which not only have access to power but just as importantly clear views of the game.
“We’re determined to continue to grow the audience for the Rothesay County Championship and the team have been working on ways to try and encourage more people to come through the gates this year," said Surrey CEO, Steve Elworthy. “We know that many fans treat the Kia Oval as their second home and have been using the ground to ‘Work From Oval’ for many years and we wanted to encourage others to come along as well.”
The initiative is continuing to run through all Surrey men’s and women’s games during working week hours this summer.
Photo courtesy Surrey CC
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It's time. The entrants to this year's Tiger Shed of the Year competition have been whittled town the public vote stage with 38 finalists battling to be overall champion in this 20th anniversary event.
You can vote via the link above for:
Public voting is now open and closes July 14. One of our favourites is The Wheelhouse, below, owned by Richard Banks & Abi from Chesterton, Shropshire.
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A tremendous 36sqm asymmetrical artist's studio under a tree canopy in Wiltshire from Richmond Bell Architects, pictured above next to the 1950s bungalow on the same property. The SIPs-built studio has a large metal-framed window and roof light to get in as much light as possible and offer nice views of the garden, as well as charred timber cladding, concealed gutters, and a natty interior window seat.
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Shepherd's hut specialists Plankbridge launched a new partnership at Chelsea Flower Show this year with wallpaper and fabric company Lewis & Wood. Here's what the interior of your new hut could look like!
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My favourite build from Chelsea Flower Show this year has come to meet a wider public in St Pancras station in London
Post-show, the Martha Krempel and Malvern Garden Buildings delight is now on display in the main concourse where passersby can nip in and learn more about garden offices, shedworking, and peatland conservation. Or as the St Pancras folk put it:
Visitors are invited to pause during their journey, explore the space and reflect on the relationship between creativity, nature and the environments that inspire both. The installation also celebrates London St. Pancras Highspeed’s long-standing connection with music through the inclusion of a Steinway Spirio self-playing piano, creating moments of reflection and spontaneous performance throughout the day.
You can nip in and have a gander until June 21.
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Booths Garden Studios has gone live with its new redesigned web site. It's well worth clicking through from the link and having a good nose round - Shedworking gives it the thumbs up for smartness, detail, and interest, with a good case studies section and plenty of information about its various zero maintenance offerings, as well as renting details and an attractive gallery.
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There's only a week to go before entries close for this year's 20th anniversary Shed of the Year competition.
The last day is June 14 to get your shed into the mix, before public voting begins the following day and closes on July 14. The winners will be announced on July 29, with an overall winner, category winners, and regional winners.
Organiser and founder of the competition Andrew Wilcox, known to us old-timers as Uncle Wilco, is particularly encouraging entries in the Simple But Effective, Community, and Colourful categories.
Click the link top for more information about how to enter.
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A special treat for you all for this week's Finery, an excerpt from my A Drink with the Idler talk last week with the magazine's editor Tom Hodgkinson.
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Treehouse specialists Blue Forest will transform the grounds of St Martin-in-the-Fields, overlooking Trafalgar Square, into 'Lost Oasis' an immersive urban garden of timber, greenery, food, drink, sport and live entertainment.
Designed and built by Blue Forest in partnership with Cornwall’s Lost Gardens of Heligan, Lost Oasis (artist's render pictured above) will features a series of carefully crafted timber structures and treehouses alongside equally appealing planting. It will offer rotating chef residencies from the likes of Nathan Outlaw, major sporting screenings including the football World Cup, Wimbledon and the Formula 1 British Grand Prix, as well as live music and comedy festival.
“The timber structures will feel as though they have grown out of the landscape, wrapped in living planting and built to tread lightly on their surroundings, bringing a true sense of the wild into the heart of London," said Andy Payne, Blue Forest founder.
It will run June 10 to August 30 and Shedworking is planning to report back from its press opening evening next Tuesday.
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Arctic Cabins, known for their non-square hexagonal huts, have brought out a square hut model called The BBQube. Here's what they say about it:
Perfect for compact garden spaces, the BBQube has straight-walls, and rather than the usual hexagonal shape, they are cube-shaped to minimise the cabin’s footprint and fit neatly into the corner of your garden. Step inside and you’ll immediately notice how the clever layout maximises space. The BBQube offers generous seating and easy movement, creating a sociable environment without overwhelming your garden.
Features include a high-quality central BBQ grill with adjustable hood, three large reindeer skins, and Composite pegged base system.
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The new garden office HQ of the family-run Aqua Sol Ingredients from Bakers Garden Buildings represents an important move from using bedrooms and dining rooms to a fully bespoke garden office. It has a steel and timber frame and features climate control temperature equipment inside. Enjoy the short video of it below.
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This week's Finery is actually for sale. It's the treehouse in the grounds of the Old Rectory in Kilvington near Nottingham. On the market with Strutt & Parker for £1.6m which also gets you 6 acres of land, a five-bedroom home, and other utbuildings include a garden room with kitchen, garaging and a tool shed, plus a 3 acre paddock with stabling.
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A splendid build by By Boon in South Oxfordshire near a natural swimming lake. Features include a tin roof, decking along the length of the cabin, and old Crittell windows sourced from a 1950s East London factory. Interestingly, the whole thing was built on a cassise and wheels so it can be fairly easily moved if/when necessary.
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"For most of the past decade, garden rooms sat in the homeowner trend column, first as a lifestyle upgrade and then as a lockdown solution that quietly outlived the pandemic. In 2026, they have become something more interesting for property investors: a low-friction asset-improvement tool with potential impact on rental yield, tenant retention and exit value. Add permitted development rules, limited EPC disruption and no separate council tax treatment where the room remains ancillary, and the back garden starts to look less like unused space and more like a portfolio lever."
For more on this, see the story on Property Investor Today.
Images courtesy Smart Modular Buildings
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This marvellously evocative photo of William Wordsworth's writing hut at Rydal Mount was taken by friend of Shedworking photographer and writer Chris Routledge. Of equally high calibre is this guest post written exclusively for us by Kira Welland a PhD student at the University of Cumbria in Ambleside whose research (‘The spatial contexts of Rydal Mount and how these influence the influence the writings of Mary, Dorothy, and Dora Wordsworth’), explores the literary heritage and architectural history of Rydal Mount:
At the head of the Rydal Mount gardens sits a poet’s throne. This is the Summer House, a garden hut that holds gravitas far beyond its humble size. It was here that William Wordsworth (1770-1850) would compose his poetry. However, this quaint writing hut not only provided the location for poesy; it was also a source of inspiration.
Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount from 1813 until his death in 1850, and he was responsible for defining the character of its gardens. The terraces, built to mimic walking in the fells, were largely landscaped by Wordsworth during the 1820s.
Connecting two of these terraces, it is likely Wordsworth built the Summer House around the same time. Certainly by 1826, Wordsworth wrote a poem on the prospect of being evicted from Rydal Mount, and intended to inscribe it on the door of the Summer House:
The Massy Ways, carried across these heights
By Roman perseverance, are destroyed, -
Or hidden underground, like sleeping worms.
How then to hope that Time will spare
This humble walk? Yet on the mountain’s side
A Poet’s hand first shaped it; and the steps
Of that same Bard – repeated to and fro
At morn, at noon, and under moonlight skies
Through the vicissitudes of many a year -
Forbade the weeds to creep o’er its grey line.
William Wordsworth, ‘The Massy Ways, carried across these heights’, lines 1-10.As the current structure differs slightly from Wordsworth’s day, the Summer House is now open on both sides to allow direct access from one terrace to another. Constructed from slate and previously lined with pinecones, it appears as an organic feature of the fellside, reflecting Wordsworth’s Romantic philosophy. With the doorways framing picturesque views towards Wansfell and Loughrigg, the little hut has big prospects, and it is easy to see how one could be enraptured in poesy from such a place.
The Summer House inspired compositions beyond those of its maker. Maria Jane Jewsbury (1800-1833) first visited Rydal Mount in 1825, and was captivated by the house and grounds. The resulting work ‘A Poet’s Home’ was published in The Literary Magnet in 1826, and featured the following lines referring to the Summer House:
Winding walk, and sheltered nook,
For student grave, and graver book;
Or a bird-like bower, perchance,
Fit for maiden and romance.
Maria Jane Jewsbury, ‘A Poet’s Home’, lines 9-12.Jewsbury expresses the versatility of the Summer House, both in its purpose for Wordsworth’s philosophical ponderings, but also as a sanctuary. The ‘sheltered nook’ evokes a familial intimacy fitting for the small hut, particularly when paired with ideas of youth and romance in the following lines. Located at the highest point in the grounds yet shielded by magnificent trees, it is a paradoxical place: small, but grand; sheltered, but imposing; solemn, but whimsical.
Two hundred years later, the Summer House continues its contradictory existence. It encapsulates the sublimity of the Lake District’s landscape, simultaneously lofty and snug. The Summer House endures as a venue and source for creativity, captured in Chris Routledge’s recent photograph. To use Wordsworth’s own words, this hut prevails for “... those pure Minds that reverence the Muse”, and will hopefully continue to do so for generations to come.
For the past few years, Kira has worked as Rydal Mount’s House Guide and Administrator, and now works for the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. She is in the process of creating her own blog recording her research journey, and is also active on Instagram, Bluesky, and
LinkedIn.
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There were plenty of garden offices, sheds, and other shedlike structures at Chelsea Flower Show which I visited yesterday. Three highlights for you, plus a recommendation to get along if you can at all as there is so much to see there. First of all, something I think we can all get behind, The Old Shed Key Bottle Opener.
Next, my favourite build of the show, The Composer's Cabin by Malvern Garden Buildings which we've mentioned a couple of times before this year on Shedworking.
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