Dr Johnson: shedworker

 

 

Dr Samuel Johnson, he of dictionary fame, was also a shedworker, or to be more precise, a summerhouseworker. However, it was not actually his. 

 

In the last quarter of the 18th century, Johnson was a regular visitor to the Streatham Place home in London of brewing magnate Henry Thrale and his wife Hester. The extensive grounds were home to a rather secluded wooden thatched summerhouse and Johnson took a shine to it so much - he sat and read in it, and may also have written some of his book The Lives of Poets - that it was informally named after him. It's not clear when it was built, but a likely date is 1773. Pictured above is an image of it with Johnson inside hard at work by the 19th century artist William Clarkson Stanfield.

 

After the house was sole in 1825, the Thrales' daughter Susannah took it to her Ashgrove home in Knockholt, Kent. A plaque on the summerhouse, now lost, recorded that: "She erected it on rising ground in the very centre of the grove making all paths lead to it, and making the grove a kind of shrine to Dr Johnson’s memory." Sadly, it was rather neglected and fell into disrepair until it was bought by a Mr WH Wells in 1962 who donated it to Kenwood House where it was restored and re-erected in 1968.

Then tragedy. It burnt down in March 1991. However, using images of the original, London artist Alan Byrne spent more than two years constructing a replica - pictured below - in his back garden in Islington, slates replacing the thatch and with chestnut used for the main build.

Those interested in finding out more should read Shaun Traynor's article in The Author magazine, a piece by good friend of shedworking John 'Shedman' Davies for The Johnson Society about a visit to the replica, and a really thorough history of it by Donald N. Cook in The New Rambler.

 

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Middle England by Jonathan Coe: a shed review

There was a spate of novels which featured sheds half a dozen years ago but sadly very few since. One recent example in which shedworking atmospheres feature is Middle England by Jonathan Coe. We asked John 'Shedman' Davies to review it for Shedworking:

“Genius. Loved it. Wonderful satire and some of the best shed sequences written in many a year!” That was my tweet after reading Middle England and I’m still of the same opinion about this marvellously humane, and far from one-sided take on the Brexit saga, the third in Coe’s series of novels about the Rotter family in Birmingham.

Nowhere is the satire more fun than in the scenes set in or around sheds. A garden centre features strongly as the setting of a kind of perverted Eden where you can take Aged P’s (as Wemmick refers to his father in Dicken’s Great Expectations) for tea. But it also used as the venue for meetings by one of Benjamin’s old school friends, now a publisher of local history books. He’s arranged to meet the author of ‘Postcards of old Droitwich and Feckenham’ to discuss its publication. The author thinks they should go and discuss things “somewhere less public,” and so begins a very funny peregrination to find a shed of a suitable size to host their meeting.

“At the rear of the Woodlands building, hidden from the car park, hidden from the main road, lay its most secret – but for many its most precious – enclave. For here were the sheds…structures designed to furnish the married Englishman with perhaps the thing he craved most of all: a place where he could escape his family without actually leaving home.”

It turns out the postcards book is just a pretext for a much darker project. As Benjamin says, ‘You never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s nasty, a lot of the time it’s as weird as hell. But that’s England for you. We’re stuck with it.’

A rich vein of satire emerges from David Cameron’s love of his shepherd’s hut: "Dave has become a very different person since resigning. Very humble. Contemplative. He realized that it was time for him to take some big decisions in his life.’ ‘Such as?’ ‘Well, buying a shed for instance.'"

But the apologist eventually turns on Cameron in a fierce diatribe: ‘Cameron?’ said Nigel, his face twisting. ‘What a twat. What a grade-one, first-class, copper-bottomed arsehole. Sitting in his fucking shed writing his memoirs. Look at the mess he’s left behind.’

Middle England is brilliantly funny, in turns acidly and gently satirical, and very, very perceptive. The Rotter family’s continuing grief over the Birmingham bombing by the IRA, forms a sobering backdrop to all the talk of backstop.

John's latest collection of work Nest - New & Selected Poems is published by Red Hen Press in North America and as Jizz by Kingston University Press in the UK.

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Jizz - new poetry collection from John 'Shedman' Davies

A supporter of Shedworking from the beginning, John 'Shedman' Davies has an excellent new and selected collection out from Kingston University Press called Jizz (a term used by birdwatchers to describe the overall impression of a bird from various features such as posture, size, and location - in the US the book will be called 'Nest'). As with his previous works, John includes shed mentions but landscape also provides a major focus as does everyday life. Our favourites are Gardener's Question Time ("Astride the shed, he pulls the roof felt up") and Walden Life, and it's good to see old favourite Maximum Shed in there, which is worth the cost of the book alone. Another triumph from Shedman and a must for all shedworkers' bookshelves.

Here is John below in full performance flow.

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The 12 Days of Shedmas

A clever idea this from John 'Shedman' Davies, illustrated by Edward Ward based on joint ideas. They can all be found on 12 Days of Shedmas on Pinterest.

Shedman at Christmas

Poet John Davies will be in the excellent Much Ado Books bookshop in Alfriston, East Sussex on December 20  in their shedlike barn from 1pm to 5pm. He'll be writing, performing, inspiring and generally being a decent chap. Strongly recommended if you're in the area - it's free and you can't book, just turn up.
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Vote for the readers' shedworking awards 2012

On Friday we'll be announcing the results of the annual Shedworking awards (see here for a full rundown on last year's winners who included Nigel Nunnett for his work at Chelsea Flower Show, Christian' Payne's DocuDen, Joanne Harris, Unbound, and John 'Shedman' Davies). We want your votes for the Readers' Award section, won last year by the Irish Men's Sheds Association which has gone on to great things in the past 12 months.

There's no shortlist drawn up by the Shedworking judges for this award, it's simply down to what you the readers of this site believe to be the most impressive step forward in the world of shedworking during 2012 - it could be anything, a book, a play, a tweet, a design, a quote, and so on. Simply add your vote (and reasons if you would like to) in the comments section or email me directly, tweet it to @shedworking, add it to the Shedworking page on Facebook or indeed on that Google+. Or just tell me if you see me. -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Shedworking awards 2011

For literally the second time ever, we're presenting the annual Shedworking Awards. It's been another fine 12 months for shedlike microarchitecture and many thanks to everybody who's visited the site, commented and who replied to our Readers' Award call for votes on Twitter. So here we go with the first envelope...

Best design - There were some extraordinary designs this year from the very unboxlike Tetra Shed to Google's marvellous indoor shedworking facilities in London. We also particularly liked Office Sian's awardwinning Hackney Shed and the historic medieval garden office. But the winner this year is the ecofriendly garden office in Nigel Nunnett's RBC Wild Garden at Chelsea Flower Show: built from a recycled shipping container and with a lovely green roof plus habitat walls, it was a perfect example of how shedworking can be beautiful and functional.

Best blog/web site - As always, Lloyd Alter at Treehugger and Kent Griswold at Tiny House Blog brought intelligent writing and intriguing tiny architecture to a wider audience. The winner though was Christian 'Documentally' Payne who devoted an entire blog - DocuDen - to his new garden office and as you'd expect from one of the UK's leading social technologists, used all sorts of material to make it a rich experience to visit.

Best Tweeter – We saw a lot more shedworkers tweeting about and from their garden office space but none did it with the panache of writer Joanne Harris (@joannechocolat) who presented us with an almost daily dose of shed-based thoughts.

Best popularisation of shedworking – Unbound is a groundbreaking publishing project which relies on crowdsourced funding. It was launched at the Hay Festival in the summer (with a little help from Shedworking) in a 3rdSpace Garden Room designed and built on site by Sawhorse. Not only does the Unbound web site use shed imagery heavily, but the festival presence brought the concept of shedworking to tens of thousands of visitors.

Readers' Award - Some of you were kind enough to nominate the charity ebook The Happy Shedworker in this category, launched earlier in the year to raise money for Shelter. But by some distance, the winner was the Irish Men’s Sheds Association’s which launched with a bang and looks set to build on that early success, bringing the idea of shedworking to a wider audience around the country.

Lifetime achievement award – Brighton-based John 'Shedman' Davies has been writing poetry about sheds and using sheds in his festival visits and workshops since well before Shedworking was established. Not only is he a talented writer and communicator, using sheds in the most creative way possible, but he's a delightful and thoughtful chap too.
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National (Shed) Poetry Day

It's National Poetry Day today. Those of you who enjoy both sheds and stanzas should make a beeline for the work of John 'Shedman' Davies who both writes about sheds and tours the country's festivals performing from inside a shed. His collection 'Shedman' is particularly worth investigating.

Our favourite poem about garden offices and shedworking is Where Eagles Dare by Matt Harvey - in fact we liked it so much that it is included in the Shedworking book. Here it is:

A silver trail across the monitor;
Fresh mouse-droppings beneath the swivel-chair;
The view obscured by rogue japonica.
Released into the wild, where earwigs dare -

You first went freelance - and then gently feral.
You worked from home - and then wandered out again,
Roughed it with spider, ant, shrew, blackbird, squirrel
In your own realm, your micro-vatican.

No name conveys exactly what it is -
Chalet? Gazebo? You were not misled
By studios, snugs, garden offices,
Workshops or outhouses. A shed's a shed -

And proud of it. You wouldn't want to hide it -
Wifi-enable rain-proof wooden box.
A box to sit in while you think outside it -
Self-rattling cage, den, poop-deck, paradox,

Hutch with home-rule, cramped cubicle of freedom,
Laboratory, thought-palace, bodger's bower,
Plot both to sow seeds and to go to seed in,
Cobwebbed, Cuprinol-scented, Seat of Power.

Matt's excellent collection The Hole in the Sum of my Parts in which this appears is published by the Poetry Trust, nicely illustrated by David Hughes, and I would urge all readers to snap up a copy now. You can buy direct from Matt's site shop here.

And here's Dominic Taylor reciting his poem 'The Shed' during the Cuisle-Limerick City International Poetry Festival 2005, recorded by John Davis.

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Royal wedding Shedman

John Davies aka Shedman has a whole raft of shedshaped events coming up including some high jinks on the day of the royal wedding as part of the Dorchester Festival which features a shedbased residency in the Abbey grounds. Here's a quick rundown:

- SHED ASSEMBLY DAY (SAD) and Shedwarming, April 28, 2pm-4pm
Watch Shedman assemble his self-assembly shed. And give him a hand. Followed by a short shedwarming and taster poetry session.

- SHED THAT! May 5, 7-9pm
Creative writing workshop for new and experienced writers

- SHED YOUR FEARS! May 7, 10am-5pm May 8, 11am-4pm
A creative workshop exploring the kaleidoscopic meanings of ‘shed’

- SAS DAY May 7 10am-5pm: join the SAS for a day and be part of the Shed Appreciation Society – bring reminiscences, stories, photos, pictures, poems, postcards and anything else connected with sheds to build a shed-load of multi-media experience.
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Shed Fest - a literary festival in a shed

This is a fabulous idea from publisher Mike Manson in Bristol. He describe it as the UK's premier shed-based literary festival but (and I'd have to check with John 'Shedman' Davis to be absolutely sure) I'm guessing it might actually be the first of its kind. Here's how he describes it:

The shed is small, space is limited and so is time. You are allocated five minutes to read or perform a poem(s), a short story or extract from a larger piece. Indeed, anything you want. The shed is yours! This is an evening for the Bristol writing community to perform their work in a supportive and fun environment.

Shed Fest runs on September 11.
UPDATE: All places at the festival have already gone



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John 'Shedman' Davies: Shedbury (video)

Shedbury from Terrier TV on Vimeo.

Writer, poet and general all round fine fellow John 'Shedman' Davies is a regular (and very popular) performer at many festivals around the country. For the last couple of years, he has spent National Shed Week (which this year starts on July 5) at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and used sheds as the focus of his performances. As we gear up for the fourth National Shed week, John has put together a video compilation (above) of the people he has spoken to at the festival under the ingenious title 'Shedbury'. Here's how he describes it:

'Shedbury' is a curiously fascinating take on English life, seen through a wooden prism and told through a series of interviews, stories and poems recorded at the festival in 2008 and 2009.

It's quite long but well worth watching, a real insight into people's lives via the medium of sheds. Shorter versions of this first cut are in the pipeline. You can also find plenty of shed photos from his festival work at his Flickr site.
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A History of the World in 100 Sheds

Inspired by the BBC Radio 4 programme 'A history of the world in 100 objects', John 'Shedman' Davies is asking people which sheds they would choose as having a real impact on world history. Anyone can contribute their thoughts and suggestions, pictures and links. See John' site Shed World for more details but here's a snippet:

"From Lao Tzu to Gillis Lundgren, the Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier to the Unabomber, from the baby Jesus to Frank Whittle, let's have your suggestions for the sheds that have really had an impression on world history. There'll be a prize for the Top Ten entries."

Well worth a browse.

John's main Shedman website has been updated with new events and activities including Second World War Shedman in Eastbourne and the Pigbaby event in Cooksbridge near Lewes ion May where he will be appearing with another chronicler of shedlike atmospheres in verse, Matt Harvey. The whole event is in aid of Save the Children.
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Nomadic Architectures II: Sheds, Bothies and Retreats

An unmissable talk featuring John 'Shedman' Davies will look at the phenomenon of the shed, why it punches above its architectural weight, and why it's such a meaningful social space. The event is part of the Art & Architecture autumn lecture series and also features Ivan Morison (who works with Heather Morison on shedlike structures such as the wooden cabin called Fantasy Island in their own arboretum pictured above) and Thomas Pausz who will talk about his work with the Manor Garden Allotmenteers whose sheds were demolished to make way for 2012 Olympic buildings. The talk is on Monday, November 2, 6.30 for 7pm, at The Gallery, 70 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6EJ.
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National (Shed) Poetry Day

There's a considerable canon of excellent shed-based and garden office-inspired poetry by the likes of John 'Shedman' Davies (above) and Matt Harvey as well as an actual Poetry House shed. Shedworking was also delighted to see that Workshop Shed has also got into the spirit of the occasion. For today's special National Poetry Day though we're going for something with which readers are probably unfamiliar, The Lean-To-Shed (Communicated By An Eight-Year-Old) by R. C. Lehmann, who wrote for Punch magazine about 100 years ago. It's quite long (you can read the whole thing at Google Books) so we've just included the first verse to give you a flavour

I’ve a palace set in a garden fair,
And, oh, but the flowers are rich and rare,
Always growing
And always blowing
Winter or summer—it doesn’t matter—
For there’s never a wind that dares to scatter
The wonderful petals that scent the air
About the walls of my palace there.
And the palace itself is very old,
And it’s built of ivory splashed with gold.
It has silver ceilings and jasper floors
And stairs of marble and crystal doors;
And whenever I go there, early or late,
The two tame dragons who guard the gate
And refuse to open the frowning portals
To sisters, brothers and other mortals,
Get up with a grin
And let me in.
And I tickle their ears and pull their tails
And pat their heads and polish their scales;
And they never attempt to flame or fly,
Being quelled by me and my human eye.
Then I pour them drink out of golden flagons,
Drink for my two tame trusty dragons…
But John,
Who’s a terrible fellow for chattering on,
John declares
They are Teddy-bears;
And the palace itself, he has often said,
Is only the gardener’s lean-to shed.

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Shedman keeping busy

John 'Shedman' Davies and his shed are having a busy time of it at the moment. For the second year running, John was at Ledbury Poetry Festival outside the Burgage Hall, starting all kinds of conversations with the question 'What's the first shed you ever remember?' Visitors included actress Linda Thorson (The Avengers, Emmerdale), Dame Joan Bakewell (who remembers her Grandfather's fire hazard of a shed at the back of a Manchester terrace) and Roger McGough, who described how his friend with an allotment shed had tried to encourage him in the ways of the soil, but to no avail.

Highlights included the man who came into Shedman's shed and said 'I set fire to my mother', the Engaged Buddhist band The Boddhivistas who sang Shed California to the Eagles tune and Merys, the lovely lady pictured who brought Shedman a miniature homemade shed with a poem inside it. John helped to round off the festival with an hour long Breakfast Shed Show in Ledbury's famous Market Hall which he claims looks a bit like a half timbered elephant shed. Many of the stories will be posted by Shedman on his website and blogssoon.John is also very busy on another project, Our Storeys at North Middlesex University Hospital in Enfield till the end of July. You can meet him outside the Spice of Life Restaurant at the North Middlesex University Hospital on Monday 27th, Wednesday 29th and Thursday 30th July from 10am-4pm and in Emsworth at Havant Literary Festival from 2nd-4th October.
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Shedman at Ledbury Poetry Festival

John 'Shedman' Davies is at the Ledbury Poetry Festival this week. His beautiful 8' x 6' shed, provided by NFP Ledbury, will be outside Ledbury's ancient Burgage Hall until Sunday. The shed, worth £400, will be raffled to raise money for charity. Do go along and say hi - John's a smashing chap and he'd love to see you.
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Chelsea Flower Show: shed roundup

It was a particularly poor year for garden offices at Chelsea Flower Show, apart from Mark Gregory's for The Children's Society. But of course there were a lot of sheds on show and John 'Shedman' Davies has a great roundup at Shedworld. Shedworking's favourite of John's selection is the Time to Think, Space to Breathe garden designed by Tony Davy and Mike Roberts in the Small Gardens section. Here's what they say about it on the BBC:

Mike had the brainwave of a simple alpine sauna lodge nestling by a lake. This tied in with Tony's memories of meadows of wild flowers, fresh air and wide open spaces experienced on walking holidays in mountains throughout Europe. After many hours of fine-tuning, the finished design included a turf roofed lodge sitting in a clearing where forest meets a glacial lake, surrounded with naturalistic planting and enclosed by a rustic fence. We hope our design gives a feeling of oneness with nature, creating a space that gives the user time to think and space to breathe.

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A weekend of sheds

There was a bumper crop of articles in the national media over the weekend about garden offices and sheds. Apart from my piece in The Guardian (plus photo gallery), the same issue also had a nice piece by David Ward, literary consultant to Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria, about his zen hut. Here's what he says:

"The idea for a garden office emerged from two needs: extra space for books (it's a small house) and somewhere for me to work. I left a salaried job just over a year ago and now work for myself at home. My three part-time roles all tend to generate paper and when I was working in a bedroom the paper would spill from the desk, on to the floor and up the walls. I regarded it as an effective system; my wife regarded the paper and me as a mess."

And to top it off, there was a new poem called A Doddle from John 'Shedman' Davies too in what amounted to a mini garden office special.Elsewhere, Alison Cork in the Daily Telegraph profiled Vivid Green (above) and in The Times, Kate Muir wrote on why everyone should have a garden shed.
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On the radio: sheds as artistic inspiration

BBC Radio 4's Front Row transmitted a marvellous segment on sheds this evening (you can listen to it again over the next seven days via the link above) which to a backdrop of Nick Drake's famous shed song featured poet John 'Shedman' Davies (who is particularly eloquent), artist Julian Perry, writer Philip Pullman and sculptor Sarah Staton whose marvellous Schriebergartenhaus is pictured above and below.She also designed the Swiss Cheese Shed, below, for the V&A exhibition The Other Flower Show in 2004.

Garland Hut

Shedman has recently been performing at Ledbury and during his stay has put together a fantastic photo essay of sheds and shedworking atmospheres in the area including The Garland Hut, now a literary heritage interpretation centre dedicated to the work of the Dymock Poets. Well worth a browse.