Hut 33

I'm rather late to the party with this one so apologies. Hut 33 is a BBC radio comedy set in Bletchley Park in 1941. It focuses on three codebreakers forced to share a wooden hut as they try to break German ciphers. Unfortunately they hate one another. It features Robert Bathurst and Olivia Colman and is rather good. You can listen again to the final episode from the BBC web site here.

Romantic homeworking

A nice little piece by Andy Borowitz in The Huffington Post who points out that working at home (and indeed a garden office) greatly reduces the opportunities for office romance. As he points out: "When you're your own boss, you have no one to sexually harass but yourself."

"After using the bathroom one morning, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and, almost without thinking, I uttered these two fateful words: "Looking good." When I got back to my desk, I was rattled. Perhaps my comment to myself in the bathroom had merely been friendly, but a part of me felt that it was inappropriate. And that come-hither expression on my face was unmistakable: I had seen it many times before, most notably on my Match.com profile. No, there could be little doubt: I was my own boss, and I was hitting on myself."

Sorry Boris, flexible working on the up

Despite Boris Johnson's fine words below, Tomorrow’s Leaders, a new study commissioned by City & Guilds and the Institute of Leadership and Management, reveals that 73 per cent of managers have flexible working in their organisation. “The study also highlighted the main obstacle to the wider adoption of smarter working practices generally,” said Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK, the national campaign backed by the TUC, CBI and British Chambers of Commerce to promote smarter working. “The culture of ‘presenteeism’ where management require staff and employees to be at the place of work to be considered working, is an anachronism from the 19th century – it is completely the wrong approach in today’s modern working environment. To overcome this, managers need to have access to more up-to-date training.

“The introduction of smarter working practices is inevitable as the UK strives to meet the competitive challenges from the Far East. The study reported that three-quarters of respondents believed workers that worked flexibly were more productive. This reinforces findings issued by BT earlier this year that reported a 20 per cent increase in productivity when smarter working practices were introduced.”

Boris Johnson: homeworking a euphemism for sloth

Boris Johnson won't make any friends in the homeworking and shedworking communities with his latest foot/mouth pronouncement. Writing on his own web site, he asks why people insist on commuting to work despite the many obvious inconveniences. Among the choice quotes are:

"Working from home is simply a euphemism for sloth, apathy, staring out of the window and random surfing of the internet: and that is why it is so imperative that we get the transport system of this country moving. What with all those trips to the kettle and the television, and keeping the central heating on, I am not even sure that staying at home is the eco-friendly option."

He also claims that: "The office is the natural habitat of Homo sapiens. It is the place we like to go during the day, just as baboons choose to congregate on some special kop or crag." His argument is that the office is vital because we go there "to groom and to socialise. We find that we need the tension and the jokes, not to mention the acrimony and the rivalry and the tears, and frankly no amount of electronic interchange is a substitute for that ability to gossip and plot."
Here he is again on homeworking.

"Instead of crashing into the shower and getting on with the day, you find that you linger, unshaven, for too long over the newspapers; and you find yourself so sunk in consequent gloom that you decide to fortify yourself with another cup of coffee, and a quick squint at BBC News 24, and then you conclude that you really must hit the desk. And as you drift towards your workstation, your eye is caught by some title in your bookshelf and you settle down to read and - bang - by the time you look up, the morning has gone. Deprived of that vital stimulus of competition, your mental flywheel is hardly turning, and why should it? There is no one to impress, no one to intrigue against, no one to worry about; and that is the real problem with working from home."

It's worth reading the whole thing. He's completely wrong, but he writes entertainingly. Incidentally, his name is actually Alex Johnson.

Shepherd's Hut Tuesday - Plankbridge

Dorset-based Plankbridge restore and recreate traditional shepherds' huts for 21st century uses such as a garden office or artist's studio. The huts are built by Richard Lee and Jane Dennison using locally sourced materials including Douglas Fir for the chassis and frame. Naturally there is traditional corrugated iron cladding (galvanised, etched, red oxide primed and metalastic painted in mid Brunswick green),tongue and groove internal lining with 100mm mineral wool insulation, solid French oak floor, and hand forged ironmongery with reproduction cast iron wheels to original patterns made in Dorset. The standard model measures (internally)1.84m width, by 3.5m length and is 2.3m high. Optional extras include bunk beds, solar panel light system and handmade woodburner. Plankbridge also build and convert other structures for use as a garden office including the conversion of an old Somerset and Dorset railway goods wagon. There are some great photos on the site, including an excellent case study, plus interesting information about the natural habitat of the area.

Mushroom house vs shed

An interesting question raised by a reader of the Sunday Telegraph who has a 'mushroom house' in his back garden - it's stone, under a grass bank and rather damp. Should it stay or should it go? David Snell, contributing editor at the interesting Homebuilding & Renovating magazine and author of Building Your Own Home, gives a couple of suggestions but then asks: "Is it worth it? You could probably buy or build overground sheds or outhouses for a fraction of the cost." While normally I'd endorse any shedroute, it does seem a shame to lose a mushroom house.

Chris Routledge - a shedworking story

Chris Routledge is a confirmed shedworker and his shed appears in the seminal early article on shedworking on the BBC web site by Giles Wilson, Shed Heaven. His shed is pictured above (and the Nevada inspiration for it is at the end of this post). Chris very kindly agreed to write a guest post for Shedworking which I'm delighted to publish below. You can read more about him at his web site here.

"I built my shed in 2003 after a visit to the Alternative Energy Centre in mid-Wales. Before then I was thinking about buying a basic 'off the peg' summer house and customising it with insulation and proper roof materials. But our visit to the AEC, which has buildings on display to show how they are made, inspired me to do it myself. I'd put up shelves before, so how hard could it be?

"Actually it was a challenge but it wasn't that hard. My wife and I were editing a book about the philosophy of language at the time, so my brain was locked into two very different kinds of project and they tended to leak over into one another. My wife, who is also a writer and who also works in the shed, summed up my attitude rather well. While I was preparing to construct the roof our neighbour came over to take a look. I was up there on top of the frame hammering away and he asked her if I had someone lined up to build the roof sections. She looked at him and asked 'Does he look like a man who is about to order something ready made?'

"I took some guidance from David Stiles' excellent book Sheds, but the design is basically my own. I took the 'post and beam' approach that is common with American wooden houses, though in my case the posts are bricks, and tried to make it look at least a little like the small wooden structures you see in towns in the American West. The one-room shacks where miners and farmers lived in the nineteenth century.

"The actual building was a lot of fun and a real challenge. As a place of work it needed to be warm and dry and connected to the outside world, but it also had to be a pleasant environment. In the winter our part of Lancashire can be very bleak and dark so I added big triangular windows in the gable ends to bring lots of light in. In the summer our garden is crammed with wild flowers, so although it's a small space it is a bit like working in the middle of a meadow. The commute is lovely.

"The great practical advantage of working in the shed over working in the back bedroom is of course that you are out of the house, away from distractions and callers. I love the incongruity of talking on the phone in the shed with people who are sitting in shiny high-rise offices in more glamourous parts of the world, but I am also finding that I now connect specific pieces of work with the place they were written. I've just finished writing my first book (Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint) written entirely in the shed and in my head it is very definitely a 'shed book'. There is something very elemental about sitting and working under a roof you put up there yourself."