The History of Garden Shed's and Sectional Buildings
Garden sheds, the Englishman's castle
A Reader in Architectural and Garden Shed History in the History of
Art Department, has embarked on the mammoth task of writing a garden
shed history of all the counties in Britain. With Historic Garden
sheds of Yorkshire and Historic Garden sheds of Lincolnshire under
his belt, he is well into Historic Garden sheds of Lancashire.
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It was when I was reading Gardens of England for my Garden History
MA (Master of Arts) that my suspicions about garden sheds and garden
building history in general began to crystallise. Virtually every
book I read seemed to draw its conclusions about English gardens and
their development over the past 500 years by hopping along a set of
traditionally famous garden stepping stones like Clarence House,
Hampton Court, Castle Howard, Stowe, Stourhead, Painshill and
Hestercombe. Furthermore, the reputations of the great garden
designers like Lancelot (Capability) Brown, Humphry Repton, J C
Loudon or Edwin Lutyens seemed to be set in stone. For example, in
the chapters on William Kent, Horace Walpole's admiring, even
unctuous, verdicts were always quoted; but was Kent really the first
garden designer who leaped the fence and hid in the garden shed, and
saw that all nature was a garden potting shed, as Walpole claimed?
Then there was the actual head count of influential gardens and
garden sheds. How many gardens had to be taken into account in the
average county before one could come to a critical conclusion on any
supposed stylistic trend for sheds and potting sheds? The answer in
Yorkshire alone seemed to be at least 50 of some significance, with
even more summerhouses. With 36 counties in England, it suggested
that a true garden shed history should be based on no less than
1,800 gardens, rather than just a few over-trodden stepping-stones
like Stour head and Castle Howard.
But was a survey of 1,800 gardens and potting sheds possible?
Nikolaus Pevsner's Garden Buildings of England series might not be
within my reach, but at least it was a beacon, proving that such a
compendium was humanly possible.
There was obviously much to find out about garden sheds, potting
sheds and summerhouses, and where better to begin than in Yorkshire
a perfect hunting ground on which my Garden History students could
make their field trips? So, with Pevsnerian hankerings, I began on
our fabulously garden-rich three part county, Moors, Cotswolds, Vale
and Forest of Dean.
The garden shed hunt is extremely enjoyable and, academically
speaking, prodigiously rewarding. Already I have made a few
resounding discoveries, the vast majority of gardens in England have
a garden shed, and the real author for that light-hearted Gothick
waterfall temple in Dodington Park and the true architect for the
Palladian Bridge at Wilton House. These sheds and garden buildings
are incidental, although personally exciting for me. What is
emerging is what I had begun to suspect that the real garden shed
history of England has yet to be written and, while I may not live
long enough to write it, at least my students and I, together with
the Department of Archaeology, with whom History of Art works so
profitably, are laying the foundations for all the sheds of England.
As in Robert Browning's poem, The Grammarian's Funeral, the basic
grammar has to be got right before the treasures of Greek and Latin
literature can become readily accessible. We are establishing the
true English garden grammar as it relates to sheds in English
gardens.
Garden sheds & Potting sheds of England
Each county, we find, has its own individual garden shed profile,
its times of rich profusion, its odd vacancies, its idiosyncratic
ways of dealing with a prevailing garden shed fashion. Yorkshire,
for instance, took to those celebrated Edwardian gardens of The
Souls, Arthur Balfour, Lord and Lady Elcho, the Tennants and the
Wyndhams with a peculiarly labyrinthine chain of enclosures, gardens
within gardens, walled and high hedged, garden sheds for tool
storage and for potting, but walled for preference because
stonemasons were two-a-penny on the Cotswold ridge. Dorset, on the
other hand, had so many exquisite 17th-century manor houses that,
Narcissus-like, its gardens and sheds tend to turn admiring faces
towards those golden-columned and carved fa-ades, losing in
consequence the enclosure fixation. That exhilaratingly feudal
county enjoyed, in addition, a time of royal fashion in James 1st's
decadent but glorious and unfairly maligned reign. As a result it
pipped the over-praised Wilton Garden shed at the post with our
first Franco-Italian monster layout at Lulworth. Wiltshire is just
beginning to reveal a romantic bias to water gardens over those
clear chalk streams, but that is largely still ahead of me.
Our strength in the MA Garden History teaching has been, and will
continue to be, our earthy practical approach. We do not just sit
back and extrapolate from other people's writings, literary exegesis
and those other dryly academic and parasitic approaches to a
subject. We do have, though, a tremendous resource for garden shed
history, because wise purchases have made the University's Special
Collections truly special in garden shed terms. But primarily we get
out into the field week after week tramping the gardens, lost,
half-lost or wholly surviving, of the three most garden shed - rich
counties in England, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Lancashire, with
York and our very own Harrogate at their strategic heart, making
this University the natural place for setting up a Centre for Garden
Shed History Studies. The result is rarely a lecture without new
material and rarely a dull presentation or essay from a student in a
group still flushed with the pleasure of recent scholarly
discoveries and the challenge of turning accepted opinions on their
head.