/The Shed “tapping into that

super-articulate but
hard-to-reach
growing market”
for people who work in sheds or shedlike atmospheres The Scotsman Exclusive new
Issue 14 The Literary Issue May 2008 short story

A very French
garden office

Use BOPS for

your shed...

O ver the last 15 years, I’ve designed
dozens of home workplaces, and
I’ve studied hundreds more. I’ve
discovered that the best of them – no
matter what - share three basic features in
common. I use the acronym BOPS to help
keep these three basic features in mind:
• Good home workplaces help Balance
home and work life.
When you work at home, you’ll be mixing
your personal and family life with your
business life. In order to balance this mix
successfully, you’ll have to create
separations between home and work.
Depending upon available space, your
family situation, and the kind of work you
do, the separations and boundaries that
help you to maintain balance can take
myriad forms.
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
blueprint
• Good home workplaces are well
Organised.
Working at home necessitates the
blending of work and home life, requiring
even more organisation than in an office
away from home. The good news is that
new technologies and storage systems can
help you become more organised and
productive, yielding more time for work or
for pleasure – your choice! A well-
designed home workplace should also be
as comfortable and healthy as the
traditional workplace, and can be even
more so. Consideration should be made
for eye fatigue, body strain and repetitive
stress injuries. There’s lots of information
available in print media and on the
internet which will help you make become
more knowledgeable about chairs,
keyboards, desk heights and lighting.
2
• Good home workplaces have a Personal
Spirit about them.
In a traditional office, someone else may
make all the decisions about your work
place, including the chair on which you sit.
But in your own home workplace, the
decision-making is all yours. Think “out of
the box”, according to your own design
tastes. Plan for places to display your
personal interests in the way of art,
mementos, collectibles, personal photos or
anything else that is a reflection of your
life and passions. Let your workplace
reflect the things in life that for you, are
worth working for!
/ Home office design expert Neal
Zimmerman is the author of The Home
Workspace Idea Book by Taunton Press
and www.atworkathome.com
 The Green Man
“My shed of the month, pictured right, is
The Feedstore,” writes Uncle Wilco of
readersheds.co.uk.” It’s oak-framed
using new and reclaimed oak, infilled
with wattle and daub (split hazel
wattle/daubed with mud and straw),
finally lime rendered and painted with
natural, lime paint. and a grass roof. It’s
old fashioned skilled work with a
modern eco twist.”
Look out for Enterprise Nation’s new web
site and editor-founder Emma Jones’ book
Spare Room Start Up available at all good
bookshops and www.enterprisenation.com
The second National Shed Week is
rapidly approaching. For full details go
to www.shedblog.co.uk and if you
haven’t done so already, please do share
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
your shed. There is an international
section this year too...
Sad news on the Shedworking book front -
its publishers have been taken over and the
new owners have politely declined to go
ahead with the project. But fear not, the
search for a new publisher is already
underway. Watch this space.
3
Those of you interested in the garden
part of garden offices should certainly
take a long look at the Garden History
Girl blog. Although it looks at garden
history, it takes a sensibly broad view of
the definition of the word and includes
plenty of attractive shedlike structures.
Well worth a browse.
Interested in insulation? Joel Rickett from The
Bookseller in a Daily Telegraph article about
home libraries which is equally pertinent for
shedworkers, writes: "Books are the original
insulator. A shelf of books along an outside
wall works well to prevent heat escaping. If
all the books were removed from the homes
in Britain, our energy bills would rocket."
This issue’s optimistically springlike front
cover features a Henley Garden Office.
 Regular readers of
The Shed will know
that we are
Want to brighten up your garden
office? Then why not invest in a
smart new bookcase such as the
If you have an urge
to garden but don’t
want to get your
4
extremely partial to Tetrad featured below. Many more slippers damp, here’s
the many USB such wonderful the very thing. The
gadgets that you examples of the Mini Desktop
can now plug in to art of the Garden from Office
your computer. Here’s a treat, a USB mini bookshelf are Playground
vacuum cleaner. Simply plug in and suck available the comes in at 4.25” square x 1.5” tall,
up all that yuck that’s been lurking in marvellous includes terracotta pot, wood trellis,
your keyboard. Available from Bookshelf blog, a garden stones, garden rake and hoe,
www.usbnow.co.uk and comes in yellow, Shedworking Alyssum seed, peat pellet, green liner
green, and silver. satellite site. and instructions.

If your shedworking space is a little pokey, then

Purely Peppermint’s Shed tip of the bimonth consider investing in Michael Kritzers’s Digital
Office Assistant built on durable plastic casters.
This tip is to prevent you from losing valuable business time with It’s a trolley, it’s a workspace, it’s a storage thing.
frequent trips back to the house. Make sure your office is set up with Simply use the bit you want or pack it away.
everything you will need for Look out for the 4x4 for all-terrain shedworking
the day, including items like later in the year.
tea, coffee, a snack or even
lunch. If at the moment
forgotten items result in too
many trips, then look at what
items you are collecting and
make sure from this point on they are accessible in your shed. It may
seem like only a few minutes here or there, but your time could be used
far more effectively. For more information on Purely Peppermint and its
founder Rachael Ross www.purelypeppermint.com click here.

Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
The Spinning Weathervane
Episode one of a new thrilling shed adventure by Sarah Salway.
All the boys in Mr Wicken’s
class at Barry Primary School
know that the tumbledown
shed at the bottom of the
playing fields has magic
qualities.
They sit on the gate leading
to the allotments and aim
stones at the weathervane
on its roof. When one of
them scores a direct hit, the
weathervane spins round
and everyone had better run
away before the metal witch
points her broomstick at
them.
Luckily none of the boys are
very good shots, and in the
three years Edward has been
at the school, he has heard
of only two boys who have
managed to hit it. And this is
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
6
partly how everyone knows She would rather just get on
the shed is magic. with maths.
Because both boys have now ‘It’s useful for later life,’
disappeared from the school, Susan says.
and no one can remember
their names. ‘And so are sheds,’ James
replies. He spends his lessons
‘Tell us about the shed, Mr drawing pictures of the
Wicken,’ Edward says one sheds he will build when he
rainy Wednesday afternoon. is older. He is currently
He has been made to ask by planning a series of wheeled
James Gordon, who is a bully ones which will form a circus
and says that if Edward that he plans to hoist up to
doesn’t, he will wee in the top of skyscrapers in ‘The man who used to own
Edward’s lunchbox. New York, the roofs of which the shed grew leeks so huge
he has already painted with that people came from all
Luckily Mr Wicken is in a race tracks and pit stops. over the world just to look
good mood. ‘Well, boys,’ he Susan says he is sad, even at them,’ Mr Wicken says.
says, and all the girls in the when he draws a shed made ‘But he grew greedy.’
class groan. Susan Collins is up of strange mathematical
the loudest. For some angles just for her. This one It is Edward’s first year in Mr
reason, throwing stones at is firmly planted on the Wicken’s class but he has
sheds doesn’t interest her. ground. heard this story many times

before in the playground. He opens his arms
now to show just how long the leeks were,
and, by mistake, clouts Christine Emmerson
in the face.
‘Ow. Sir!’she calls, but Mr Wicken has giant
vegetables on his mind.
‘Stupid boy, stupid shed. It’s all just make
believe,’ Christine spits. Edward determines
then and there that he will be the next boy
to hit the shed’s weathervane. His name will
go down in the school records and even
Susan will record his popularity surge on a
flowchart. He just wishes someone knew the
names of the other two boys.
‘And when people get greedy, nothing
stands in their way,’ Mr Wicken says, his eyes
seeming to Edward to be so red-rimmed
they look as if they are on fire. ‘And I mean
nothing.’
…to be continued…
Sarah Salway is the author of Tell Me
Everything and Something Beginning With
(Bloomsbury) and Leading the Dance
(Bluechrome) and blogs regularly at Sarah’s
Writing Journal and A Quiet Sit Down.
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
7
When you walk into a forest
by Jeremy Over
When you walk into a forest don’t forget to knock
so that you allow your surroundings to grow into you
and over your old home.
5 petals white. Yellow heart. 3 leaves. Barren Strawberry.
Today I am feeling a little more accepted by the birds and rocks;
this damp cave in the moss.
Black plastic in the hawthorn branches is torn like a crow.
A Blackcap sings whilst rearranging some of its feathers, not wholly
concentrating on its song as it pushes up through cracks in the pavement.
To wander is the Taoist codeword for becoming ecstatic
purple vetchling curlew rising from the field through fulsome
lute playing in the sheepfold then settling back down again
into my Samuel Palmer Magic Apple Tree armchair
in The Shed: for people who work in sheds
or shed-like atmospheres.
Jeremy Over is a civil servant (policy adviser for Department for Work and
Pensions) and poet working from his shed-like outhouse near
Cockermouth, Cumbria. He is the author of A Little Bit of Bread and No
Cheese (Carcanet) 2001 and the forthcoming Tring (Carcanet) in 2009.
 One attraction of buying an old
property in rural France is that you
usually get space to spare, writes Nick
Inman. You don’t need to think of
building a shed in the garden when
you have convertible outbuildings in
your grounds to spare. You may get a
barn or two included in the purchase
price, or a chicken coop or pig sty; but
if you’re lucky your house will come
with a pigeonnier, a free-standing
dovecote ripe for office development.
There are pigeonniers all over France
but they are concentrated in the
southwest. In the north where a cold
climate meant winter food was often
Shed of
in short supply, keeping pigeons was a
feudal privilege and a dovecot an
ostentatious sign of privilege.
the
In the poorer, warmer south where the
bimonth
human population was thinly spread
any smallholder could drill a few large
holes in a wall to let the birds in to
roost. Pigeons were easy to keep: they
bred quickly, producing an endless
supply of eggs and meat for the table
and droppings which could be used as
fertilizer for the fields and vineyards.
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
From the 16th century, landowners
with surplus cash commissioned round
8
or square towers with elegant pointed
roofs a short way from the house.
These were still functional structures
but they had now become follies. Now,
property owners are putting their
pigeonniers to new uses. Though they
were built for birds, most pigeonniers
are large enough to make a decent-
sized shedworking atmosphere. They
usually stand on stilts capped with
mushroom-shaped stones to protect
pigeons from rodents and a flight of
steps/ladder is needed to get inside but
that only adds to the sense of intimacy.
What they don’t have are windows and
you have to be ingenious to get
around this limitation to keep the
harmony of the architecture.
But with the aid of a grant for the
preservation of a local rural building,
there’s not much else to stop you
turning the cute little stone or half-
timbered tower in your grounds into a
home office. Just remember to block
up the access holes in the roof or you’ll
be forever cleaning pigeon muck off
your modem.

Roderick is a composer (we've done an
opera together) and over our 20 years
together he has gradually become
more and more dedicated to silence -
and more, to 'not having anyone
around' while he works, writes
Canterbury Laureate Patricia Debney.
We have always had work spaces in our
houses, luckily, one each. However, as
the children got older and more able
to occupy themselves, he found himself
with a couple of hours on his hands but
no way to write or work, as he hated
being around anyone else.
Four years ago I woke quite suddenly
and uncharacteristically in the middle
of the night, and was struck by an idea
so utterly it was like being possessed:
he needed a shed in the garden. It was
like a puzzle piece slotting in, and I
could see the rest of the house falling
into place around it, the rest of the
way we lived and he worked....I had
not a moment's doubt that this was the
way and the truth.
He took a little convincing (too
expensive, surely not all for him?), but
then set about it with gusto. He
designed it to the exact proportions of
the room in the house, put in double-
glazed windows all over the place,
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworking news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk
My Shed
added a small front deck, and found a
British company that would cut the
wood off-site, then come and build it.
And six months later, in September
2004, they did. Everything slid together
(again, like a puzzle). The only nails in
it are those holding the wooden floor
down. Roderick himself dug the trench
for the electrics, the ethernet, the
phone...
And he loves it. He comes back in from
it cheerful, relaxed. He watches the
local foxes slink across the back garden,
and has seen kingfishers, pheasant,
rabbits, ducks, voles, etc, from his desk.
And as predicted, it completely
changed the way we are able to use
the house. We now have a sitting room
with an old upright piano for the kids,
space to sit together not facing the tv
etc.
9
I like small spaces, and stay in my attic
room with a couple of bookcases and a
desk, the old nursery. Roderick likes big
spaces, and in the summer his space is
so big that with the french doors open
it's the whole back garden. When I've
had huge jobs to do in the holidays,
I've occasionally used it, but do find it a
bit...echoey!
We've always called it a shed. None of
this garden studio stuff. Our friends
laugh: it is the size of a little cottage.
But it's only one room. And is a shed.
And from it, he sees and hears no one,
nothing human. Which is just how he
likes it. R's shed marks a real shift in
our working lives, in so many ways. It
also marks a time in our relationship
when we so thoroughly acknowledged
our differences, what we needed or
didn't need in order to be happy -- and
our acceptance of these things in
ourselves and each other. A big deal!
Patricia Debney is the author of Losing
You and How To Be A Butterfly and
blogs at
http://patriciadebney.wordpress.com
 View from a Shed 10

Contact: alex@splashmedia.co.uk
The Shed © Alex Johnson 2006/7/8
Felix Bennett is The Shed’s artist in residence and one of the country’s leading cartoonists and
illustrators. You can enjoy more of his work at his entertaining web site www.felixbennett.com
Get your daily updated fix of Shedworkin news, gossip and other things at http://www.shedworking.co.uk