During Architecture Week 2002, John Davies decided to build a shed inside a shed. The idea was to sit inside the shed inside a shed and write poetry. Little did he know that the residency would spawn a whole new persona and business for Davies, now aka ‘the Shedman’.
Davies was looking for a suitable venue for his residency application, which had been accepted by Arts Council England South East’s ArchiTEXTS project, when he visited the Booth Museum of Natural History with his young son.
‘I’d always had a soft spot for this quaint natural history museum with its glass cases full of stuffed birds,’ Davies recalls. ‘I met the curator, John Cooper, and when I enquired about the architectural status of the building, he explained that it is listed as a building and is listed as shed,’ he continues.
‘When I mentioned this to my wife, she suggested building a shed in the shed!’
As part of the ArchiTEXTS project, in which eight writers from across the South East wrote about architectural locations of their choice, Davies installed his shed inside the natural history museum in Brighton, and prepared to be inspired. But, he notes with surprise, he underestimated the amount of interest his shed would attract.
‘The response from visitors was phenomenal,’ Shedman enthuses. ‘Visitors interacted by bringing their own shed anecdotes, pictures, poems and mementos. So the community created its own multimedia installation,’ he notes. ‘I recorded people’s stories, which ranged from the funny to the peculiar, from the harrowing to the meditative, and could be very moving.’
Through his research, Davies also found he wasn’t alone in his love of the shed. Australian writer and shed enthusiast Mark Thomson has tapped into a lucrative market through his bestselling book, Blokes and Sheds, celebrating the shed as a haven for the Aussie male, a special place, a personal museum.
But, apparently, artists have been using sheds for centuries to hone their creativity.
‘Initially, I was interested in exploring the shed as a place of focused creative activity – especially in relation to the number of artists who have worked in sheds, from Mozart to George Bernard Shaw, from Dylan Thomas to Philip Pullan,’ Davies admits.
But as it turned out, the shed can be a great place to nurture other people’s creativity, too.
‘Shedman has become a major project for me, and I’m now very busy running residencies and schools projects.’ Davies was recently writer in residence at the Appledore Arts Festival in Devon; for Architecture Week 2003, which begins today, he will be writer in residence at the Redbrigde Show in Ilford. He is now in the process of registering Shedman as a brand, and has received funding from Arts Council England to develop his own book about sheds – ‘a cultural history of the shed,’ he says, weaving poetry and prose, stories and reminiscences, reportage and photographs.
Writer and poet Jackie Wills is also on the cusp of publishing her third book of poetry, which will include poems she wrote about Shoreham Airport during Architecture Week last year. Although inspired by a shed of a different kind, like Davies, Wills’ poems were influenced by a mixture of history and personal experience.
‘I loved the building,’ Wills says, explaining why Shoreham Airport was her building of choice for the ArchiTEXTS project. ‘It’s this old, ‘30s building… I’ve always liked that style [of building].’
‘But what really drew me to Shoreham Airport was the fact that my father was an aircraft engineer… So when I was a kid, we were just surrounded by aircraft memorabilia and ephemera.’
Opened in 1910, Shoreham is the longest established airport in the country, and is mainly used by light aircraft.
In her second book, Wills says some of the poems reflected her fascination with aviation – going to airshows, the names given to light aircraft – and it was a theme she wanted to explore further. ‘I wanted to write more, and Shoreham Airport seemed like an ideal starting point – or continuing point, really,’ she says.
So did she spend a lot of time at the airport, in the Art Deco surrounds of the main terminal building, to inspire her?
‘Funnily enough, I didn’t,’ Wills laughs, explaining that for her, it is a very visible part of the flat, eccentric landscape she drives through regularly on her way to Worthing from Brighton.
‘It was the idea of the place which was really, really important to me. Of course, the architecture was [also],’ she adds, ‘but I didn’t feel like I had to be there a lot in order to write those poems.’
‘A lot of the ideas for the poems, apart from coming from the emotional sense of the place and names [of aircraft], came from research as well,’ Wills affirms. She pulls in references to the architect, Stavers Tiltman, in Streamline Moderne, and tells the story of the first pilot to fly from the airport, Piffard, who tuned his engine with a tuning fork.
‘The other piece of history that I drew in, was the history of flight, in a poem called Valkyrie,’ says Wills, explaining the reference to the Montgolfier brothers, who developed the first hot air balloon. This poem reflects on some of the choices of names for light aircraft, which Wills finds, tended to be ‘quite aggressive, war-like names.’
Beginning with the hot air balloon, the poem ends with a reference to September 11: ‘A Valkyrie was among the first to fly / her name ‘Chooser of the Slain’ a premonition / of the Blitz and Dresden or the last calls / to earth from those infamous planes.’
A CD Rom of the poems created from the ‘ArchiTEXTS’ project will be launched to an invited audience next week at Foredown Tower in Portslade, and will be distributed free to schools, colleges and libraries. To purchase a copy, email architecture.wk.se@artscouncil.org
Jackie Wills has published two books, ‘Powder Tower’ and ‘Party’, with her third, ‘Fever Tree’, set for release later this year. For more information on the Shedman, visit www.shedman.net
