Sheds, Sheds, Sheds

Sheds, Sheds, Sheds is a wonderfully irreverent shed miscellany that looks at every possible use of a shed from Woolwich to Woolongong. If there was ever any doubt, Lockdown proved that the shed is more than simply somewhere to store stuff when the house runs out of space. Sheds have always had that extra dimension... Some of our greatest literature has been produced in a shed - Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Roald Dahl, Philip Pullman, Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw created their best works in the garden shed - or in Thomas's case, a converted garage. Multi-billion pound businesses such as IKEA, Harley Davidson and Hewlett-Packard started life in a shed and 1 in 5 are used for something apart from garden storage. What do the band Radiohead, classical composer Edvard Grieg and Snoop Dogg have in common? They have all created music in sheds - Edvard was so sensitive to noise around the house that he built himself a lakeside hut. Snoop sold off his shed for charity. And the shed is an important contributor to the world of art. ShedBoatShed has won the prestigious Turner Prize (though not the prestigious Cuprinol Shed of the Year), Claude Monet painted from a shed mounted on top of a boat, Damien Hirst has a shed studio. Tracey Emin had a Whitstable Beach Hut that became an art installation and Rachel Whiteread used a shed to produce a concrete collector's piece Negative Shed. We look at the shed galaxy - what is a shed, what is not a shed in the shed galaxy. Fisherman's hut? Shed. Kiosk? Not a shed. Packed with an enormous variety of quirky shed stories, such as Brides Shed Revisited, the wedding hut used on Bournemouth beach to marry couples with the sound of lapping waves and seagulls, or the shed that was lifted up like a kite and flew further than the Wright Brothers managed in Kittyhawke. This and many others will delight in Sheds, Sheds, Sheds - stories and pictures from the house's best friend.