The one great desire of the cottager’s heart—after his garden—is plenty of sheds and outhouses in which to store wood, vegetables, and lumber of all kinds. This trait is quite forgotten as a rule by those who design ‘improved’ cottages for gentlemen anxious to see the labourers on their estates well lodged; and consequently the new buildings do not give so much satisfaction as might be expected.
It is only natural that to a man whose possessions are limited, things like potatoes, logs of wood, chips, odds and ends should assume a value beyond the appreciation of the well-to-do. The point should be borne in mind by those who are endeavouring to give the labouring class better accommodation.
Richard Jefferies - Wild Life in a Southern County (1879)
Richard Jefferies - Wild Life in a Southern County (1879)
I don't think this predilection has changed much, even for modern men whose possessions are far less limited than they would have been in Jefferies' day.
8 comments:
Oh I dunno if we have less, look at the average UK garage, stuffed full of decades of detritus and unable to accept a car since the week after you moved in.
How many blokes have a garage full of stuff, garden sheds in which to get away from indoors domesticity and / or a greenhouse in which to have a condor moment.
Sheds are a man’s dream … home to wonders untold.
My Grandad's shed was a miraculous work of art. Logs, tools, drying onions, coils of wire, a sawing-horse, oil lamps, tins full of odd washers. My Dad, being a factory worker, had lost some of the magic. Grandad was summoned to help him build the shed in our garden. I wouldn't know where to start. I think the rot set in when companies started mass-producing ready-made sheds. They are not the same.
Nessimmersion - that's a point, apart from us, nobody we know keeps a car in their garage.
James - they are, we inherited a good one in the garden of our second house, but probably long gone now.
Sam - yes, ready-made sheds are not the same, they don't seem to mature in the way old sheds used to.
Childhood: in addition to a greenhouse and a coal shed we had "Dad's garden shed" properly equipped with work benches, vices and so on. There I learnt to solder: there I did chemical "experiments": there I looked down my microscope at crystals I had made.
(Which is more than I did in my professional career: I cannot remember ever having looked down a microscope for any adult purpose.)
I like the old rigmarole: "We don't put the car in the garage - it's full up with freezers and the washing machine and the tumble dryer." "We don't have those in the kitchen because there's no room there what with all the house plants." "We have lots of plants indoors because there's not much room in the garden because of the car being parked there."
dearieme - I learnt to solder in the shed too, and I did chemical "experiments", mostly involving lots of smoke and fumes. The microscope I used indoors, often to examine drops of puddle water after spotting rotifers, although at the time I didn't know they were rotifers.
We have a car in the garage, but we don't know anyone else who uses their garage for such an unusual purpose.
When I was a boy we had an old stable that we called "the garage" because once upon a time it had occasionally hosted our car. But that habit was lost: it had filled up with boats, a boat trolley, an outboard, sets of sails, etc.
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