For the good life, shed your inhibitions

PSST, wanna buy a ticket to the Chelsea Flower Show? You can tell an event has truly arrived when it starts to attract ticket touts. Entrepreneurial sorts have been selling passes to this week’s event in London for a couple of hundred pounds when a ticket normally goes for £45.

Gardening, you see, is the new rock and roll. It even has rival bands, with the Beechgrove Garden lot engaged in a Blur/oasis-style tussle with the Gardeners’ World mob (my money is on the Scots: Carole Baxter might look slight, but she fights dirty).

Like rock and roll, trends within gardening come and go. Zooming up the charts at Chelsea were sheds. Yes, you read that correctly. Sheds. Not your common or garden variety of shed, half collapsed, unpainted, stuffed with bits and bobs for which there will never again be any conceivable need. These were posh sheds.

Lynda Snell started the ball rolling in The Archers when she hired Eddie Grundy to knock up a shepherd’s hut in which she could compose the annual panto and plot world domination. Then it emerged David Cameron, former PM and the man who brought you Brexit, was writing his memoirs in a shepherd’s hut. (He still hasn’t finished them. Sheesh, Dave, how long does it take to write “Oops, sorry!”). The Cameron hut, painted in swanky Farrow and Ball colours, cost a reported £25,000.

Things have moved on since then with one writer reporting the presence at Chelsea of the first “hipster shepherd’s hut”, handcrafted in the finest woods, clad in tastefully hued tin, and complete with shower and toilet. Yours for £29k. “Not only do they add a bucolic element to a garden,” reported Anne Ashworth of the Times, “but they are increasingly being used to house a grown-up child who has returned home after university.” Yet more cost, then.

There is no need for not so grown-up children to feel left out. Also on show at Chelsea was a mock Georgian Wendy house made of bricks. Chandeliers and bookshelves optional, and a snip at £20,000. But the mother of all sheds at the moment is the “she shed”, to which the latest edition of Country Living has provided a guide.

Painting the thing is just the start. She shed owners must also “define the purpose” of the building. “The point of a she shed is to have a quiet are liberated, dreams come true. In short, a shed makes you a better person, a better version of you. It does not have to be true. You can buy a £40,000 shed and still not be able to string a sentence together, but there is still the possibility that you might. Hope is a designer shed.

Isn’t it strange, though, that running alongside the fashion for sheds is the trend towards more open-plan houses. Indoors, people want walls knocked down to make big family kitchens and “spaces” to hang out together. It’s all about the “flow”, as they say on the property programmes. People can rest, socialise, dine where they like.

Yet outdoors, everyone desires their own shed. They want to get the heck away from other people. Other people are noisy, messy. They don’t want to watch the programme you like. They talk when you want to read. All perfectly understandable feelings, but where will this desire to be alone eventually lead? In 20 years’ time every garden could look like a trailer park with a shed for mum, one for dad, one each for the children and two for granny and grandpa who like to spread out with their jigsaws.

If only there was some place where you could have private spaces and public ones, where you could do your own thing or join in the communal fun. Sounds a lot like the houses we used to have before the massed ranks of builders arrived. Anyone know a good architect?