Garden sheds I have known and the stories that come with them ........ the figure in the reflection

Now there is a moment in the film Blow Up when a photographer notices something odd and sinister in one of the pictures he had casually taken in a London park in the summer of 1966.

Peter's painting of the shed

In the process of enlarging the shot he notices a body and nearby in the bushes a man holding a gun and from that point the film takes a series of twists and turns.

Anyone of my generation will remember the film and the impact it made on them.

I know I do.  I was 16 and Britain and especially London was experiencing that exciting and wonderful period when the new from fashion to music to ideas and politics looked different and promised a different future.

Figures in a reflection from the photograph

That said I can hardly really admit to being part of it.  In Eltham in south east London it all looked pretty much the same as it had done a decade earlier, and I guess for Peter living in Preston it was much the same.

But the memory of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film never left either of us and my photograph of our old garden shed stirred something in Peter’s imagination.

I long ago had clocked the image in the reflection and then forgot about it but on a slow evening with just repeats on the telly Peter took up the challenge of painting the shed  and Blow Up took over.

And like David Hemmings in the film he began to explore those images and because he does things in acrylic what followed will become a series of paintings each just a little more detailed than the one before.

Standing in front of the main panel was the man with the camera, but behind him was the figure of a woman.

Detail of the reflection from the photograph

Look more closely and she is holding something, ........ enlarge that detail and there is a gun.

Or so it would seem.

Now in my short life in that house my parents shared it with a succession of tenants, from Millie the Mole and her love partner Boy Boy Jones, to a  man with two wives and a couple who met across the upstairs landing.*

He was Polish and she was German, they fell for each other, got married and moved out.

But his parting gift to us was the shed built in the mid 1950s and still standing today long after we left for Well Hall.

As for the story of the shed, well I will leave that to your imagination.

Painting; the shed in the garden of Lausanne Road  © 2016 Peter Topping Paintings from Pictures Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

*The history of the shed, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20history%20of%20the%20Shed

Garden sheds I have known and the stories that come with them ........ Millie the Mole, and the Polish builder

Now the garden shed is as much a part of the landscape and our history as the stone water trough, red telephone kiosk and the equally loved old fashioned rear entrance double decker bus.*

The garden shed, 2010

Some of these old favourites may now be no longer fit for purpose and some like the double decker were useless if you were in a wheelchair, but the humble garden shed just goes on and each will have a story.

This is ours; built in our garden in Lausanne Road sometime in the mid 1950s by one of the people who rented rooms form my parents.

He was Polish and later became very friendly with another tenant who was German and in the fullness of time they married and moved out to a flat just round the corner.

I think he had replaced Millie the Mole and her boy friend Boy Boy Jones.**

This was the period just after the last world war and housing was still in short supply, with many people living in rented accommodation.

It was the age of the private landlord and “living in rooms” was commonplace.

We were I think unique in owning our own house and most of my friends lived in grand old Victorian houses which long ago had been sub divided in to flats.

Lausanne Road, 2010

I don't remember, Millie the Mole and Boy Boy Jones. He was involved in smash and grab raids which were at the cutting edge of big time crime.

The gang would choose a suitable jewellers and using a brick and pick axe handle smash the window, grab the loot and escape in the waiting car. Boy Boy Jones was the driver.

A career which came to an abrupt end when he drove off during a raid, leaving the gang to struggle along a crowded Peckham High Street, with assorted diamond rings, a necklace and several watches.

Needless to say their progress was somewhat hampered by the loot and the Saturday shoppers and they were caught.

Boy Boy Jones remained free which was not necessarily a good thing for Millie, whose relationship with him was tempestuous at the best of times and led on one occasion to Boy Boy arousing the street as he dangled her out of one of the upstairs windows by her wrists.

And when they moved on it was the Polish chap and his wife who moved in.  To me they were something different. Occasionally I would be invited to share a cup of real coffee and some Polish biscuits which arrived from the “homeland”.

Like so many of the stories I have posted their experiences reflect the awful events of the century they lived in. Theirs were “little lives lived out in a big century.” Both had been victims of the displacement of millions of ordinary people who had been in the wrong place when the war broke out and found themselves part of that tide of homeless refugees in 1945.

Me, a tent and that garden shed, 1957

I don’t know their stories and like many of their generation they didn’t talk about the past. But he was Polish and may have spent time as a Soviet prisoner, which begs the question had he been on the wrong side in the conflict, or just a causality of the Cold War?

Either way there is a lasting testimony to their stay in the house, because the garden shed he built in the late 1950s is still there. I had almost completely forgotten about it.

And then on an impulse while on a visit to London for a family wedding we visited the old house.

It is almost 50 years since we left but there is much about the place that I remember. I am grateful to Rachel and David the new owners who did not mind that we had invaded their Sunday and were happy to show us around.

The garden seemed smaller and more alive with plants than I remember it. The trees had gone but the shed remained.

I rather liked the fact that something from all those people who had passed through had survived.

Location; Lausanne Road, London

Pictures; the shed in 2010 and in 1957 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Lausanne Road, 2010 courtesy of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick

*The history of the Shed. https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20history%20of%20the%20Shed

**Millie the Mole, Boy Boy Jones and a garden shed, ............ London in the 1950s, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/millie-mole-boy-boy-jones-and-garden.html 

A shedload of sheds on the Ivygreen Allotments ...... or sheds Peter has painted .... nu 2 Lois & Paul's Shed

History should be kind to the garden shed and by extension to all those that adorn our allotments up and down the country.

After all they have been a feature of our landscape for a very long time and like the story of the private garden and the history of allotments they are a fascinating insight into how we live.

So with that in mind when Peter told me he was interested in turning some of the sheds on the Ivygreen Allotments into paintings, I knew it was time for a new series.*

It started with a fine painting of one of the more humble ones and today showcases that of Lois & Paul's Shed.

At which point I will against my better judgement quote Peter’s comment on sending the image across “sounds like a Plot to me I will post you a copy through the back door....” which only leaves me to mutter "I shall have to go digging for the more fruitful research on allotment history."

Location; Ivygreen Allotments

Painting; Here is the first of the paintings of Ivygreen Allotments.... Lois & Paul's Shed at Ivygreen Allotments, painting © 2016 Peter Topping Paintings from Pictures Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

*The history of the shed, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20history%20of%20the%20Shed

A shedload of sheds on the Ivygreen Allotments ........... or sheds Peter will paint .... nu 1 an introduction

Now never having been one to shy away from those bits of history which others regard as trivial, I have explored a range of street furniture which was once taken for granted but is now fast disappearing from our roads and highways.

Sheds of all sizes

It started with the water trough continued with the destruction of many of the traditional finger posts and now includes telephone boxes, street drain grids and old lamp posts.

That said those old cast iron ventilation shafts which vented the build up of dangerous gasses  in our Victorian sewers have survived as have the humble shed on the  municipal allotment.

And having spoken to Peter, who is interested in turning some of the sheds on the Ivygreen Allotments into paintings, I rather think it’s time for a new series.

Down on Halstead Avenue they come in all shapes and sizes.

There are big ones, small ones, ones which have come from garden centres and DIY stores and even one that is nearing its 90th birthday.

And here I have to own up to briefly renting an allotment.

It was directly opposite our two up two down on Raynham Street in Ashton and we took over the tenancy from our next door neighbour, but to my shame we did little with it and when we left the house we gave it up.

But we didn’t have a shed and perhaps if we had a shed maybe the story would have been different.

At the gates

According to the National Allotments Society, “allotments have been in existence for hundreds of years, with evidence pointing back to Anglo-Saxon times.

But the system we recognise today has its roots in the Nineteenth Century, when land was given over to the labouring poor for the provision of food growing.

This measure was desperately needed thanks to the rapid industrialisation of the country and the lack of a welfare state.

In 1908 the Small Holdings and Allotments Act came into force, placing a duty on local authorities to provide sufficient allotments, according to demand.

Allotment Gardens in 1907

However it wasn’t until the end of the First World War that land was made available to all, primarily as a way of assisting returning service men (Land Settlement Facilities Act 1919) instead of just the labouring poor.

The rights of allotment holders in England and Wales were strengthened through the Allotments Acts of 1922, but the most important change can be found in the Allotments Act of 1925 which established statutory allotments which local authorities could not sell off or covert without Ministerial consent.”*

All of which fits with the story of those on Halstead Avenue which the  Ivygreen Allotments Society claim are about a hundred years old and certainly looking at the OS map for 1907 they are marked as Allotment Gardens.

Pictures; a shed and a gate from the collection of Peter Topping and the detail from the 1907 OS for Chorlton-cum-Hardy

*The National Allotments Society, http://www.nsalg.org.uk/allotment-info/brief-history-of-allotments/