Sheds are Bourgeois Crap

So reckons a character in Lars von Trier's 1998 flick, The Idiots. But he may have had a point. There was a time when the shed was very much a feature of working class life. My family were no different, we had three in our garden: one to keep the bikes and sledges (which was later used as a kennel by the mutt); one for our fridge freezer, and the last was where my dad tried to teach me manly things like nailing together planks of wood and how to skin a rabbit. And there was a fourth shed down the allotment dad and granddad used to keep their garden tools. I never really made the habit of poking around my friends' parents' sheds but I got the impression they were kept for strictly utilitarian purposes too.

But not anymore! According to BBC Breakfast this morning the economic crisis has seen sheds sell by the ... shed load. But it is clear the report is talking about something very different from the shed where my dad did arcane things with power tools. What the BBC reports is the growing embourgeoisement of sheds.

Apparently, creative and professional types are turning to sheds because they offer particular advantages working indoors cannot. For starters, they're isolated from the rest of the house: they are places where work can proceed undisturbed without the foul intrusion of telephone calls, emails or knocks at the door. Is so doing, the shed-as-refuge threatens to become the de rigeur space where the creative individual mind cuts free of the befuddlement of the social world so it can go about conjuring newness out of nothingness.

These new "sheddies" have a pantheon of patron saints to give the move into the garden something of an intellectual imprimatur. George Bernard Shaw wrote much of his work in a shed that rotated. Philip Pullman of His Dark Materials fame conceived and wrote his trilogy in a shed (it features in the report and is now the property of illustrator Ted Dewan - Pullman let him have it only on condition it was used for "creative purposes"). And I'm pretty sure Roald Dahl worked in a shed too*.

In his seminal Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argues class differences make themselves felt culturally in myriad different ways within and between classes. The most celebrated and obvious example in recent years of distinction playing out has been the appropriation of Burberry by some layers of the working class. For a luxury fashion house, to have its brand associated with the dangerous classes has been nothing short of disastrous as its wealthy consumers have turned to other houses to serve as fashionable markers of privileged taste.

So bourgeois cultural products can "sink" down into the depths of society from its gilded levels, so seemingly neglected cultural artifacts of working class life can make the reverse journey. The fate of Banksy's street art that has seen it rise from the mundane urban landscape of Bristol to the toast of the art world is one example. It would seem the shed is on a similar trajectory - and a necessary one as home offices have become depressingly common and so yesterday.

Fully in line with the logics of distinction, the bourgeois shed differs from its antecedents. This shed is a creative space: any and all associations with manual labour are purged (who needs tools anyway when one can hire in a gardener?) The shed is also a comfortable space where, if necessary, the creative dynamo of the bourgeois mind can relax and free associate behind insulated walls and double glazed windows. And, of course, because sheds are accumulating prestige and status they will increasingly become subject to artistic and architectural fashions. Mark my words, it won't be long before Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen hits TV screens with How Cred is your Shed?

*Just for the record, I do the bulk of my work in the office, the library, the living room table, the sofa, and the train (standard class). All thoroughly proletarian locations.