St Pancras station train shed

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It's a testament to the engineering skills, vision and achievement of the Victorians that so much of the infrastructure that they created still serves us today. Our large towns and cities, for example, still depend to a very great extent on the sewers that they constructed, and the essence of the railway system is almost wholly a creation of the nineteenth century.

I was reminded of this the other day when I walked through the arch under St Pancras Hotel in London and stepped onto the platform where the Eurostar trains were were lined up. What caught my eye wasn't the sleek elegance of the shiny locomotives and their carriages, but the enormous, soaring, single-span arch of the engine shed. This structure was the work of the engineer, William Henry Barlow (1812-1902) assisted by Rowland Mason Ordish (1824-1886). It is slightly pointed, creates a space just over 245 feet (75 metres) wide, and was the largest such building in the world at the time it was erected in 1868. The materials used were wrought iron, timber and glass. Each of the 24 main ribs are six feet deep and are created from a lattice-work of metal that lends the whole structure a light, almost insubstantial appearance. That it continues in service today is a testament to its strength and the skill of those who designed and built it. In the fifteenth year of the twenty first century we are used to being impressed by large, new, exciting structures - earlier in the day I had been looking at 1 St Mary Axe (the "Gherkin") and the new Broadgate development - and it's good, I think, that the buildings that awed the Victorians are still capable of inspiring that feeling in us today.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 10.4mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Signs and sentience

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Over the years I've posted quite a few photographs of signs. Some of them, such as the recent one of the London Underground roundel show specimens displaying exemplary design, others, as is the case with this old road sign, illustrate how signs in the past emphasised the message much more than presentation. However, it is those signs that say more than the writer intended that I enjoy most of all.

I particularly relished the sign I came across in Williamson Park, Lancaster, that proclaimed, "Danger - Shallow Water" and I had to drive carefully and look behind every tree and bush when I came upon the sign at Bleasdale, Lancashire, that said, "Slow - Children & Dogs Everywhere". Then there was the sign on a Blackpool pier exhorting visitors not to attach bicycles to the railings because to do so was a fire hazard. I felt I had little choice but to give that blog post the title, "Incendiary bicycles?"

When I decided that my garden shed needed its security improving I took a few basic measures to make it more difficult for a burglar to enter. I also cast around for a sign that would increase the deterrent effect. When I saw this one I simply had to buy it. I loved the idea that my shed is sentient and has feelings just like you and me, though every time I see it I do wonder what I could have done to cause it such consternation.

Incidentally, this image shows a photographic optical illusion of a kind that I've noticed before. The writing on the sign is engraved, yet sometimes it appears to be embossed depending on how you visually interpret the shadows in the indentations. Another example of the phenomenon can be seen in this old graffiti on the medieval stonework of the tower of St Botolph in Boston, Lincolnshire

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 100mm macro
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 100 sec
ISO: 160
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Men and sheds

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For a certain type of Englishman the garden shed is the centre of his universe, the place where the chaos of the world is brought under control. In the space circumscribed by its four walls he is the master of all he surveys: nothing enters or happens without his say-so. It used to be said that "an Englishman's home is his castle". That was never true because it was usually heavily influenced by a female hand. However, for the kind of man I'm talking about the shed really is his castle, a place of retreat and solitude, with a Chubb lock and a stout tongue and groove door in place of the drawbridge and portcullis.

Only in England, I think, could a book called Men and Sheds find a publisher and an enthusiastic readership. And only in England could it spawn sequels and imitators with the titles Shed Men, The Shed Book, and 101 Things To Do In A Shed! Woodworking, metalwork, model railways, DIY, astronomy, sports, TV watching, music making, collections of various sorts: it seems that men can use a shed for anything that takes their fancy. And, lest you think that sheds are solely the province of those of lesser means, you should know that writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas and Roald Dahl found their inspiration working in these humble structures; though in some instances they might have had the grander (but no more accurate) name of "summer house". A few days ago my newspaper carried an article about the "shed of the year". It had been nominated for the title by the website readersheds.co.uk (yes, such a site really exists!) and has a bed, a compost toilet, telescope, dart board and satellite TV: a veritable mansion in the world of sheds!

My photograph above prompted these thoughts, not because it is the archetypal man's shed, but because it looks like it's probably a member of that rare species, a woman's shed. Potting sheds, like the gardening that they support, are the province of both sexes, and this one has a clue that suggests it may be the domain of a woman. It's not the group of planted pots by the door that makes me think this, or even the vase of flowers next to them, so much as the words "Potting Shed". Each letter has been individually painted in bright colours with a few flowers dotted about for good measure, and the whole is on a white board that is fixed to the door. To my mind that is a female touch: a man's sign would have been either more utilitarian or more elaborate, and definitely not as pretty!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/160 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The gravedigger's door

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"As one door closes, another opens", we say, and this was metaphorically and literally true for the parishioners of Swineshead in Lincolnshire. For a period of a hundred, or maybe even two hundred years, as the door of life closed on a person, so the door of this churchyard shed opened, and the gravedigger brought out his tools to prepare a burial place for the deceased.

Today the building is more likely to contain a lawnmower and a few other tools for maintaining the grounds of the ancient church. But it may still hold the gravedigger's tools for those parishioners whose final journey doesn't include cremation. Whatever its present purpose, it still stands, castellated above, repaired and extended with different bricks, and sealed with its old pointed door in its old pointed arch - the builder's idea of what is appropriate for a churchyard.

I'd gone to Swineshead to photograph the lovely church tower and spire with its corona base, and came away with a number of images that I'm pleased with. This is one that I didn't look for - it just, serendipitously, presented itself. Of all the shots I took on that bright, windy afternoon, this is my favourite for the combination of colours, shadows and texture.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 16mm (32mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Old sheds

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At some time in the future a photographer will stop in front of an old agricultural shed and say to his friend, "Weren't these twenty-first century steel framed buildings, with their green, powder-coated, pressed metal walls and roofs wonderful". They'll be extolling the virtues of a structure that many today see as an abomination, a blight on the countryside.

However, it doesn't take an enormous leap of the imagination to see how an eyesore becomes an icon: how the stone-built Yorkshire Dales barn, the height of modernity in the nineteenth century becomes the ancient listed building of today. Or how the brick-built, terracotta-tiled barn of the eighteenth or nineteenth century in East Yorkshire or Lincolnshire, structures associated with the agricultural "improvers" who dispossessed the poor of their land, becomes the rustic and romantic backdrop to desirable country living.

Whether anyone will "Ooh!" and "Aah!" over this pair of ramshackle sheds is another matter. Yet, they too carry a record of the past in their timber and block construction, as well as a reflection of the neglect and the harsh weather they have experienced. I came upon them among fields of vegetables in the flatness of the Lincolnshire Fens. The rising sun was driving off the morning fog, but enough remained for it to obscure the horizon and isolate the sheds from their background. They were housing some large pieces of new timber, a commodity rare enough in this intensively farmed area, and ragged though they were they were, they were still good enough to provide valuable protection.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0EV
Image Stabilisation: Off