Shed - Culture

Culture

In Australia and New Zealand the term shed can be used to refer to any building that is not a residence and which may be open at the ends or sides, or both. Australia's passion for sheds is documented in Mark Thomson's Blokes and Sheds (1998). Jim Hopkins' similarly titled Blokes & Sheds (1998), with photographer Julie Riley Hopkins, profiles amateur inventors from across New Zealand. Hopkins and Riley followed up that book with Inventions from the Shed (1999) and a 5-part film documentary series with the same name. Gordon Thorburn also examined the shed proclivity in his book Men and Sheds (2002), as did Gareth Jones in Shed Men (2004).

Recently, "Men's Sheds" have become common in Australia. In New Zealand, the bi-monthly magazine The Shed appeals to the culture of "blokes" who do woodwork or metalwork DIY projects in their sheds.

Another magazine called The Shed, a bimonthly PDF magazine produced in the UK, but with a global audience, targets people who work (usually in creative industries) in garden offices, sheds and other shed-like atmospheres. In the UK, people have long enjoyed working in their potting sheds; the slang term "sheddie", to refer to a person enamoured of shed-building, testifies to the place of sheds in UK popular culture. A Usenet Newsgroup "uk.rec.sheds" has long championed this subculture: their lengthy FAQ is a masterly summary of the idea. Shedworking: A lifestyle guide for shedworkers is published at Blogger.

Author Gordon Thorburn examined the shed proclivity in his book Men and Sheds, which argues that a "place of retreat" is a "male necessity" which provides men with solace, especially during their retirement. In contrast, in the novel Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, Aunt Edna Doom saw "something nasty in the woodshed" and retreated to her bed for half a century.

In the United States, a woodshed is often associated with corporal punishment; in many rural communities, a wayward boy would be disciplined with a switch or whip or similar instrument by an adult male relative, typically the father. Such discipline would frequently be meted out in or behind the wooden shed ubiquitous in rural America, so as to be out of the public view. The phrase "taking someone to the woodshed" now is a generic idiom for meting out discipline (whether violent or not), or for resoundingly defeating an opponent in a game or sport.

To woodshed, or 'shed, in jazz jargon, is "to shut oneself up, away from the world, and practice long and hard, as in 'going to the woodshed'."