The Winter Palace
The writer of "Caught By The River" recently shared her account of a wondrous shed in SE4:
[In] Kev’s south London back garden, he and his girlfriend add lovely twists to their lives by, for example, inviting people round for a mini festival instead of a BBQ. Their artist friends turned the bathroom into a neon installation with hanging octopi and dreamy seaweed. They hung a huge roll of paper on the outside wall and pulled and pegged the resulting pictures out around the house, and someone sung a funny song about why his dad was a c-word.
We sat in Kev’s shed, that he had built himself. He had raided skips and de-burdened builders of salvage they’d otherwise have to tip. He uprooted Sold signs outside houses and used the poles for joists. “Estate agents are immoral,” he said, “so it’s fine.” Sitting in Kev’s shed was like sitting in a building imagined by Hammer & Tongs or Roald Dahl, a made-up shed made real by a simple equation: idea + action + a healthy disregard for other people’s rules.
Eventually, we managed to get in touch with Kevin, who gave us this photo of the shed and told us:
We made the winterhouse mostly because I'm always rooting around in skips and it seemed about time to do something useful with the booty. The little arty party just seemed to happen with various people passing through the house. So many talented people lurking around south London I find. I'm moving out end of the month and so we are bequeathing the winter house to the new housemates although I'll be back in spring to have a little mini fest of some sort.
