Fan of follies creates a chapel-shaped shed
Here's a garden shed as you've never seen it before – built like a tin chapel complete with its working own bell tower.
It is the creation of Alan Terrill, who built it from scratch and managed to find the bell on eBay.
"It's just there for fun," he said today. "It's only rung if I'm demonstrating it to someone who's come to look at the shed."
While that old ship's bell is just a light hearted addition, the shed itself is entirely functional, performing the traditional role of keeping garden tools and grass seed dry.
The 59-year-old, who works at the Severn Hospice, said: "I'm interested in follies as a subject and belong to the Folly Fellowship, an organisation that cares about follies.
"I run their website. Because of that everything I build tends to be decorative. We wanted a shed for the garden tools and said why not have it in the middle of the lawn, rather than hidden in the corner."
Alan, who lives in the countryside near Minsterley, built the shed from scratch to his own design from wood and corrugated iron sheeting.
"It's a practical shed on the inside, while on the outside it looks like a chapel. I put a bell on top and there's a rope down the side so it can be rung.
"I like corrugated iron chapels. There's one at White Gritt, which is a couple of miles down the road which is still used every Sunday and which I often pass while I'm out cycling. There were quite a lot around at the beginning of the last century. They were built in kit form, like an Ikea building. They were delivered on a trailer – missions halls, churches, chapels, schools – and they could put them together in a couple of days. I've been quite fond of them."
But as the fronts of these buildings tend to be plain, Alan thought he'd add extra interest taking inspiration from an historic building just over the Shropshire border.
"The front I modelled on a building in Tenbury Wells, called the Spa building. It was a failed spa enterprise which tried to entice people to come to Tenbury to 'take the waters', but fell into disuse and has only recently been renovated.
"It's made of wood with a galvanised iron covering, but is very decorative and its style has been described as 'Chinese-Gothick'".
As for his own shed, he says he made it up as he went along. "I needed a shed big enough to hold all the usual gardening junk and, to make things easy, I based the dimensions on the width of standard corrugated iron sheets and made it four widths long by three widths wide. I did a drawing to work out how much timber I needed – not a proper scale drawing, but enough to work out the total lengths of timber. Cutting the sheets took a bit of getting used to. I got an angle grinder which sent sparks everywhere but it was easier to cut and work with than I imagined."
He made the shed over five or six weeks and says the materials cost about £1,100 all told. The only thing he can compare his unique creation with is the shepherd's hut-style wheeled buildings which used to be used by road surfacing teams and have now come into fashion as holiday homes, which for an equivalent building he says would cost £9,000 to £10,000.
"It doesn't rust and is completely durable. It's a lot less maintenance than a conventional timber shed.
"Not many people have seen it really. A handful of friends have. It's quite visible to walkers and I've seen the odd one stop and look.
"I'm very pleased with it and making it by hand means I can make it tall enough to fit my 6ft 3ins height without bending." It is not Alan's first unusual creation. The biggest one he's built was at his former home in Kent, where he built a 15ft folly tower called Rohan's Tower in the garden out of blue brick, with stairs to the top, to occupy himself after the death of his son from cancer in 1998.
"The battlements were made out of large Lego bricks.
"I've done miniature castles for our pet tortoises and guinea pigs and that sort of thing. I just like unusual buildings. It's the eccentricity and the human interest of the people who built them which interests me."
