Here is another look back at a building I saw at the ChiItern Open Air Museum back in last summer. It is, as many of my readers will know, a Nissen hut, a kind of building that could be erected quickly to provide anything from storage space to accommodation for troops. Indeed it was an army officer who came up with the idea, and here’s what I wrote about these simple but ingenious buildings in an earlier post:
It was in 1916, that Lt Col Peter Nissen had the idea of combining a metal frame and sheets of corrugated iron to produce cheap, easily assembled huts for the Allied armed forces. The army acted quite quickly on Nissen's idea because they needed huts: like many a good inventor, Nissen had seen a pressing need – for cheap buildings that could be made quickly to house an expanding army – and set out to find a way of fulfilling it. Although the idea of the hut is very simple, the finished design was not done in a day, because Nissen had to refine it, thinking of everything from an easy, watertight way to joined the iron sheets to a set of simple illustrated assembly instructions that could be followed by unskilled men working at speed.
I might have added that another refinement was constructing windows in the curved walls of the building. The Nissen hut al the museum shows the dormer window design that was the usual solution. It was easy enough, as here, to include extra windows in the flat ends of the hut – the end wall was usually of wood, although masonry end walls were also sometimes built.
This hut’s original use is not known. When the museum acquired it, it was at a farm near Dunstable, where it had been used for storage. At the museum it has two uses. The front part is fitted out as an air force briefing room from World War II; a room at the other end is used by educational groups that visit the museum. It may be almost 100 years old – no one is sure of its exact age – but it’s still a practical little building.
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