Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

Hot hut

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.

West Camel, Somerset

The joys of the wriggly stuff

Up there in the list of my obsessions are various things that are not strictly architecture, but which are adjuncts to architecture and often make buildings interesting or give them interesting contexts – lettering on buildings, three-dimensional pub signs, post boxes, wooden shacks, obsolete petrol pumps, and, somewhere near the top of the heap, corrugated iron. Aficionados of this versatile but low-status building material often refer to it as ‘wriggly tin’, which is a misnomer as far as the ‘tin’ goes, but is amusing enough and highlights its salient quality, the corrugations that both make the stuff strong and give it its characteristic appearance, helping it to look good when the sun comes out.

Wriggly tin is cheap, lightweight, easy for low-skilled people to build with, and highly versatile. If you hit the term ‘corrugated iron’ in the tag cloud in the right-hand column, you’ll find posts about barns, a house, a boat house, Nissen huts, workshops, and even churches built of the material. Here in West Camel there’s a multiple whammy of corrugated iron – not just a modest green-painted shed but a row of houses with great curving roofs with a corrugated covering. If the houses resemble Nissen huts, there’s a reason. They were built by John Petter and Percy J Warren, who took their inspiration from the Nissen huts designed by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Nissen. The pair of architects set up a company to produce the houses and acknowledged their debt to Nissen by calling their firm Nissen-Petren Houses and appointing Nissen to the board of directors.

The idea was to market the houses to local authorities, who were building homes in the 1920s in the wake of the First World War. The return of soldiers not only increased the demand for affordable housing, but caused a shortage of materials and skilled labour, and the design of the Nissen-Petren houses was a way of overcoming these problems by creating structures of non-traditional materials that were straightforward to erect. The houses had a steel frame, concrete end walls, and a roof covered with corrugated steel. They could be built much faster than brick houses and the hope was that the cost would be slightly lower too. However, the houses weren’t taken up widely – there were concerns about the cost, the appearance of the houses, and that fact that some roof leaks were reported. A few were built in the West Country, but not enough to make the Nissen-Petren company viable and it closed in financial difficulties. The row in West Camel, visible from the A303, are, as far as I know, the largest group to survive.

Stanton, Gloucestershire

More curves

Bear with me, patient reader, as I indulge my interest with yet one more bit of corrugated iron. The key to the material’s success, from the time of its invention in the 19th century to today, is how the corrugations give this thin, lightweight material strength. Another of its virtues is how it can be bent during the building process, to make roofs that are inexpensive, strong, and curved to shed the rain effectively. Hence its widespread use in barns and sheds – as long-suffering regular readers will know from various past posts.

Here’s another use of the curving process. The photograph was taken some years ago at a plant nursery tucked away in the Cotswolds. The owner was then using several corrugated iron sheds and Nissen huts for work and storage, and where two sit together, whoever erected them has improvised a broad gutter between the two to take the rainwater that runs off. This entailed merely bending a sheet of corrugated iron into a semi-circle. It’s disarmingly simple, and could be made to fit the gap, which is a little wide for a single conventional gutter. Of course, like any gutter, it needs cleaning out, otherwise plants will grow in it, as they have begun to do here. But it’s an ingenious bit of bricolage, to which I raise my hat.

Chedworth, Gloucestershire

Nissen and his huts

The other day I was driving to Cirencester and the route was blocked by roadworks in a village. I took the prescribed diversion, but turned off the signed route after a short distance, to take a back road that I didn’t know, but which the Resident Wise Woman and I both thought would take us closer to our destination. As we rounded a bend, a shout of delight rang out from the passenger seat: we had spotted the building in my photograph, probably the longest Nissen hut I’ve ever seen. A convenient gate provided a temporary parking space and I was soon out of the car and zooming in to this amazing enfilade of corrugated iron and developing rust. It was going to be a good day.

There was no one around to ask, but we guessed that the hut was a building associated with a former airfield nearby, itself not far from the current RFC Rendcomb Airfield. RFC.* That's RFC as in Royal Flying Corps, which is to say before the RAF. Suggesting that the area was home to a World War I airfield. If that’s the case, I thought we could be looking at quite an early Nissen hut. but it turns out to be a World War II hut, part of Chedworth airfield.¶

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 need – for cheap huts that could be made quickly to house an expanding army – and set out to solve 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.

And so it was that these strange rounded structures began to appear. The Daily Mail, being cheerful in terrible times, described what it must have been like they they emerged on to the field of conflict, without any apparent preparation and in magically short order:

‘At about the same time as the tanks made their memorable debut on the battlefield, another creature, almost equally primaeval of aspect, began to appear in conquered areas. No one ever saw it on the move, or met it on the roads. It just appeared! Overnight you would see a blank space of ground. In the morning it would be occupied by an immense creature of the tortoise species, settled down solidly and permanently on the earth, and emitting green smoke from a right-angled system at one end, where its mouth might be, as though it were smoking a pipe.’

The huts caught on, at first to house troops, kit, and even field hospital beds, after the war for all sorts of civilian uses. They're not uncommon on airfields§ and many have also ended up on farms, or used as factory extensions. But I have not seen one as long as this  – even the lon huts I saw on TV making up a former prisoner of war camp were not, I think, as big as this one. It must need its many windows, as the standard layout for the shortest huts, with just a pair of windows in each end, simply would not work in a structure as long as this. But work this one must have done, for years, for whatever purpose it is now used, and although somewhat rusty, it shows signs of care and recent repair. Long live Nissen’s huts!


- - - - -


* Wingwalking is one of the activities pursued here. For a fee, you too can get strapped on to a framework on the upper wing of a lovely Boeing Stearsman biplane and zoom and bank above the Cotswolds. I find it a frightening idea, but many love it, and someone was enjoying the experience as we drove past.

¶ Thanks to readers who supplied information via the Comments section.

† For much of my information on the origin of these ingenious huts, and the Daily Mail quotation, I am indebted to Fred McCosh, Nissen of the Huts, BD Publishing, 1997.

§ Back home, I checked the OS map and saw that the airfield indeed extended in this direction – and that maybe even the road I was driving along was originally part of it.