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INTRODUCTION: "BEDS IN SHEDS" IN 2015 AND 1666
In September 2015 Joe Peduzzi answered an advertisement on SpareRoom.com to view a room in Bethnal Green in East London. Peduzzi was new to the city, having moved from the Isle of Wight to start a new job. A photograph of the flat shows what appears to be a fairly ordinary communal living space, equipped with a sofa, a chair, some tables, and shelves. But tucked away behind the other furniture was a less expected addition: a small freestanding structure with its own roof, walls, and windows, painted white to fade into the background. This structure was a garden shed.1 "Beds in sheds"-to borrow the formulation beloved by outraged journalists-are one of the more picturesque additions to London's early twentyfirst-century housing crisis. No longer merely places to store old plant pots and bikes, these sheds offer a material commentary on life in the contemporary global city, acting as a convenient figure for wider social, cultural, political, and economic issues: from the new lows plumbed in the rental market to the unchecked activities of self-interested landlords and the challenges faced by young people, scrabbling to get some kind of foothold in the city.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 also resulted in a housing crisis, when around thirteen thousand houses were destroyed in both the city proper and the extramural areas just to the west.2 One strategy for contending with the dispersal of people was the temporary structures dotted around the city at Moorfields, Finsbury Fields, Highgate, and Islington to the north, and St George's Fields in Southwark to the south.3 Some of these "miserable huts and hovels" were intended as short-term crisis management, providing emergency shelter for those who had been burned out of their homes.4 Not all were rudimentary: in April 1667 Samuel Pepys remarked upon structures at Moorfields that were two stories high.5
Some structures built as disaster relief were still in place decades after the fire. The Court of Aldermen ordered the demolition of all sheds on Moorfield in 1674, issuing an even more sweeping directive the following year.6 The story of Thomas Catchmead, fishmonger, was even more remarkable. Burned out of his premises in Fish Lane in the city, he temporarily relocated...