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The Economist December 18th 2021
After God, in the story of corrugated iron, comes war
↓ Buenos Aires,
Argentina (left) and Zeila, Somaliland
national craze for the weekend “bach”, a Kiwi dacha, was born. Baches are among New Zealand’s most icon ic buildings—largely because of tin. Back in Britain, corrugatediron churches for the new settlements in Australia, Burma, Canada and be yond were designed to seat hundreds of congregants. Before shipping, they would be erected to check noth ing was missing. The occasion was public and festive. Services and even dances were held inside. Churches for export also primed a new domestic market for corrugated churches, chapels and mission halls. These are Britain’s “tin tabernacles”. The radical structures were the antithesis of the medieval stone parish churches that till then had embodied religion, the English landscape and a paternalistic social order. the ripple eff ect Two broad forces were at work. The fi rst was a popula tion on the move, a consequence of an intense period of population growth and industrialisation. Poor, rural classes fl ocked to new centres of industry and mining. In the other direction, prospering middle classes sought distance from satanic mills and miasmic air by looking to the new suburbs. The demand for new plac es of worship followed. There was also a moral and so cial upheaval, typifi ed by improving education, a growing awareness of class and a wave of religious “re vivals”. Paternalism was there, in places, but with the new religiosity came a questioning of the established church. Iron churches, writes Nick Thomson in “Cor rugated Iron Buildings”, were the “perfect synthesis of industrial ability and social or spiritual need”. The catalogues of the ironmakers were swift to ca ter to the new trend. Church kits off ered gothic win dows and belfries. They started at under £100 (about £12,000 ($15,800) today), including shipping to the nearest railway goods station and erection on ready made foundations. Landowners and industrialists were persuaded to part with a scrap of ground, and within weeks, the structure would be up. The cost per soul must have seemed a bargain. In today’s postindustrial age, populations have moved on again, mainly to exurbia. Many of the sur viving tin tabernacles fl oat in empty quarters, at a rural crossroads or under the overgrown boughs of aban doned orchards. One landmark in Shrubland Road in
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east London has passed through the hands of several denominations. Now the building stands for sale, pre sumably destined to become homes for hipsters. After God, in the story of corrugated iron, comes war. In 1916, halfway through the fi rst world war, a Ca nadian engineer in the British Army, Peter Nissen, came up with a halfcylindrical building for billeting troops or storing equipment. A handful of men could put up a Nissen hut in four hours, transforming sol diers’ comfort. In the second world war, a larger ver sion, the Quonset hut, evolved in America. Hundreds of thousands were made. Two Nissen huts, joined end to end, underwent an apotheosis on Scotland’s Orkney Isles at the hands of Italian prisonersofwar. The Ital ian Chapel features a rood screen fashioned from steel reinforcing rods, and lanterns made of cornedbeef tins. A painted Madonna and Child rise behind the al tar. The walls and ceiling are covered with trompe l’oeil depictions of saints and Italian landscapes. The ornate whole is a masterpiece of suff ering willed into hope. Across the poor world, tin still lies at the heart of in formal settlements: urbanisation rolls out sheet by corrugated sheet. As well as representing shelter and adaptability, corrugated iron serves both as currency and community glue. Tin has less obvious adapta tions: leave plastic bottles of water on top of a tin roof, and the refl ected light and radiation will help kill bac teria in the water. Stick the same bottle through a hole in a tin roof, and you have an instant solar lamp. In the rich world, tin has acquired a hipness that ac knowledges its backstory and its “authenticity”, to employ a muchabused word, in pursuit of a simpler, more essential way of living. In particular, a handful of Australian architects, notably Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier and Ken Maher, celebrate the tradition of corrugated iron in a modern context. Mr Murcutt’s buildings “touch the earth lightly”, a phrase he bor rows from ancient aboriginal precepts. Mr Maher’s Olympic Park Station in Sydney, built to bring specta tors to the 2000 games, has a spectacular vaulted roof that pays homage to Australia’s corrugated tradition, Mr Maher says, while leaving the traveller with a po werful sense of emerging into the light. A long way from that quivering sheet in the Dartmoor hedge, but all the more reason to allow your eye, next time you are out and about, to settle on the humble, unsung tin. n
