The battle for the cloud

corrugated iron

G IMME SHELTER

Down the deep lanes that lead to Dartmoor’s granite uplands, in England's West Country, a weatherbeaten gap has grown in the hedge marking a Saxon field boundary. One day this winter a battered sheet of corrugated iron appeared, lodged in the gap as if it had blown in. In reality, the middle-aged brothers who farm nearby are probably responsible: their sheep have a habit of busting into others’ fields. In the chilling wind the sheet quivers, like a living thing.

Rusted corrugated iron melds with autumn’s russet colours, just asthe corrugated roofs of nearby barnssit comfortably in Dartmoor’s weather-worn landscape. For decades, corrugated iron has been used by farmers for lambing sheds, shepherds’ huts, shelter for farm machinery and much more.

Too often, corrugated iron (in fact, more usually, steel) goes ignored. Tastemakers have looked down on it, though that is changing. Invented in the early 19th century, its spread represents a revolution that is playing out still, on a global scale. Sheets of corrugated iron marked the first wide-scale building material that did not spring from what lay, in terms of stone, clay and timber, around. It represented the first widespread use of steel in buildings. Corrugated iron is light, and easy to transport and assemble. That enabled the first mass production of prefabricated buildings—introducing the flat-packable concept a century before ikea.

From the mid-19th century, some of the biggest waves of human migration and settlement were indivisible from the corrugated iron that people often brought with them. The metal enabled life in places that were otherwise inhospitable because of climate, terrain or paucity of local materials for shelter. It is,