Living Outside The Box
Browsing through GoodNewsNetwork today I found this article about shipping container housing. “Inexpensive and abundant, old shipping containers are turning into good looking affordable housing,” so it claims.
Further research brought me to similar programmes around the world, including the UK’s Container City. The second development (pictured) comprises 22 studios over 5 floors and took a mere 8 days to install, plus it comes with the fuzzy feel-good factor of recycling on a gargantuan scale.
I laughed at the predictability of this item standing out amongst the rest, as I myself am currently trying to resolve the Affordable Living Conundrum. Increasingly challenging in the UK, and yet more so in the ancient and picturesque city of York, which seems to have adopted me or at least to have captured my heart. Thank God I was born into a family of engineers. They are all happily chipping in with ideas for space-saving contraptions, involving the use of ropes, pulleys and ladders. The surveyor described my chosen property as a “small bedsit” — as if the word bedsit needed to be further minimised — but we prefer the agent’s “studio apartment” which sounds much less ’80s, and reminds me much less of Marc Almond.
As all this is taking place in Yorkshire I am often reminded of the classic Monty Python sketch, The Four Yorkshiremen (“There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.”), which you can view or read courtesy of Richard Pettinger here. It makes any accommodation, especially so much as a shipping container, or even a bedsit, seem like “luxury.”
If you’re more interested in living outside the box than in one (but still with the fuzzy feel-good factor), you’d better go to Inspiration4everyone.com, where you can find some jolly handy tips.
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May 15th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Funnily enough, I remember fondly my time spent living in a bedsit, mostly by myself, but for a period with three tenants come church-mice squeezed all inside. Which is not to say that a house full of flat-mates doesn’t have its own good points.
Perhaps luckily though, it seems Marc Almond was slightly before my time…
May 16th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Thanks John. I knew I’d regret mentioning Marc Almond
Soft Cell’s Bedsitter came out in 1982. If that was before your time, you’re lucky indeed!
May 16th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
If we’re counting, pop music and myself were strangers until precisely 1984—although I’m not going to be man enough and reveal the song that changed my ways. Up until that point I listened exclusively to classical music, by deliberate choice, and in fact didn’t realise that this might be unusual until a peer discovered what was playing on my walkman and told me so, more than emphatically.
There’s probably a story in all of this, and a theme I return to again and again—that my childhood self had far more wisdom than I ever knew.
Still, one highlight of both pop music and the 1980s that deserves more than a passing mention was Live Aid—a very special moment in the history of all sorts of things, and evidence of something that I can’t precisely put a finger on, at least not today…
May 18th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
I saw a news clip (or it could have been a short documentary) on TV the other day about Container City in the UK. How fabulous! The studios looked so spacious and comfy.
What a great idea!
Camille
May 18th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Wish I could have seen it, Camille! Very interesting, I was wondering how they looked inside.
May 21st, 2007 at 12:48 pm
” When I was a young lad, being brought up in Yorkshire - How we used to Dream of living in a container, - with a roof over us heads!”
May 21st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Dream on, Yorkshire Soul!
May 24th, 2007 at 4:50 am
I wish the container thing had caught on in the US were there are approximately 3.5 million homeless people.
May 25th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
What a great and colourful idea for high density housing and sustainable living.
How great would it be if public housing was as colourful as these recycled containers.
May 25th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Hi there ImagineIf. Thanks for visiting!