Is it a tin shack or a cherished architectural gem? Opinion will always be divided over the merits of corrugated iron buildings. The versatility of tin and the different uses it can be put to, since its invention in 1829, has created a flourishing architectural heritage. All over Scotland it is possible to find examples of custom built tin huts for shooters, fishers, bowlers and curlers, game larders and boat-houses, schools, churches, cottages and village shops, station huts and halts as well as other treats such as the odd, rare mobile shepherd’s hut. Some boast decorative barge boarding, ornate roof ridging and well-crafted doors and windows, most are characterful and their colours fade beautifully.

To a whole generation scarred by two World Wars, corrugated iron is associated with wartime austerity – ‘elephant’ and air-raid shelters, Nissan huts and barracks and post war building using cheap materials. To a younger generation it conjures up shantytowns and slums in third world countries, with their patchwork of recycled tin sheets. To yet another group, tin is purely for utilitarian agricultural sheds and warehouses. But for some who have travelled the world, brightly coloured tin buildings are a legacy of the Scots involvement in colonialism abroad and conflict in the church; factors that combined to create a market for kit buildings around the Empire as well as in Scotland.

These timber-framed, ironclad buildings were shipped to all parts of Britain and its Empire, including Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, Africa, India and North America. Sending flat pack buildings abroad has been going on for since the 18th century. In 1787, the earliest settlement The versatility of tin and the different uses it can be put to, since its invention in 1829, has created a flourishing architectural heritage. in New South Wales boasted a pre-fabricated, timberframed hospital made by Samuel Wyatt ‘for His Majesty’s distant possessions.’ He boasted that he had exhibited it to the King ‘by taking down …the buildings and putting it up again…in one hour...’. In 1788, records show that Captain Arthur Philips arrived in Australia with his own 50' x 22' four-roomed house that took a week to erect.

The timber frame with canvas walls though proved, ‘not perfectly impervious to either wind or weather’. But things improved and arriving with your own cottage meant that an emigrant could theoretically disembark from his ship in a new country in the morning, and sleep in his own secure lockable house by nightfall. The tin building boom of the second half of the 19th century could and did supply whole colonial outposts or settlements with flat packs of everything from a church, warehouse, range of shops, hospital, theatre and a range of dwellings from a ‘portable governor’s house’ and various sized bungalows to an artisans hut. In 1843 a tin palace was even sent out to Nigeria for King Eyambo (could this be the origin of a ‘tin-pot ruler’?).

From around 1850 Scotland, along with the rest of the British Isles, had an extensive iron-working industry producing all manner of DIY buildings that were advertised in a typical 19th century, Spiers & Co of Glasgow, catalogue as: ‘Cool in summer’, ‘Warm in winter’, ‘Habitable as soon as erected’ and boasted that: ‘properties can be readily removed and re-erected’. Possibly because people are more reluctant to pull down churches, more of these seem to have survived intact and there are many examples in various stages of dilapidation to be found all over the U.K. The famous tin church on Orkney, built and decorated by Italian prisoners of war has become a national treasure. Probably the largest tin church still in use is the one at the notorious Deep Cut Barracks in Surrey, while more elaborate, but of a similar size, was the long gone tin cathedral in Oban built in 1878.

This was just one of the churches and religious sites donated to congregations by the 3rd Marquis of Bute, a convert to Catholicism. They were not exclusively for Roman Catholic use, however. In 1872 he donated the Norwegian Church, originally tin, but now clad in wood, and the site for the Highfield Jewish Cemetery, both by the Bute Docks in Cardiff. Our Lady of Mercy RC chapel in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, was built in 1884 and ‘St Mary’s Help the Christians’ tin church at Luton in 1898 with Bute funds. Differences in interpreting the Presbyterian Church’s Christian message in Scotland, known as the ‘Disruption’ of 1843, also spawned a proliferation of new churches, with some small villages having up to five separate congregations – tin churches were a cheap option. But not all landowners were so accommodating.

After the Disruption many refused permission for Free Church worshippers to use their land, causing the ingenious folk around Loch Sunart to build a floating iron church, which chugged up and down the loch behind a barge to host services. One presumes that the sight of a church gently rocking with righteous prayer, just below the house, of a Sunday, may have not improved the enjoyment of an anti-Free Church laird’s Sabbath. By 1929 the ‘Reunion’ of the previously split factions of the Scottish Church meant there were just too many churches. The mail order catalogues went out of business and the decline of the tin building boom was underway; it was to continue for the rest of the 20th century. So what does the future hold for tin buildings? Corrugated iron is so popular with Antipodeans that many will maintain that they invented it.

Within 10 years of its invention, the export of wriggly tin to Australia began a love affair with the material that still continues after 180 years. Cutting edge design, of not just industrial and agricultural buildings, but of dramatic glass and iron houses takes corrugated 21st century, with roofs perfectly pitched at 35 degrees to catch the cooling breezes. In Britain we may not have cherished our tin heritage in the same way but as a re-cyclable, green building material it is certainly due more respect in the land of its birth.