ROGER WRITES: "There is something about men and sheds. It's a bit like men and the sea. There's a natural affinity there. Men love sheds. They want to build sheds. Anything from a D.I.Y store's cut-price, paper-thin tongue-and-groove offering to a proper allotment lash-up, made from anything and everything. Bits of old skirting board, chicken wire, Edwardian panelled doors - the lot. The allotment confection route was favoured by the builders of the erections that are the subjects of Jan Stradtmann's photographs.

"There's a natural affinity there. Men love sheds. They want to build sheds."

I think these pictures are all at once funny, sad and disturbing. I should say straight away that I'm glad he took them - just to record their existence is important in this rapidly changing capital city that does not leave much room for the individual. Allotments, like parks, let the city and its citizen's breath. Looking at them made me smile for all the above reasons and of course I love a shed myself. Constructing one brings back those heady, multi-coloured Lego brick days of childhood. Building something three-dimensional is so life-affirming compared with working in a computerised 2D world. There is also something comforting about being inside a shed - warm and womb-like - a retreat.

The sadness comes from the striving for perfection by the builders (the hinged door with a handle, glazed windows), forensically recorded here, and the ultimate failure to outlast the weeds and impending developers.

The photographs are disturbing in the way the sheds are photographed at night, on a kind of wasteland with all that implies. Manor Gardens seems a very lonely place after dark. And what awaits inside? Why is the door ajar? And most chillingly - why is there a curtain at the window? Perhaps after all it is the very the connection with men that is the most distressing aspect of the images of these abject hovels."

Roger Tooth