In a sense, Pub Sheds UK has created a new type of community, connecting like-minded men around the UK. Considering that last year the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness estimated that around eight million men in the UK feel lonely at least once a week, this couldn’t be more important. Groups like Pub Sheds UK dispel any suggestion of isolated ‘man-caves’ and connects them all like a map of pub sheds.
Talking of maps, we’re blessed to have Google Maps, without which we would never have found the Steampunk Saloon – or rather the Southend home whose garden it inhabits. Yet once we reach the art-deco front of the house, and owner Jason Burles takes us through to the garden, it’s impossible to miss.
A modern-day Renaissance man, Burles is half-geezer, half-Gatsby, obsessed with curios and art. Burles’s pub shed is like a gallery. It’s an emporium of heady, dark treats: cups from Alcatraz, a mosquito-topped cane from Jurassic World, a cod skeleton (“I love to go up to the Natural History museum. I actually bought a piece off them”), a bottle of ‘poison’ from a Harry Potter set, and an arresting array of taxidermy.
Like a curator, Burles has represented a theme – steampunk – through objects from all kinds of places, be it New York, Russia via Etsy, or “a skip”. Just as carefully chosen is his drink selection. His collection is dizzying, and gets me dizzyingly drunk. Beer brewed from chocolate and caffeine, (“have your dinner first”), American citrus IPAs, his own homemade whisky and a bottle of vodka with a scorpion in the top. Burles has created a steampunk-themed bar worthy of a capital city, let alone a garden in Southend. Yet, it still draws upon one of the most important aspects of a pub: community. “It’s a social part of people to go to pubs,” Burles tells me. “Where would you go to meet people without pubs or clubs?”
The Steampunk Saloon is an inviting, entertaining and surprising place to hang out and sink a few beers. As well as a pretty special bookshelf that boasts a signed first-edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, there’s also the art pieces, the state-of-the-art hi-fi, and of course Jason’s hospitality, which combine to create the full experience for his ‘punters’. It’s no surprise the place is always packed with Burles’s family and friends.