Nissen hut
A Nissen hut is a prefabricated steel structure originally for military use, especially as barracks, made from a 210° portion of a cylindrical skin of corrugated iron.
A Nissen hut is made from a sheet of metal bent into half a cylinder and planted in the ground with its axis horizontal.
[2] The corrugated steel half-circles used to build Nissen huts can be stored efficiently because the curved sheets can be cupped one inside another.
[1] Between 16 and 18 April 1916, Major Peter Norman Nissen of the 29th Company Royal Engineers of the British Army began to experiment with hut designs.
Huts in the United Kingdom were frequently seen as cold and draughty, while those in the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific were seen as stuffy and humid.
The Nissen hut was adapted into a larger prefabricated two-storey house and marketed by Nissen-Petren Ltd. Four of the original prototypes survive in Queen Camel in Somerset.
[8] A similar approach was taken with the U.S. Quonset hut at the end of the war, with articles on how to adapt the buildings for domestic use appearing in Home Beautiful and Popular Mechanics.
[9] In Aultbea on Loch Ewe, in Scotland, a large Nissen hut cinema built by the Royal Navy was donated to the village after the Second World War, and remains in use as a community hall.
The second point was that rectangular furniture does not fit into a curved-wall house very well, and, thus, the actual usable space in a hut might be much less than supposed.
[1] In Pune, India, some Nissen huts were provided to persons who lost their homes due to floods caused by the Panshet Dam burst in 1961.
Fifty Nissen huts were constructed in Belmont North, a suburb of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.
[10] Seventeen of the huts have been demolished over the years, but the remainder have been refurbished, improved and extended and remain popular with their owners.
The camp housed European migrants who had been displaced by the war and resettled in Western Australia, then employed in road construction.
The Australian Government worked with the United Nations to accept, resettle and provide employment for many thousands of Europeans after the Second World War.
Immigrants were housed in Nissen huts at Holmesglen, in south east Melbourne until the early 1970s when they were demolished to make way for native parklands.
A unique example still exists along nearby High Street Road in Ashwood where the hut is occupied by a bottle shop.
