Glory be to God for wrinkly tin
IT’S an enjoyable paradox that a material born of the Industrial Revolution should have become assimilated into the built vernacular and produced some of our most delightful small-scale buildings. Wrinkly tin, as it’s affectionately known, saw its heyday between the 1860s and the First World War, but hundreds of corrugated iron structures survive today, as photogenic when gently succumbing to shades of rust as when trim in their livery of colourful paintwork.
Foremost among them are tin tabernacles —that distinctive breed of portable chapels, churches and mission halls put up in response to the church-building boom of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
