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The noun bicycle-shed designates a shed or building for storing bicycles when not in use, especially at a school or workplace.

The phrase behind the bicycle-shed, and its variants, are used in reference to a school’s bicycle-shed as a place of seclusion in which pupils pursue prohibited activities such as fighting, smoking, etc.

This phrase occurs, for example, in the following paragraph from Termination on financial grounds is an abuse of a freedom so dearly fought for, by the Irish journalist Emer O’Kelly, published in the Sunday Independent (Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland) of Sunday 4^th July 2010 [page 18, column 8]—the Dublin Well Woman Centre is a not-for-profit organisation that provides family-planning and sexual-health services:

The Well Woman Centre and other legitimate advice agencies don’t lecture their clients; they don’t even offer directive counselling. But their counsellors must have felt a collective desire to kick a lot of stupid, irresponsible asses during 2009 as they outlined the options available to supposedly mature women with active sex lives who got “caught” like 15-year-olds behind the bicycle shed at the school disco.

These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase behind the bicycle-shed and variants that I have found:

1-: From The Misadventures of Jackson. IV. The Small Boarder, a story set at the fictional St. Olaf’s boarding-school, in England, by A. Katharine Parkes, published in Chatterbox (Boston (Massachusetts): Dana Estes & Co.) for 1909 [page 194, column 1]:

Jackson and Perkins were at the moment engaged in a bitter feud with an older boy in the Third, named Roberts.
Roberts was both big and lazy. Nevertheless he had keenly resented the fact that the two younger boys had been promoted over his head. […]
He hated them, therefore, with a jealous hatred, and he found a new way of showing his dislike by bullying Woodhouse. It was in vain that Jackson and Perkins threw down the glove in their protégé’s defence. Each fought Roberts in turn behind the bicycle-shed, but neither could make a stand against an enemy of such size and weight.

2-: From the column Louth Topics, by ‘Luda’, published in the Louth Standard (Louth, Lincolnshire, England) of Saturday 2^nd August 1924 [page 5, column 7]:

THE BISHOP’S FIGHT.
An interesting story of how his lordship, as a boy, administered a thrashing to another boy who denied Tennyson’s claim to be a poet was told by the Bishop of Lincoln at the prize-giving at Alford Grammar School on Wednesday. To a schoolboy who was enamoured of  Keats and Shelley, he suggested that Tennyson was a poet. “He told me,” said his lordship, “that anybody who thought that Tennyson was a poet was beneath contempt, and I ventured to contradict him, and then he insisted that we should fight it out. I told him it was all nonsense, I did not want to fight him at all, but he said I must fight, and he must have the blood of anybody who thought Tennyson was a poet. I told him I was bigger and heavier than he, and he had better not fight me; but he insisted, and we went behind a bicycle shed, and we fought, and I had very much the better of it, so it was eventually decided that Tennyson was a poet. (Laughter.) I do not commend this method of deciding that Tennyson was a poet—and I thought at the time it was a silly procedure—but it happened, and it shows that in those days, when we had not the advantages that boys have to-day, we took a serious interest in English literature—so much so that we were prepared to fight about it.”

3-: From “Beneath his Dignity.” Chapter I. A Fountain Pen, by Maude Kennedy, of Reading, published in The Reading Standard (Reading, Berkshire, England) of Saturday 9^th April 1927 [The Young People’s Corner conducted by ‘Junius’, page 14, column 3]—this story is set at the fictional Shettam Grammar School:

A crowd of boys had strolled up in eager anticipation of a fight.
[…]
Barton believed in wasting no time, and in a moment the fight was in full progress. For ten minutes they were both bent on battering each other to pieces, but the unexpected appearance of a master put the crowd to flight. The boys who were fighting sought a more secluded spot to end their tiff in. So they rushed behind the bicycle shed, there to be parted by the gardener.

4-: From the Evening Times (Vineland, New Jersey, USA) of Thursday 4^th February 1937 [page 1, column 8]:

Students Protest Report Smoking Started Blaze
H. L. Reber Youngsters Indignant About Newspaper Article

Boys attending the H. L. Reber School, objecting to reports that smoking of cigarettes by pupils ignited the fire in the bicycle shed of the school Tuesday afternoon, held a mass meeting of protest, this morning, in the school auditorium. The meeting, which lasted 30 minutes and which was attended by the total boys’ enrollment, 300, was called by Edward MacLean, student president of the school.
The protest was voiced against an article published in another local newspaper which quoted Vineland firemen as saying the fire “may have been started by a group of schoolboys smoking cigarettes.” It also stated that “schoolboys have been known to smoke behind the bicycle shed where the fire started.”

5-: From the column Please forward, by the English cartoonist, illustrator and painter Joyce Dennys (1893-1991), published in The Sketch (London, England) of Wednesday 30^th June 1943 [page 342, column 1]:

“To the Only Woman I Ever Fought For,” said Snubby, and with a low bow he handed me a little round wooden case.
“Me, Snubby?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the fight I had with Willie Stamp,” said Snubby reproachfully, but I looked at him blankly.
“I must say it’s not like Henrietta to forget a thing of that kind,” said Charles.
“Snubby’s always talking about it,” said Mrs. Snubby. “I’m sick of the story.”
“You can’t have forgotten, Henrietta,” said Snubby in a shocked voice. “It was behind the bicycle-shed. Surely you remember?”

The earliest occurrence of the variant behind the bike-shed that I have found is from Wilkinson’s law, by Arthur Barton, a history teacher, published in The Guardian (Manchester, Lancashire, England) of Monday 6^th January 1964 [page 8, column 4]—this teacher writes about one of his pupils, 14-year-old Wilkinson, who wants to leave school:

I should say that roughly one third to a half of the 500 boys in the secondary modern where I’ve taught these last 17 years share some of his characteristics. Of course they aren’t all stout or insolent or lazy or oversexed, but a lot of them are some of these things and they share his distaste and boredom with all but the social side of school. And by social I mean smoking in the lavatories, scrounging in the garden, and disappearing at dinner-time behind the bike-sheds with appropriate girl friends.