Thanks JWait but I think you miss understand me. Probably my fault.
Basically, I only want my shpping cart to appear on the 'shop' pages. I wanted to hide it on the 'static' pages.
I thought there would be a setting in the admin section which allow my to give the page a css class (in the body tag or something). But if there is I couldn't find it.
I have found a work around though ... adding this to home.tpl
Code:
<div id="page-container" class="{$main}">
This gives me the hook I need to call from the css file to style / hide anything on these pages differently. Sorted.