As JK Rowling gets planning permission to construct a summer house inspired by Hagrid’s hut, we round up five of the best writer’s sheds. Take a look inside the hideouts which have inspired writers from Virginia Woolf to Henry David Thoreau
Fri 17 Oct 2014 11.34 EDT Last modified on Wed 21 Aug 2019 08.09 EDT
Hagrid’s hut is a refuge for Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley in JK Rowling’s popular children’s series. This still from the 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone shows Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid in pensive mood.
Dylan Thomas wrote in a bike shed study perched on stilts on the cliff above the boathouse in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, where he spent the last four years of his life. An exact copy of it is open to the public as part of the Dylan Thomas Boathouse.
Built as a garage by a previous owner, Thomas filled his ‘word-splashed hut’ with pictures of Byron, Walt Whitman, Louis MacNeice, WH Auden as well as lists of alliterative words. In this 1953 photograph he wears a cast on his left arm after an accident in New York.
Thomas wrote poems such as Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Over Sir John’s Hill and Poem on His Birthday inside this hut, with a view of the hills, the town of Laugharne and the Taf estuary below.
Photograph: Roy Shakespeare/LOOP IMAGES/Loop Images/Corbis
Philip Pullman at the door of the shed in his Oxford garden, which was built when his son started playing the violin. Pullman wrote all three books of His Dark Materials trilogyin this shed.
Among the treasures in Pullman’s shed are a Venetian mask, a saxophone, and a reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. ‘I have my little superstitions ... one of them [is to] let the cobwebs grow while I’m writing the book and I tidy it up afterwards,’ he told the BBC.
Roald Dahl leans on a cane while standing outside the shed where he used to write, the Gipsy House, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. A campaign to raise money for renovations sparked uproar in 2011, after fans balked at the £500,000 price tag for relocating the shed to the Roald Dahl museum.
Photograph: Ian Cook//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
‘The table had all kinds of strange memorabilia on it,’ remembered Quentin Blake, ‘one of which was part of his own hip bone that had been removed; another was a ball of silver paper that he’d collected from bars of chocolate since he was a young man [...]. There were various other things that had been sent to him by fans or schoolchildren ... ’
‘... The whole of the inside was organised as a place for writing,’ continued Blake. ‘As he didn’t want to move from his chair everything was within reach. He wrote on yellow legal paper with his favourite kind of pencils. [...] He used to smoke and there is an ashtray with cigarette butts preserved to this day.’
Virginia Woolf’s shed at Monk’s House, Sussex. ‘She wrote there in the summers,’ says Hermione Lee, ‘and liked it very much, though it was not ideal for concentration. She was always being distracted – by Leonard sorting the apples over her head in the loft ... or the dog sitting next to her ... leaving paw marks on her manuscript pages.’
The title page from the first edition of Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden: or, Life in the Woods, a classic account of life in a simple one-room cabin in New England. Thoreau spent two years ‘in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond’ near Concord, Massachusetts.
