Five best writers' sheds in pictures

As JK Rowling gets planning permission to construct a summer house inspired by Hagrids hut, we round up five of the best writers sheds. Take a look inside the hideouts which have inspired writers from Virginia Woolf to Henry David Thoreau

Hagrids hut is a refuge for Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley in JK Rowlings popular childrens series. This still from the 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone shows Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid in pensive mood.

Photograph: Peter Mountain/Warner Bros

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. It is open to the public as part of the Dylan Thomas Boathouse.

Photograph: Rollie McKenna

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.

Photograph: Mary Evans Picture Library

Thomas wrote poems such as Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Over Sir Johns 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 trilogy in this shed.

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Five best writers' sheds in pictures