Michael Morpurgo: shedworker

Writer and former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo is a shedworker, as he reveals in the latest column of The Guardian's excellent series, Writers' Rooms . It's a particularly revealing piece and the description of his shedlike atmosphere is intriguing. For many years, I wrote on our bed in the house. But there were complaints about ink on the sheets, dirty feet on the bed, and we felt we should try to create somewhere else, a storyteller's house. Clare, my wife designed it - it's based on the Anglo-Saxon chapel of St Peter-Ad-Murum at Bradwell-juxta-Mare in Essex, where I grew up, but it has a Devon thatched roof, a Japanese garden and an uninterrupted view of the countryside, looking towards Dartmoor. The photo above by Eamonn McCabe is of the interior but I can't find one of the exterior, so here is the model for it below.