📍20 Northmoor Road, Oxford OX2 6UR, UK
1930 – 1947“I was orphaned young — my father died in South Africa, and my mother when I was twelve — but before that she brought my brother and me to Sarehole, a hamlet outside Birmingham with a working watermill, meadows and a miller's son we were terrified of. Those years became the Shire. In 1930, now a professor with Edith and four children, I moved us to 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford, a solid suburban house with a study where I marked endless exam papers. On one of them, a student had left a page blank, and I found myself writing: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The Hobbit grew from bedtime stories told to the boys in this house, and every Christmas Eve, in this study, I wrote and illustrated a letter from Father Christmas for the children, a tradition I kept for over twenty years. The Lord of the Rings was largely written here too, late at night after the house had gone quiet. There is a blue plaque on the house now.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today