📍Gipsy House, Whitefield Lane, Great Missenden HP16 0BP, UK
1954 – 1990“I grew up in Llandaff, near Cardiff, the son of Norwegian parents; my father died when I was three, and my formidable mother raised us. At boarding school at Repton, Cadbury's sent us boxes of new chocolate bars to taste and mark — that is where Charlie began. In March 1954 my first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, and I bought Gipsy House, a Georgian farmhouse on the edge of the Chiltern village of Great Missenden, at auction for £4,500. It was home for the rest of my life, thirty-six years. At the bottom of the garden, beyond the orchard and an old gipsy caravan the children played in, I built a little brick writing hut. Every morning and afternoon I walked down to it and sat in my mother's old wing-back armchair, altered to fit my bad back, with a board across my knees and a ball of silver foil from chocolate wrappers growing on the table. There I wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG and Matilda, and the village — its petrol station, its library, its woods — slipped into the stories. My hut now stands in the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre on the high street.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today