Shed of heaven: Why the credit crunch has people heading for their sheds

The apotheosis of the garden shed has been one of wonders of the new century. Twenty years ago, it was a chilly, ramshackle potting shed, where stolid and unsociable male hobbyists could briefly retire from their womenfolk and children, to smoke shag tobacco and read the evening paper by candlelight or hurricane lamp, amid a redundant detritus of garden implements and abandoned balsa-wood model boats.

Ten years ago, it went upmarket and became an outsourced office or library for groovy rus in urbe metropolitans; powered by subterranean cables, it featured electric lights, wall heaters, a telephone and sockets for computer, printer and hi-fi – a warm, humming, creative environment, where you could spend hours in contentedly self-delighted browsing, musing and occasional guilty bursts of playing air guitar along with Slash or Mark Knopfler.

Today, it's become a display cabinet of technological sophistication: a home cinema, a cocktail bar, a personalised, chill-out, son-et-lumière zone of wistful shadows and ambient mood music. Some owners have gone so far as to install a chaise longue, a bed, a fridge and Gaggia espresso machine to replicate, only a few feet from their home, the feel of a very upmarket hotel room.

I've been a devoted fan of shed life for 10 years. It was May 1998, two years after we moved to Dulwich, that I first thought it would be fun to build a retreat – a bosky hideaway, a sylvan cell – at the end of my 100ft-long garden. Since the garden abuts the railway line along which the Eurostar used to thunder from Paris or Brussels to Waterloo, this end of it is good and private.

A firm called Courtyard Designs sent a brochure. I selected the 15ft by 10ft option, with the Louisiana-style porch and rang them. "I want to order one of your sheds..." I began. "We never call them that," said a woman's voice in a tone you don't argue with. "It's an Executive Outhouse. Or, if you like, an Office in the Garden." But I ordered the thing (it cost £13,000 in those ancient times) and their brawny operatives came over and constructed it in two days flat. I remember coming home from work in the dark on Friday night and being startled to find a structure as solid and glamorous as the Taj Mahal looming out of the flat, nettle-strewn nothingness under the lime trees.

It took a week of sweat and grunting to dig a two-foot-deep trench in which to run the vital wires and cables all the way down the garden to the shed. But when it was done, it was as if I'd succeeded in bringing electric light to the whole metropolis. Being able to switch on, from the kitchen, the five recessed ceiling lights in the shed felt like a miracle. I bought a desk from Ikea (I know, I know) with a teardrop extension for a computer and printer; I laid down a hardwearing blue-cord carpet; I prevailed on Spike the local carpenter to fit nine shelves the entire length of the 15ft-long back wall; I plugged in a small hi-fi, plonked on the desk a black marble ashtray I'd bought in Venice, extracted a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the mini-fridge one evening, sat down and wrote my first shed article.

Since then, the place has seen some action. I've written three shed books – a family memoir, a book about the key movies in one's life and a novel about the Rector of Stiffkey – at the Ikea desk with the teardrop extension. Thousands of articles, columns, reviews, speeches, interview questions, transcripts, radio parodies, unsingable song lyrics, stoutly formal letters to bank personnel and lists optimistically headed "Things to Do (Urgent)" have been written in there. Over the years, I've had long, bourbon-fuelled conversations into the night with old friends for whom a visit that does not conclude with intense, confessional Shed Talk is no visit at all. Sometimes, I've had to employ a wheelbarrow to cart all the empty wine bottles down the garden to the recycling bins. My children have made the trek along the greensward at weekends, bringing their industrious father mugs of tea and Tunnock's marshmallow teacakes. My youngest child, Clementine, now 12, uttered her first words in the shed; they were shortly followed by our first-ever interactive conversation, which I pass on in its entirety:

Clementine: "Dadada dadada... Hello, Daddy."

Me: "My God! You can talk! You said your first words! This is fantastic. Come and sit on my knee. Gosh, your hands are very sticky."

Clementine: "Yes. Lolly."

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to lure female acquaintances into its seductive embrace at the climax of New Year's Eve parties. I have read 2,000 books in there. I've played 2,000 hours of Bruce Springsteen and Mark Knopfler, Leonard Cohen and Eddi Reader, The Fratellis and Alabama 3, Rufus Wainwright and Regina Spektor, over and over until their voices seemed to hang in the silent room when you came through the door, and to give it a personality just as much as the old movie posters of Rear Window, King Kong and Chinatown. When I discovered – when was it? 2002? 2003? – the intense satisfaction of finishing an article or half-chapter of a book-in-progress at midnight and sliding a disc into the laptop to watch, say, Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent or Saboteur with a reflective slug of Pinotage, I'd no idea it would lead to the tottering skyscrapers of DVDs that now cram my desk and threaten to end it all one day, in an avalanche of celluloid.

Dylan Thomas famously wrote his best verse and prose in a (rather less hi-tech) shed in Laugharne. George Bernard Shaw worked on his plays in a shed that could be rotated ingeniously during the day so that the sunlight was always behind him, rather then piercing his eyes. Daphne du Maurier had a hut constructed in the garden of Menabilly, with "a paraffin stove, Fox's Glacier Mints, cigarettes and a typewriter". The writer's shed has a perfectly respectable pedigree. Yet not everyone has bought the idea that these dwellings are crucibles of creativity, of vital importance to l'artiste et son travail.

Once, in the Groucho Club in London, I found myself at the bar beside Cerys Matthews, the deeply gorgeous Welsh singer. I told her of my admiration for her talents as a chanteuse. I rhapsodised about the charm and attack of the Catatonia album International Velvet. She responded warily (was there nowhere, not even a fashionable media joint in Soho, where she was free from lurve-struck fans?), but, in her friendly fashion, she chatted for a while. "My favourite track is 'Strange Glue'," I said, "for the climax when you sing, 'And I smile/ Yes, I smile/ As they're taking me over.' Such passion."

"Oh no," she said. "I'm much fonder of 'My Selfish Gene', it's a much more challenging and satisfying song."

"Believe me, Cerys," I said, "when I'm listening to you in my shed at night, with the cigarette smoke curling up to the ceiling, I know which I prefer."

She gave me a quizzical look that was ever-so-slightly pitying. "Oh," she said, "bit of a shed boy, are you?"

A shed boy? I looked at her raised eyebrow. Goddamit. She was seeing something that I didn't like at all. All I once, I felt as if the words WANK-PIT OCCUPANT were emblazoned across my forehead. I seemed to lose her attention after that, and I stole guiltily away.

Anyone searching for the symbolic status of the garden shed was given something to chew on by John Gray's book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, a farrago of gender-war truisms published a few years ago. Women readers were advised that, to understand the male mind, they must appreciate their partner's hard-wired desire to escape confrontation and responsibility from time to time; sometimes, they learnt, there was no point trying to communicate with (or nag or confront) the alpha male because he will have retired to his primeval cave. Suddenly, this psychological state seemed to be acquiring lathe-and-plaster form in the gardens of the nation; for what was the new-style shed but a sophisticated cave in which your beloved could sulk and brood and confirm his masculinity in lonely splendour?

There may be some truth in it. Sometimes, after a domestic row, the shed can double as a maison du chien, to which one slinks gratefully until the air clears. It can seem, at times, like a well-upholstered kennel, a glamorous battery-hen coop where one, so to speak, lays articles. At times of stress, it becomes a small speakeasy or a gigantic ashtray. But at its best, it is something sublime: a little satellite, orbiting the far-off lights of home where the family is busying itself for bed, a place in which to think and dream and rally oneself for the fray of tomorrow. In daylight hours, it's a woodland "hide" where you can watch the robins posing on the clothes-line and the squirrels greedily nibbling nuts and chasing one another along the fence. Their preoccupations mirror your own, as you struggle with sentences and nibble away at thoughts and descriptions, and feel liberated from the twin incarcerations of home and office. It's a nest of beguilements and distractions in which, sometimes, you catch a glimpse of your real self – even if that's a strange montage of cobwebs, dog-ends, wine-stained glasses, faded copies of the TLS, pinned-up photographs and invitations, dry leaves on the carpet and dead wasps in the inkjet printer.

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