Dahl family seeks $800,000 to save writing hut

London: Roald Dahl's family has launched an $ 800,000 campaign to relocate the garden hut where the British children's author created classics including "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "James and the Giant Peach."

Dahl, who died in 1990 aged 74, would go from his home in Great Missenden, northwest of London, to the hut in his garden every day for 30 years.

No one else was allowed into the small outbuilding, built in the 1950s from a single layer of bricks.

The author created classics including \'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory\' and \'James and the Giant Peach\' in it.

Dahl's grandson Luke Kelly came up with the idea to relocate the interior of the hut and its contents, including the author's own hip bone, to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre close to the family home.

The relocation is estimated to cost around 500,000 pounds ($ 790,101) organisers said on Tuesday. They hope to install the hut's interior and open it to the public by March 2012.

"When my grandfather died he left in his wake an aching gap, but also a palpable magic and limitless imagination, which is not exclusive to my family," said author and former model Sophie Dahl, the author's granddaughter.

"It is now time for us to save the hut, but even more importantly, to share it."

There has been some skeptical reaction to the Dahl family's fundraising campaign on micro-blogging site Twitter.

"Stella McCartney to appeal to taxpayers for money to restring her father's Hohner Bass guitar," wrote journalist Misha Glenny, in a gentle dig at the campaign.

Another Twitter message dubbed Sophie Dahl the "Big Stingy Giant," a play on the title of one of her grandfather's classics "The BFG" (The Big Friendly Giant).

The press release on Roald Dahl's website said that the family "had done its utmost to safeguard the hut," which is now in a state of disrepair. ($1 = 0.633 British Pounds) (Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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