A treehouse, a camp behind the sofa, a tent in the garden: every child escapes from the world through play to create a new universe in a small, hidden spot. The lack of space and props is the very richness that fuels the imagination. Absence becomes inspiration. That child, and the accompanying dream of a secret hidden room, lives within each of us.

‘Once we had surmounted the terrors of the corridor, we too all loved to dream in the back room,’ writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. ‘It is because a dreamlike house lives within us that we were a dark corner of the family home, a more secret room. (…) Every dreamer needs to return to his cell.’ Bachelard sends the dreamer back to the cell, a place of austere seclusion where the imagination is given free rein.