Welcome to the Hobbit house

It is like stepping into a storybook - a surreal cross between The Lord of The Rings, Lancelot of the Lake and The Motorcycle Diaries.

But that only begins to tell the story of the pretty octagonal gatehouse built in Wolverhampton in 1868.

The unique property has been home for the last 33 years to college groundsman Alex Poile and is affectionately referred to by students as The Tardis, with its small, eight-sided kitchen leading into a warren of rooms not visible from the drive.

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And every curiosity therein tells a story, from the goat's skull to the Victorian oil lamps, to the stuffed birds and the German bayonet his grandfather used in the First World War.

In the living room, books about medieval history sit proudly next to the 63-year-old's collection of heavy metal music.

There is a wind-up gramophone and a collection of cacti, a framed Rupert Bear illustration and several cuckoo clocks, a nod to his mother's Austrian roots.

Hanging from the ceilings are eight wooden ducks bought for £2 as a job lot from Wolverhampton market while his stone fireplace is a shrine to Tolkien.

In his bedroom a shop rail filled with biker leathers from America is placed beside a wicker basket of vintage teddy bears. "The artist in me likes to have things around that are pleasing to the eye," says the grocer's son, whose paintings of mythical scenes hang in every room.

The books, mainly on astronomy, architecture and the natural world, were acquired when the college library relocated.

Alex's hobby began when he met his former wife Valerie, from Tettenhall, in Kent, wooed her and followed her back , moving into the groundsman's lodge which came with the job in 1977.

On trips home to Folkstone and neighbouring Deal and Dover in the half-term holidays, he would scour antiques shops for collectables. "Students have often brought me things, too," he says, telling the tale of a pupil who insisted on bringing him a 3ft-high wooden statue of a fierce-looking demon-warrior from a holiday in Kenya.

"It was so big that his mother had to pay for a seat on the plane for it," he laughs.

He now gets around the campus by quad bike, leaving the gatehouse at 5.25 each morning to let in the cleaners and unlock various parts of the building before heading off to check the sports fields and gardens.

Living with him at the lodge is his four-year-old boxer dog, Max, and a newly-acquired lionhead rabbit called Simba.

His small, portable TV is hidden behind curtains on a lower shelf. He turns it on for the weather forecasts and Wolves matches and sometimes students will come over to watch The Hobbit with him.

"I don't know what I'd do if a friend turned out to have an 8ft by 4ft flat screen telly in a minimalist flat with no books and nothing on the walls " he ponders. "I suppose we'd still be friends but I'd find that a very strange concept indeed."