With all the fuss over the prospective sale of JK Rowling's childhood home (Look – a cupboard under the stairs! It must have inspired Harry Potter!), not enough attention is being paid to what seems to me a far more important literary property story.

JG Ballard's house in Shepperton, London, is up for sale. This is where the writer lived and wrote from 1960 until his death in 2009. You don't need to blether about cupboards under stairs to make the case for its importance. Shepperton held a vital place in Ballard's imagination: he was drawn to its commercial nullity, its suburban Englishness crossed by shabby concrete carriageways, its proximity to those in-between places, such as airports and orbital roads, in which he thrived.

It was around Shepperton that the protagonist of Crash, his novel about people being sexually aroused by car crashes, drove. In another novel, he wrote: "The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere."

It's strange that this strangest of writers should have been so devoted to so ordinary a patch of ground. But it's also a clue to how his life shaped his gift. The amazing thing about Miracles of Life, his 2008 autobiography, was that what seemed to be outlandish dream images in his early work – empty swimming pools and abandoned airstrips, the juxtaposition of good manners with outright psychosis, the strange conjunctions of the brutal and the decorative – were actually the fruit of his wartime childhood in China.

When he came to Shepperton, Ballard was fascinated by the apparent perversity of civilisation pretending to be civilised. Here was his subject. Ballard went to where the weird was and stayed there. But what he saw as weird, we see as normal.

The subtitle of his autobiography characterises the arc of his life as being "from Shanghai to Shepperton". He liked to play himself. A friend of mine, who interviewed him a few years back, found herself inside his house "staring warily at a length of yellowing net curtain in the window of the most dilapidated house in the row. The garden is overgrown and weeds threaten to bind the tyres of a silver Ford Granada to the driveway. 'I'll be looking out for you at 2.30, peering through my curtains,' Ballard had said earlier that day."

Simon Sellars, who runs the Ballardian website, has suggested fans club together to turn the house into a museum. The asking price is £320,000, and the house is described as "in need of refurbishment". Wouldn't it be wonderful to ensure that this "refurbishment" never takes place? When I looked at the estate agent's website, I could find no mention of the house's literary connection – but there was a button you could click for a slideshow. I imagined it would nip briskly through some bright photographs of the different rooms inside the house. But it was actually more like an installation-art tribute to the great man.

A pop-up window appears. There's a photograph of the front of the house, a red-brick semi with a shabby yellow door and uneven nets in the curved window. It hangs there for a few seconds, then vanishes, to be replaced by a photograph of a completely overgrown garden. The image zooms towards the foliage. Then the original image reappears and we zoom in again. Then we have the front of the house again, zooming in. House, garden, house, house, house, garden. It's mechanical, random, impersonal, and rather sinister. What's lurking in that foliage? What's this anxious zoom trying to show us behind the net curtains?

It is brilliantly Ballardian. His editor once told me that Ballard saw his role, as a writer, to be the man standing on the hard shoulder of a particularly hairy curve on the motorway of modernity, holding up a bent cardboard sign on which were scrawled words to the effect of "TROUBLE AHEAD!" or "BRIDGE OUT!" If we can't buy the house, we could at least have a whipround for a statue of the man holding just such a placard. He could be hanging over the side of Laleham Road, just where it passes over the M3.