If it’s good enough for Keats...
Iquestion if there be a room in England which commands a view of mountains and lakes and woods superior to that in which I am now writing.” If you read that in a holiday-home company’s blurb, you might dismiss it as a touch flowery. But when you learnt that the copywriter was a Mr Coleridge, you’d sit up and take notice. You might even want to stay there. And you can.
Samuel Taylor’s Cumbrian bolt hole is just one of many used by famous scribes. Writers like to write in nice places, and people like to go on holiday to nice places: put those two facts together and it’s not so surprising that you can take a break in a bunch of houses where our greatest authors lived and worked. Like their erstwhile occupants, each is inspiring in its own distinct way, and each offers a particular insight into their work. Enjoy — and, if you go, don’t forget to pack a good book.
JOHN KEATS
26 Piazza di Spagna, Rome
Given his prodigious talent, the tragedy of Keats’s early death captures the imagination as much as his life and work. Enfeebled by tuberculosis, he was in no state to appreciate it, but the great Romantic chose a beautiful place to go: this 17th-century building by the Spanish Steps looks straight up to Santa Trinita dei Monti. The flat for rent is a floor above the one in which he died in 1821, but it’s identical in layout and hardly altered, with period furniture and the same spectacular views; downstairs is a museum to his life. Sleeping three, it starts at £291 per night (three nights minimum) with the Landmark Trust (01628 825925, landmarktrust.org.uk).
GEORGE ORWELL
Barnhill, Jura
One for the purists, this. It’s hard to imagine the all-seeing eye of Big Brother reaching to this remote croft (nearest paved road five miles; nearest shop 25 miles), and perhaps that’s one reason Orwell chose to write Nineteen Eighty-Four here. The other would be his taste for asceticism — Barnhill is fairly basic, with a grumpy generator for power and a Rayburn for heat, but wildly beautiful, too, with deer on the lawn and seals in the bay looking over to Loch Crinan. In private hands, it sleeps six, with prices starting at £600 a week: this year’s full, but to ask about bookings, email lennieston@aol.com.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
The White House, Corfu
Durrell loved Corfu, and Prospero’s Cell, the book he wrote in this simple cube perched by the water at the edge of Kalami’s pretty little beach, is a hymn of praise to the island. The house suited him well: “The windows give directly on the sea, so that its perpetual sighing is the rhythm of our work and our sleeping. By day it runs golden on the ceilings,” he wrote in the 1930s. It still does, as you’ll find if you stay in the top-floor apartment: sleeping eight, it starts at £455pp per week, including flights, with CV Travel (020 7401 1026, cvtravel.co.uk).
ROALD DAHL
The Cabin, Tenby, Dyfed
The potent mix of adventure and subversion in Dahl’s books has kept children engaged for decades, and here, in his childhood holiday home, it’s easy to picture him up to some highly imaginative mischief. He came to Tenby with his family every year from the age of five, staying at this apartment in a Grade I-listed building that rises straight from the sea wall, and later wrote fondly about taking donkey rides on the beach and eating freshly gathered winkles. Sleeping six, it’s still perfect for a traditional family holiday: the high position means you can keep an eye on what the kids are getting up to on the beach from your window. A week from July 17 costs £1,243 with Coastal Cottages (01437 765765, www.coastalcottages.co.uk).
JOHN BETJEMAN
43 Cloth Fair, London EC1
The avuncular poet laureate lived in this 17th-century house near Smithfield market from 1954 to 1971, and you can see why he loved it: simple, elegant, in one of the few corners of the City unvandalised (as he would have put it) by strident tower blocks. It’s now also one of the trendiest, with an organic Italian restaurant on the ground floor and nightclubs down the street. He might have rather enjoyed that. You can rent the top two floors, toast your toes by the gas coal fire and read “Come, friendly bombs...” on the little roof terrace. Prices start at £607 for a three-night weekend with the Landmark Trust (01628 825925, landmarktrust.org.uk).
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Greenway, Devon
Miss Marple would feel right at home in this solidly unfussy Georgian detached, although Poirot would no doubt find plenty to be suspicious of. Looking down over the Dart estuary, this sunny, benevolent and terribly English spot was Christie’s summer home for 38 years, and she set three books here. (Five Little Pigs features a gratifyingly nasty murder in the garden.) It’s now open to the public, but the National Trust has used a big chunk of the first and second floors for a holiday apartment, sleeping 10, all furnished in the 1930s style Christie would have known. There’s a private garden with a pool in which to hide from the hordes. A week in September is £2,167 (nationaltrustcottages.co.uk).
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Greta Hall, Cumbria
He just couldn’t stop raving about it. “The room in which I write commands six distinct Landscapes — the two Lakes, the Vale, River, & mountains, & mists, & Clouds, & Sunshine make endless combinations, as if heaven & Earth were for ever talking to each other.” The room in question, then Coleridge’s study, is now the master bedroom of the Coleridge Wing at Greta Hall, in Keswick. He lived here for six years, wrote the second part of his epic poem Christabel here, and entertained Wordsworth, Southey, Byron, Shelley: a sort of Romantic poets’ love-in. Now Grade I-listed, the place still has the appeal that drew them all (he wasn’t exaggerating about the views). The wing sleeps six; a week starts at £480 with Cumbrian Cottages (01228 599960, cumbrian-cottages.co.uk).
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Treasure Island Cottage, Deeside
Ah, Jim lad: it was in this very stone cottage that Stevenson came up with Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew and Long John Silver. Admittedly, he let his imagination wander a little — Braemar is a long way from the Caribbean — but there’s Boy’s Own adventure aplenty to be had in the glens of Royal Deeside all around, and the scenery is superb (despite the lack of palm trees). It’s a cosy place, sleeping four, with a wood-burning stove in the vast stone inglenook and some canny pubs nearby. A high-season week costs £395 with Ecosse Unique (01835 822277, unique-cottages.co.uk).
Sant’Antonio, near Tivoli, Italy
Okay, it’s hard to be certain that this is the site of a villa belonging to Rome’s greatest lyric poet — the academics are still squabbling about it — but two things are beyond dispute: the walls of Sant’Antonio, once a monastery overlooking the hills near Tivoli, date back to a bang-on 60BC, and have the mosaics and Latin inscriptions to prove it; and a holiday here, in simple rooms with wondrous, unchanged views, has a sense of timelessness that chimes perfectly with the poet’s world-view. The wine’s great, too. Sleeping 12, it starts at £311 per night (three nights minimum) with the Landmark Trust (01628 825925, landmarktrust.org.uk).