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The
TLS Map of Writers’ Homes
A literary
map of the United Kingdom
RODERICK
NIEUWENHUIS
TLS Map of Writers’ Homes is far from complete. Help us to populate it with the houses of (deceased) writers. Email the author’s name, the location of the house, and a maximum of 50 words to: writershomes@the-tls.co.uk
The map will be updated every week.
In the early morning of November 16, 1940, a German air raid laid waste to great parts of Bournemouth, killing fifty-three people and damaging more than 2,000 properties in three separate areas of the city. One of the houses that fell to the German bombs was Skerryvore. From 1885–7, this house was owned by Robert Louis Stevenson, who relocated to the Victorian coastal town in the hope of restoring his health. He named the house after the tallest lighthouse in Scotland, built by his uncle around 1840. It was in Skerryvore that he wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and began Treasure Island.
Today Skerryvore is a symbol of Britain’s love for its literary heritage. Although completely destroyed in 1940, the plot of land on which the house stood has been intentionally left vacant, and is decorated with numerous commemorative plaques. The site was turned intro a memorial garden, “designed and constructed by the Bournemouth corporation in 1957 as a memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson”.
“A public appetite for places of literary interest has shown no signs of abatement”, reports the most recent edition of The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain and Ireland, and visitor numbers prove the point. The five former homes of William Shakespeare attract around 750,000 people each year. The Jane Austen Museum in Chawton is annually visited by 40,000 people. When Greenway, Agatha Christie’s summer house in Devon, opened in 2000, visitor numbers were so great that people had to be turned away.
London was the world’s first capital to honour the homes of writers with commemorative plaques. Since 1866, more than 900 Blue Plaques have been planted on culturally important London buildings. The first marked the home of Lord Byron, which was eventually demolished in 1889. But residences of Oscar Wilde and Vincent van Gogh were saved from destruction because they bore the signal of cultural significance.
A hundred years ago, Edward Thomas was perhaps the first to shine a light on British writers’ homes when he published A Literary Pilgrim in England, in which he described the houses of more than twenty British writers, from Charlotte Brontë to Walter Scott. The book was published in 1917, the year in which Thomas died of injuries sustained during the Battle of Arras. Though buried in France, England has not forgotten Thomas. Many of his own former dwellings bear a commemorative plaque, and in 1985 he was honoured as a war poet with a place in Poet’s Corner. Thomas, like Skerryvore, was destroyed in war. But neither are forgotten.
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