Travel guide to British writers' homes

Book marks ... Haworth, West Yorkshire, the former home town of the Bronte sisters. The English landscapes that inspired its greatest writers are just as compelling for their readers, writes Susan Johnson. The English language bequeathed to the world a rich literary heritage, a unique legacy of novels, plays and poems, which in turn inspired romantic myths about the Englishmen and women who wrote them. The enigmatic lives of Byron, Shakespeare, the Brontes, Jane Austen and Dickens have aroused almost as much interest as their works. Jane Campion's new film, Bright Star, about the doomed love life of the poet John Keats, is the latest in a long line of movies, books and plays about English writers. Advertisement: Story continues below In a country with such a peerless literary history, it is hardly surprising that literary tourism is booming. A niche travel market, English literary tourism appeals to readers keen to see the birthplaces, graves and especially the houses and landscapes where writers' imaginations were formed and blossomed. Alison Dalby, of the National Trust, which owns and manages the largest number of British writers' houses, says the number of visitors grows annually. Interest in the trust's most recently opened property, Greenway Agatha Christie's holiday home in Devon was so great last summer that visitors had to be turned away. The dwellings of England's most famous writers draw millions of visitors each year. The five houses associated with Shakespeare in StratforduponAvon attract 750,000 tourists annually, the largest number of literary pilgrims. Surprisingly, it is not Jane Austen's house at Chawton in Hampshire (40,000 annual visitors) or the only surviving London home of Charles Dickens in Doughty Street (25,000 a year) that attracts the secondlargest group of visitors. It is Sissinghurst Rosetta Stone Castle in Kent, the home of Vita SackvilleWest, novelist and sometime lover of Virginia Woolf (about 160,000 annual visitors). "It is definitely Vita herself her own story and her garden that draws people," the trust's communications officer for the southeast, Michelle Cleverley, says. But it is London that is most alive with literary history, from Dr Johnson's house near Fleet Street (Johnson was the compiler of the first comprehensive English dictionary and was also famous for declaring "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life") to the beautiful, newly restored Hampstead house of Keats, who wrote Ode to a Nightingale there, inspired by a bird singing in the plum tree outside his window. Keats was in love with the girl who lived in the adjoining house, 18yearold Fanny Brawne, and her bedroom is now open to visitors for the first time. Campion's new film has already had an impact on visitor numbers. An actual landscape as much as an imagined one, London attracts literary tourists like no other city. Dickens made the city his own and his only surviving London house is in a beautiful part of town, near Chancery Lane, which inspired his novel Bleak House. Sherlock Holmes's famous flat in Baker Street is not far away and is now the site of the Sherlock Holmes Museum.

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