Artists’ homes are precious for the things they tell us about the lives and times of those who worked in them
Historic England has sounded an alarm. A cottage William Blake once lived in, in Felpham, West Sussex, is at risk of collapse. The poet and artist lived there for only three years, from 1800 to 1803, but during that time began his epic poem Milton; its preface includes the stanzas which, being set to music by Hubert Parry, became the hymn Jerusalem: “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?”
Anyone who has seen the low ceilings and slate floors of Dove Cottage, the home of Dorothy and William Wordsworth perched on a hillside in the Lake District, or wondered how Jane Austen could produce anything from her tiny desk in a corner of the sitting room of her house in Chawton, Hampshire, or admired the painted furnishings in Charleston, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s home in Sussex, knows there is nothing incidental about a house.
