Famous former Lake District residents

Famous former Lake District residents

The former Lake District residents make up some of the most inspirational artists, poets and authors in the world. Famous names to have lived in the region include:

Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter was born in London on the 28th of July 1866, but later lived exclusively in the Lake District. She had a lonely childhood, educated by a governess at home, she hardly had any contact with people outside her immediate family.

Beatrix loved animals from an early age and had numerous pets that she studied and made drawings of all through her childhood. Her parents rented Wray Castle near Ambleside and Beatrix fell in love with the natural beauty of the Lake District right away and spent numerous summer holidays in the Lake District.

As an adult, she lived most of her life in the Lake District, inspiring her to write her books, in particular The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

She also made numerous paintings and sketches of the Lake District’s landscape. After her death in 1943, she left her 14 farms and 4000 acres of land to the National Trust, on the proviso that her favourite home, Hill Top at Sawrey, was opened to the public and left unchanged.

If you are planning to follow in the footsteps of the great authors, walkers and poets in the Lakes, why not book into a luxury Windermere spa hotel and make the most of your stay.

Alfred Wainwright

Alfred Wainwright was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1907, and at 23 went to the Lake District for a week’s holiday and immediately fell in love with the natural beauty of the Lakelands.

He is well-known for his seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, which he made while working in the Borough Treasurers Office in Kendal in 1941. His handwritten and hand-drawn works of art have inspired all fellwalkers for the last 40 years. A recreation of the Borough Treasurers Office in Kendal where he worked is exhibited in The Kendal Museum of Natural History. Alfred Wainwright died in 1991.

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was the second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, and was born in 1770 in Cockermouth in the Lake District. Wordsworth lived for most of his life in the Lake District, staying in Grasmere, Keswick and Rydal Mount. He was probably the most famous of the Lake Poets and the area´s connections to him contribute largely to the Lake District´s popularity.

Visitors can still go and see Dove Cottage in Grasmere where Wordsworth once lived, and Rydal Mount. The Lake District inspired the famous poet to write some of his most famous works, including Daffodils or ´I wandered lonely as a Cloud …´ which was written after Wordsworth saw a host of golden daffodils while out walking with his sister, Dorothy in Ullswater.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Coleridge was the youngest of ten children of the respected vicar Reverend John Coleridge, and was born on 21 October 1772 in the rural town of Ottery St Mary in Devonshire. Coleridge was a poet, a literary critic and philosopher who was close friends with William Wordsworth.

Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression. Coleridge suffered from poor health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated with laudanum, which resulted in a lifelong addiction to opium. Coleridge died on 25th July, 1834.

If you want to learn more about former Lake District residents, then why not visit Cumbria. Make the most of your stay in the Lake District, with a luxury spa hotel in Windermere.

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