page_title: Keswick, Cumbria
section_title: Lake Poets and other Keswick notables
hierarchical_section_title: Keswick, Cumbria / Culture / Lake Poets and other Keswick notables
caption_attribution_description: English: Greta Hall and Keswick Bridge
context_page_description: Keswick is an English market town and a civil parish, historically in Cumberland, and since 1974 in the Borough of Allerdale in Cumbria. Lying within the Lake District National Park, Keswick is just north of Derwentwater and is 4 miles from Bassenthwaite Lake. It had a population of 5,243 at the 2011 census.
  There is evidence of prehistoric occupation of the area, but the first recorded mention of the town dates from the 13th century, when Edward I of England granted a charter for Keswick's market, which has maintained a continuous 700-year existence. The town was an important mining area, and from the 18th century has been known as a holiday centre; tourism has been its principal industry for more than 150 years. Its features include the Moot Hall; a modern theatre, the Theatre by the Lake; one of Britain's oldest surviving cinemas, the Alhambra; and the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in the town's largest open space, Fitz Park. Among the town's annual events is the Keswick Convention, an Evangelical gathering attracting visitors from many countries.
  Keswick became widely known for its association with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.
context_section_description: Coleridge and William Wordsworth were close friends and collaborators; when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy took up residence in the Lake District in late 1799 it was, in Bott's word, inevitable that Coleridge would follow suit. Six months after the Wordsworths moved into Dove Cottage at Grasmere, Coleridge leased Greta Hall in Keswick, 12 miles (19 km) away. In 1803 Robert Southey, Coleridge's brother-in-law, agreed to share the house with Coleridge and his family. Southey remained at Greta Hall after Coleridge left in 1804, and it remained Southey's family home until his death in 1843. Many famous literary figures stayed at Greta Hall in these years, including the Wordsworths, Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas de Quincey, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. Lamb, a Londoner devoted to his native city, remained doubtful of the attractions of the Lake District, but most of the visitors to Greta Hall wrote eloquently of the beauty of the scenery, and further enhanced the public regard for, and desire to visit, the area. Southey was well regarded locally, but played little part in the life of the town. He is buried in Crosthwaite churchyard and there is a memorial to him inside the church, with an inscription written by Wordsworth.
  Among Keswick notables before the Lake Poets was Sir John Bankes, a leading Royalist during the English Civil War. He was Charles I's Attorney General and Chief Justice. Bankes was born at Castlerigg near Keswick in 1589. A bust in his memory is in upper Fitz Park close to the museum. In 2014 he was further commemorated by the conversion of the former Keswick courthouse into a bar named in his honour with his full title, "The Chief Justice of the Common Pleas".
  Later residents of the area have included the classical scholar, essayist, poet and founder of the Society for Psychical Research, Frederic Myers, who was born in Keswick, and the campaigner for animal welfare Donald Watson, founder of the Vegan Society, who lived in Keswick after retiring from teaching. The pioneer mountaineers and photographers George and Ashley Abraham lived and worked in Keswick. Their photographic shop in Lake Road, built in 1887, was later taken over by the local mountaineer and outfitter George Fisher; the shop still contains memorabilia, including photographs, from the Abrahams' era.
  Of literary figures after the Lake Poets among those most closely associated with Keswick was the novelist Hugh Walpole. In 1924 he moved into Brackenburn, a house between Keswick and Grange at the opposite end of Derwentwater. Like the Lake Poets in the previous century, he wrote enthusiastically about the Lake District, and its scenery and atmosphere often found their way into his fiction. He wrote in 1939, "That I love Cumberland with all my heart and soul is another reason for my pleasure in writing these Herries books. That I wasn't born a Cumbrian isn't my fault: that Cumbrians, in spite of my 'foreignness', have been so kind to me, is my good fortune."
caption: Greta Hall, behind Greta Bridge
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