Planning some literary breaks - starting with London but all ideas welcome

[AgualusasLover]

For various reasons, I will get to use a reasonable amount of my annual leave just for me this year.

I live in London but want to devote one working week to literary pursuits. All ideas very welcome. I’ve done a lot of British Library/pottering about Bloomsbury but not averse to a day doing that. Keen to visit Westminster Abbey for Poets’ Corner. I’ll need to do everything by public transport. Hit me with your ideas along with food recommendations.

I am planning a few weekends as well. High on my list is:

Dorset - Jane Austen, Hardy
Devon/Cornwall - Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier

Thanks you @JaninaDuszejko and @IbizaToTheNorfolkBroads

I've done the walk to Top Withens on a couple of occasions. I thoroughly recommend it.

Other undersung Yorkshire novelists - Anne Bronte is interred in the cemetery in St Mary's Church, Scarborough and Winifred Holtby is buried in the tiny church yard in Rudston, the village of her birth, a location which also boasts the tallest standing stone in Britain. It's also close to the remote and beautiful Flamborough headland, which may well be one of my favourite places in the four counties comprising Yorkshire.

I need to join the London Library for at least a year as it has a particular collection of books I'm interested in. Top locations for my next trip to London will be the Freud museum - not strictly literary but a huge influence on the literature of his day - and also the numerous bookshops on the Charing Cross Road. I completely fell for the book 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff - there's a blue plaque there showing exactly where the bookshop Marks & Co was located.

Another vote here for the East Sussex region: beautiful Rye, and the fascinating Charleston and Monks House museums once owned respectively by Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. If the modernists are your thing, Windmill Hill in East Sussex was an important setting for one of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage novels. And if you read Enid Blyton as a kid, the hilltop area of Rye is thought to be the inspiration for the town of Castaway Hill in Five Go to Smugglers' Top.

I keep a lookout for blue plaques wherever I go! They always offer some interesting surprises.

Oswestry in north Shropshire is the birthplace of Barbara Pym and is recognisable from her earlier novels. It is also the birthplace of war poet Wilfred Owen and Shrewsbury and Much Wenlock are associated with Mary Webb.

Portsmouth - Charles Dickens

Winchester - Jane Austin

Both accessible by train