'Keswick - Greta Hall

Main Street, Keswick Cumbria CA12 5NH. Tel 017687 75980.

Location : Keswick
Map - Ordnance Survey - NY 265238

Greta Hall was built about 1800 and was the former home of the Lake poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Southey, who was poet laureate from 1813 - 1843, lived there for fourty years. Many famous literary personalities visted Greta Hall - the Wordsworths, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, P.B. Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott.

From 1872 to 1887 it was a girls' school. In 1909 it was bought by Canon Rawnsley, and was rented to the headmaster of Keswick School as a girls' boarding house. In 1921 it was bought by the governors of the school and remained a girls' boarding house until 1994. It then became a private home.

Greta hall was bought by the current owners in 1998, and has recently been restored to provide bed & breakfast and self-catering accommodation. For more information, and a history of the building, see www.gretahall.net.

There is much information about the history of Greta Hall and its residents in George Bott's book 'Keswick - The Story of a Lake District Town', published 1994 by Cumbria County Council/Chaplins Booksellers.