London homes of artists and writers kept as museums

London keeps an unusual number of writers' and painters' houses in something close to working order, and what separates them is how much of the original fabric is still in the room: Leighton's north-facing studio arranged as he left it, Asalache's fretwork cut into the plaster of a Lambeth terrace, the engraving plates at Chiswick. This list gathers the ones you can walk into as a paying or non-paying visitor, with what is known about who built them, who decorated them and what was preserved rather than reconstructed. Opening days are short at several, and two are outside the centre.

Places in this collection

  • Dr Johnson's House — Johnson took this townhouse off Fleet Street from 1748 and compiled A Dictionary of the English Language in it, working in the garret above…
  • Carlyle's House — Thomas and Jane Carlyle moved into this Chelsea house in 1834 and it became a working address for literary London, visited by Dickens, Rusk…
  • 575 Wandsworth Road — The Kenyan-born poet and artist Khadambi Asalache bought this rundown early nineteenth-century terrace, which had been squatted, and spent…
  • Dorich House Museum — The sculptor Dora Gordine designed this building in 1936 as apartment, studio and gallery for herself and her husband, the Russian art scho…
  • Hogarth's House — The painter and satirist used this as his country house in the eighteenth century and built himself a studio at the bottom of the garden. T…
  • 18 Stafford Terrace — Edward Linley Sambourne, cartoonist for Punch, lived here with his wife and two children, and the interiors survive as one of the clearest…
  • Keats House — Keats lodged in this Regency villa in Hampstead for seventeen months between 1818 and 1820, before leaving for Italy, where he died. He dra…
  • Charles Dickens Museum — Dickens rented this Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury from 1837 to 1839, the only one of his London addresses still standing, and in it he fin…

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