Wordsworth House and Garden

Rowan McCabe, our (virtual) poet in residence for Wordsworth’s 250th anniversary year in 2020, knocks on strangers’ doors and asks what is important to them. Here’s what happens next…

Wordsworth House’s walled heritage garden, where William learned his love of nature, is filled with the colours, scents and sounds of the season.

Meet the maid-of-all-work and get a sneak preview of the happiness and hardship of everyday life in William's childhood home with our special podcasts.

Read the poems that won last year's Wordsworth@250 Young People’s Poetry Competition, judged by poets Rowan McCabe and Helen Mort.

As the childhood home of William and his sister Dorothy, Wordsworth House was, for many years, a place of tremendous happiness, but it also witnessed great sorrow.

The Wordsworths aren’t the only family to have left their mark on this house. Thanks to their inadvertent pyromaniac tendencies, the Ellises, who lived here in the 1930s, were almost responsible for its destruction.

Julia Routledge spends her working day dressed as Amy, the maid-of-all-work employed by William Wordsworth’s parents at his childhood home in Cockermouth.

Annie explains why she loves working in the garden that inspired William Wordsworth to become one of the world's best-loved nature poets - and how other family members got involved too.