Charles Dickens's writing chalet open to public

Now is your chance to have a look around Charles Dickens's writing chalet in Rochester. The ground floor will be open to the public as part of the Heritage Open Days scheme on September 12, 13, 19, and 20 (click link to book).

Visiting hours are between 11am and 4pm at Eastgate Gardens off Rochester High Street where members of the council's Heritage Team, the Friends of Eastgate House and the Charles Dickens Fellowship will be on chat about the building.

There will also be talks and tours throughout each day, full details via the link above. Booking is not necessary. 

Image courtesy Visit Medway 

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Dickens's writing chalet saved for the nation

The future of Charles Dickens's shedlike writing chalet looks a lot brighter thanks to a major financial lifeline from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Set in the gardens of Eastgate House, just off Rochester's High Street, it will receive a £240,000 grant to help develop plans to restore the architectural treasure and open it up to the public. Medway Council is contributing £40,000, while project partners from the Rochester and Chatham branch of the Dickens Fellowship are contributing £5,000. 

Now more than 160 years old, this Grade I-listed structure, situated in Eastgate Gardens, is extremely fragile and at serious risk of being lost.

Dickens worked there on several of his novels including Our Mutual Friend, The Uncommercial Traveller, and his final, unfinished, work The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He also rehearsed there before his numerous public appearances and lined the second floor with mirrors to help him prepare.

The chalet was given to him as a present from actor friend Charles Fechter in 1864 when Dickens lived at Gads Hill in Higham. It arrived at Higham Railway Station on Christmas Eve 1864, in 94 pieces packed into 58 boxes, an early example of prefabricated design and was moved to its current location in Rochester in the 1960s.

The project will conserve and restore the Chalet where organisers plan to develop a programme of events for residents, schools, and visitors to explore Dickens’ creativity and his contemporary relevance as a social campaigner. If development plans are successful, they will unlock a further funding of £1.2m from the Heritage Fund.

Eilish McGuinness, Chief Executive, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: "I’m pleased we are adding the Charles Dickens Writing Chalet, the writing nook where he wrote his last novels in peace and tranquillity, to the writing heritage we’ve funded over the years."

Image: Nick Johnson/The Imageworks

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Charles Dickens's writing chalet in new issue of the Idler

 

The new issue of the Idler magazine - March-April 2026 - is winging its way to subscribers and bookshops/newsagents of note. Contents include my regular column on sheds and shedlike atmospheres which this time round focuses on the ongoing saga of what's happening to Charles Dickens's writing chalet.

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Charles Dickens’ writing chalet restoration update

There are optimistic sounds coming from the campaign to restore Charles Dickens' writing chalet in Rochester which as you know has been in an increasingly poor state of repair for some time now. 

The project - a partnership between Medway Council and the Friends of Eastgate House - now has its own website where its mission statement is "to revive and reimagine Dickens’ Writing Chalet as a vibrant cultural space for the community". Here's what they say:

Alongside other key heritage sites — such as Eastgate House, the Six Poor Travellers, Restoration House and The Bull Hotel – the Chalet will become part of a compelling story about place, history and imagination. It will also serve as a platform for events and fundraising activities to secure its future use and ongoing maintenance, helping to preserve its legacy for generations to come.

Recent events over the summer have included opening the chalet to the public during August, and the presentation of a mini chalet scale model to the Annual Conference of the Dickens Fellowship. We'll keep you posted on further updates on this extremely worthy scheme.

Image courtesy Rye Design

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Charles Dickens' writing chalet appears in unpublished correspondence

A new exhibition at The Charles Dickens Museum of unpublished and rarely-seen letters reveal plenty of intriguing details of life within the Dickens family in the years immediately following the death of Dickens in 1870, including a mention of his writing chalet at Gad's Hill.

The letters were all sent by members of the Dickens family to ‘Plorn’ Dickens (1852-1902), the youngest son of Charles and Catherine Dickens, between 1868 and 1902 and was acquired by the Museum at auction on in January this year at auction.

The collection shows the affectionate but sometimes strained relationships between the Dickens siblings, in one case caused by wrangling over the disposal of Charles Dickens’s chalet at Gad’s Hill. On July 12, 1871, the eldest daughter, Mamie Dickens (1838-1896), wrote to Plorn about their brother Francis (1844-1886). “Yes, we looked forward with great pleasure to seeing Franky again, but his visit has been a great disappointment as far as we are concerned, for we have seen hardly anything of him. Ever since the business of the Chalet he has never been near us. I have written to him constantly asking him to come here. We, as well as Kitty, have done everything we possibly could to make him welcome. However, we lead such a quiet life now, that I think he found us dull. He was always a queer fellow."

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Dickens' writing chalet

On a festive (if rather overcast) trip to Rochester, we naturally called in at Eastgate House, former home of the novelist Charles Dickens and his writing chalet in which he wrote five of his works (while it was in the garden of his other Rochester home, Gad's Hill). It's now in urgent need of repair to preserve it and currently supported by steel props to keep it secure. Fundraisers are trying to get together £100,000 to get it open and running again. More details here.

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Charles Dickens' underground garden office commute

Charles Dickens's former Kent Home, now Gad's Hill School near Rochester, is to be turned into a £10m museum and heritage centre. Dickens did most of his writing in the garden office chalet at the end of the garden (see here for details) but the rather strange drawback was that it was on the other side of the road so he had a tunnel built to reach it: it's still there although the chalet has now been moved.
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Campaign to save Charles Dickens's writing chalet underway

Charles Dickens is one of that elite subset of shedworkers who can be described more accurately as a chaletworker: he wrote A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and much else besides (he didn't finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood in here too on his deathbed) in a wooden chalet which was originally built in the grounds of his Gadshill home in Kent but which was subsequently moved in nearly 100 sections to Eastgate House in Rochester.

According to his biographer John Forster:

"Dickens constructed a passage beneath the road from his front lawn; and in the shrubbery thus rendered accessible, and which he then laid out very rettily, he placed afterwards a Swiss châlet presented to him by Mr. Fechter, which arrived from Paris in ninety-four pieces fitting like the joints of a puzzle, but which proved to be somewhat costly in setting on its legs by means of a foundation brickwork. "It will really be a very pretty thing," he wrote (January 1865), "and in the summer (supposing it not to be blown away in the spring), the upper room will make a charming study. It is much higher than we supposed." Once up, it did really become a great resource in the summer months, and much of Dickens's work was done there."

But the chalet - a present from actor Charles Fechter - is in need of repair as much of the wood is rotting away and the Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship is aiming to raise £100,000 before the bicentenary of the author's birth in 2012 to get it looking spick and span (rather like it looks below not long after it was built).

There's a nice video of the chalet on the BBC site and if you want to contribute to the restoration fund, you can send cheques payable to the Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship (Chalet Fund) to 27 Amethyst Avenue, Chatham, Kent ME5 9TX.
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It is just you - virtual book tour (and win a book)

As part of his virtual book tour, Steve Stack and his marvellous book It Is Just You, Everything's Not Shit (an upbeat and witty riposte to those other books which wallow in the misery of things) appears today and over the weekend on Shedworking. In a rather postmodern take on the book tour (as if doing it online weren't enough), here is an interview Steve did with me about homeworking and shedworking, a longer version of which appears in his book. To win a copy, simply add a comment mentioning something nice about the world and the one I like most will get a copy of the book. Or if you can't wait, you can buy a copy here.

What are the advantages of homeworking?
Generally, a sense of freedom that you simply don't get in a normal office. I'd much rather be a box fresh, free range homeworker roaming free (or at least in a garden office) than cooped up in a pen, nose to nose with the same battery chicks all day. More specifically:
- A greater control over my time - I still have to work, but I can choose an extremely flexible routine which involves, for example, listening to cricket and playing with my sons which wouldn't otherwise be possible.
- I can listen to music (which is great since I've never worked with anybody who's shared my interest in early music)
- I choose how my office looks, can wear what I want to work, and have a 30 second commute (less if I decide to work on the kitchen table rather than go to the shed)

Tell us a little about Shedworking the blog, and The Shed magazine
The Shed is a free bimonthly pdf magazine for shedworkers and people who work in shedlike atmospheres, a lifestyle (sometimes quite aspirational) title rather than one which features nuts and bolts homeworking subjects such as filling in your tax return. I started it because there is a growing community of shedworkers (and homeworkers in general) whose daily experiences and interests are not catered for by any other publication, indeed who by definition tend to work in relative isolation and are not aware of others in a similar position. The Shedworking site is a natural extension of the 'brand', again made possible by new technology and its marvellously free nature. The idea of the blog is to provide a daily update of news and items of interest for homeworkers in general, but with a decidedly sheddish slant (e.g. the list of all the UK shed suppliers which is not available at any other central point). Unbelievably, nobody else does this on a daily basis for homeworkers anywhere in the world.

Shed envy - what's the best homeworking set-up you've seen?
Ooh, that's a very hard one. It might be a bit of a cheat of an answer, but I think you've got to go a long way to beat George Bernard Shaw's revolving hut at Shaw's Corner, just up the road at Ayot St Lawrence, which he could winch round to change the view or improve the light or maybe for a bit of exercise. It had a telephone connection to the house and electrics, and is still in good nick. One of the most admirable is Adam Constantine, a designer, who essentially runs a successful carbon-neutral company from his shed in Shrewsbury but in a modestly understated way.

Any famous shedworkers you would care to impress us with?
A small selection might include Andrew Marr, Alison Pearson, Louis de Bernières, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens (though his was more Swiss chalet than shed), Jeanette Winterson, Philip Pullman, Trevor Baylis, Dylan Thomas, William S. Harley and Arthur Davidson, Roald Dahl, Arthur Miller. Er, Linda Barker.

How do you think working from home changes a person?
It deinstitutionalises them. It can also make them fatter if they can't keep away from the fridge (another advantage in working from a shed rather than a kitchen table).

Celebrity Sheds - part II

Following the first popular Celebrity Sheds post here is a second helping, focusing on writers:
* Louis de Bernières, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin who actually had the first draft of a novel pinched from his shed
* Charles Dickens, whose enormous Swiss chalet 'shed' where he wrote Edwin Drood and others, can be visited at the gardens of the former Charles Dickens Centre in Rochester
* Jilly Cooper, who writes in a gazebo at the bottom of her garden
* Jeanette Winterson whose shed you can read about here

And finally one who isn't a fan as reported in the Daily Telegraph
* Robert Harris, who says "I am anti-sheddist. I couldn't work anywhere cold and nasty. I like the background noise of life going on."