Keats is on your side
As the house where Keats wrote Ode To A Nightingale re-opens with a large Lottery grant, Belinda Webb, writer of the excellent A Clockwork Apple, argues the money spent on that and Elizabeth Gaskell's house would be better spent on supporting writers with something to say now.
I agree that should be the priority if you had to make the choice, though I do feel heritage sites as memorials to great writers are good things too. Why can't we have both? The Lottery should indeed fund new writers, so why not have another source of income to subsidise the heritage of the past? I'd be very happy to see the state sanctioned stripping of both the assets and personal income of Sir Fred Goodwin to finance both Keats and Gaskell's houses for instance. I'm sure that would spruce up the real estate of the Lake Poets too. Move on the rest of the RBS board and we've got the combined homes of the Lake Poets, Brontes, Bloomsbury group, Modernists and Angry Young Men sorted for decades to come.
I'm not joking.
