If you want to make a Beatrix Potter pilgrimage, inspired by the excellent V&A exhibition on her world, you’ll have to come to the Lake District.
She was really a London girl – born in Kensington and raised in The Boltons – but she made the Lake District her home and from the ripe age of 47 lived there. Her home, Hill Top, is owned by the National Trust, and open to the public. It’s very small – just a couple of rooms and a scullery on the ground floor, and four rooms at the top, along with the garden, but it’s atmospheric and it’s here that she wrote the Tale of Samuel Whiskers based on her problems with rats in the place (none now; breathe on).
