One of the most famous literary streets in England, West Street's small, attractive houses, built around the picturesque grounds of Sir William Borlase's Grammar School, are still relatively unprepossessing but obviously they impressed T.S. Eliot, Thomas Love Peacock, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, so much that they decided to take up residence in some of them.

Each house is commemorated with a blue plaque high up on the respective facades, which are generally made up of flint and red brick materials. The Shelleys did in fact stay next door to Sir William Borlase in a charming cottage, Albion House, now owned by the school. Mary Shelley finished her groundbreaking Gothic novel, Frankenstein, there. Significantly, the cottage was created in a Gothic style. The Shelleys lived here for a year before shooting off to Italy. Further up the street at No.31 is T.S. Eliot's red brick house where he lived after World War I. Thomas Love Peacock lived in a similar house at No.47., where he wrote Nightmare Abbey - another interesting Gothic inclination but maybe I am clutching onto straws.

For those of you who are fascinated in the Romanticist writers, you should almost certainly make a quick stop here in Marlow. For those of you adore old English literature in general (or in the case of Eliot English-American) your eyes will be open with wonder.