Snooping around: Homes with literary links

Property of the week: Pier Approach, Broadstairs, Kent. From here you can gaze through folding glass doors across your balcony and watch the boats in the harbour below. Clamber upstairs to the decked roof terrace and you can peer halfway to France. The sea dominates both bedrooms while oak floors, ash wood staircases, a sunken tub and stainless-steel worktops add to the appeal. Sadly, it's £500,000 for merely a maisonette.
Colebrook Sturrock, 01843 863100 Photograph: Colebrook Sturrock/Colebrook Sturrock

Wreck of the week: Lofthouse, Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire. This former farmworker’s cottage attached to an unconverted barn is unmodernised. Adding £100,000 to the £150,000 asking price would change all that. It’s on a large farm and sporting estate in an area of outstanding natural beauty and planning permission exists to convert it into a three-bed house. However, the cottage is joined to the farmhouse and neighbours are close by.
Dacre, Son & Hartley, 01423 711010 Photograph: Dacre, Son & Hartley/PR

Take three: homes with literary links. Shakespeare House is a £1.6m, seven bedroom, five bathroom house in Grendon Underwood, near Bicester, Buckinghamshire. The man himself is supposed to have broken his journeys to London here when it was a coaching inn. You don't get it all though: a converted barn in the grounds is being sold separately, and you will have to give up some of your 1.38 acres to whoever buys it.
Strutt & Parker, 01844 342571 Photograph: Strutt & Parker/PR

Take three: homes with literary links. John Galsworthy used to rent this Georgian farmhouse in Manaton, Devon and wrote The Forsyte Saga here. You get five beds and four bathrooms for your £1.95m plus isolation – it’s set amid 313 acres on Dartmoor. The gardens are horticulturally awesome but the decor needs updating.
Savills, 01392 455755 Photograph: Savills/PR

Take three: homes with literary links. Named after the poet Edmund Spenser, who reputedly lived here in Alton, Hampshire, in the 1590s, this house has three bedrooms and three receptions. On the market at £399,950 your lyrical prowess should develop among the exposed wall and ceiling beams and ancient fireplaces.
Keats, 01420 87666 Photograph: Keats/PR