Wordsworth's birthplace and early home to be given an £800,000 facelift

The childhood home of the poet William Wordsworth is to receive an £800,000 facelift, the National Trust announced yesterday. Work will start in the autumn on Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumbria, where the poet was born in 1770 and spent his first eight years.

The aim was to give visitors an interactive and inspirational experience, the trust said. The Heritage Lottery Fund is giving £480,000 and the Cumbria Rural Development Fund £192,000. The National Trust will be part-funding a further £150,000.

The trust says it will carefully recreate the sort of Georgian home that William and his sister Dorothy would have known in their childhood.

The house and garden will also give a flavour of life in 18th- century Cockermouth "warts and all". The house will be redecorated, rewired and redisplayed, producing a lifelike Georgian home, in which visitors will experience the sights, sounds and smells of domestic life in Wordsworth's day. Plans include living history days, exciting ways of interpreting Wordsworth's life story, and various hands-on activities.

The trust said the house would close in October at the end of the present season and reopen in June 2004.