Poet's shelter 'should be listed'

TS Eliot reads an extract from Four Quartets

Leading literary figures are calling for a seaside shelter in Kent, in which the poet TS Eliot sat, to be preserved.

The Nayland Rock shelter on Margate seafront is where he went in 1921 while recovering from a nervous breakdown.

He composed one of his most famous works, The Waste Land, in the shelter, which is the subject of an application for protection as a listed building.

Supporters include former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, who described the shelter as "a shrine to modern poetry".

TS Eliot's second wife, Valerie, also believes the shelter and its legacy should be preserved.

In a letter to Thanet District Council, she confirmed: "My late husband spent a period of recuperation in Margate and spent much of his days in the shelter on the front from where he composed part of The Waste Land."

Roger Latchford, deputy leader of Thanet Council, says it is a beautiful setting

Nick Dermott, heritage adviser to the council, said it was important to mark the place where such an "extraordinary moving and enduring poem" was composed.

"He apparently sketched, he played the mandolin and he thought about the poem, and eventually he came to write the poem, and some of the lines which appear in the poem.

"He came to Margate a depressed and angry man, and he went away happy with a completed poem.

"It just shows what Margate does for people."

Mr Dermott said if the shelter did become a listed building, he hoped there would be blue plaque to mark the role Margate played in 20th Century literature.