Paradise abandoned: does it matter that John Milton's former home is decaying?

The disintegration of Berkyn Manor in Berkshire, where the poet lived in his mid-to late 20s, has caused an internet outcry - but there is another home to remember him by

A set of pictures has been all over the internet in the past 24 hours – they are of Berkyn Manor, a dilapidated old house in Horton near Slough, Berkshire, which has been abandoned since the death of its owner in 1987. They’re haunting, fascinating glimpses into a life, and into a collapsing building that was formerly a home, and are given added piquancy by the fact that no lesser a literary figure than John Milton once lived there, between 1636, or a little earlier, and 1638, a detail lending itself to many excellent Paradise Lost headlines.

Milton would have been in his mid-to late 20s while living in Berkyn Manor, which his family had rented. He’d left Cambridge, where he’d been recognised“as a nascent poet (he had published verses in both Latin and English) and a polemical and incendiary rhetorician”, and “returned to his parents’ house to pursue further private study”. In 1637, he would write Lycidas, after a friend of his drowned: “He must not flote upon his watry bear / Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, / Without the meed of som melodious tear.”