Plans to save Doyle's home far from elementary...

The former home of author Arthur Conan Doyle is to be turned into flats. 'Undershaw', built in Surrey by Doyle in 1897, will now be made into eight dwellings, three homes and five town houses, along with a small public pavillion with information about the Sherlock Holmes author. Campaign groups, including 'Save Undershaw', and the 'Victorian Society', have strongly objected to the plans, wishing for it instead to be restored or become a museum.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

An appeal has been made to restore a chalet where Charles Dickens wrote some of his most famous works. The small wooden building was a present to the writer from French actor Charles Fechter, and arrived at Higham railway station in 1864, in 58 separate boxes. Although the building used to stand in the writer's home, Gads Hill Place, in now is located in the council gardens of Eastgate House, Rochester and is in desperate need of restoration. Accessed via a specially made tunnel under the main Rochester to London Road at Higham, Dickens wrote works such as , 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'Great Expectations' and partially finished 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' at the chalet. The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship hopes to raise £100,000 to complete the work by 2012, which will be 200 years since Dickens's birth.

George Orwell's Indian homecoming..

The birthplace of English writer Goerge Orwell, is to receive a makeover after years of dilapidation. With his father an agent in the opium department, Orwell was born in Motihari, India; a small town near the Nepalese border. Although he and his family left for England the next year, 'Orwell cared about India all his life'. Yet his house fell into disrepair, a state heightened by earthquakes and has been home to numerous animals. Now the government has decided to renovate it in order to attract more tourists to one of India's most undeveloped states, saying that they 'will not allow George Orwell's ancestral house, where he was born, to be lost to history'. Calls for renovation have been mooted before, notably in 2003, the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. The work will begin  early 2010.