Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey: Chaucer, Dickens and Britain's Writers

It started almost by accident. Geoffrey Chaucer died on 25 October 1400 and was buried in the South Transept, not for The Canterbury Tales but because he lived next door: he rented a house in the Lady Chapel garden, had served as Clerk of the King's Works and was still in royal favour.

His grey Purbeck marble tomb came much later. The poet Nicholas Brigham put it up in 1556, more than 150 years after Chaucer's death, and the bones were moved into it. It still stands in the corner.

The tradition really began with Edmund Spenser. He was buried near Chaucer on 16 January 1599, at the Earl of Essex's expense, and the poets at his funeral threw their elegies into the grave, perhaps with Shakespeare among them. A search in 1938 tried to find the grave and test the story, but nothing could be identified.

Dickens wanted a quiet funeral and got one. He was buried at 9:30 in the morning on 14 June 1870, with only twelve mourners in an almost empty Abbey and a plain coffin covered in ferns and roses. His grave carries only his name, as he asked.

The public had other ideas. It was public opinion that insisted the Abbey was the only fitting place for him, and the grave was left open until 16 June so people could file past. Thousands came, Londoners from all walks of life, and left flowers.

Thomas Hardy lies just north of him. His ashes were buried here on 16 January 1928, with Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw and A.E. Housman among the mourners, while his heart was buried in Stinsford, Dorset, near his parents. Kipling himself is buried in the same transept.

Shakespeare is buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, but the Abbey gave him a life-size white marble statue. William Kent designed it and Peter Scheemakers carved it, and it was put up on 29 January 1741, 124 years after his death, largely thanks to the campaigning of the Shakespeare Ladies Club.

He leans on a pile of books and points to a scroll with lines from The Tempest, with the heads of Elizabeth I, Henry V and Richard III carved below. Next to him, on the wall, is a plain stone tablet reading only JANE AUSTEN 1775 1817. Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral; the Jane Austen Society presented the tablet in 1967.

The Brontë sisters, C.S. Lewis and Philip Larkin are remembered the same way, with memorials rather than graves. Walk the transept slowly and read the floor as well as the walls.