Blog · Literary Lake District
← Back to Blog
On the main street of Hawkshead, opposite the Red Lion, is a small seventeenth-century building with a stone porch and a sign that names a cat. It was, for a century, a solicitor's office. It was, for thirty-four years after that, a gallery of Beatrix Potter's watercolours. And since August 2025 it has been Tabitha Twitchit's Bookshop, a National Trust second-hand bookshop with an unusually good story attached to it — which is that the most successful children's author in the world walked in here one day to buy a farm, and came out, some years later, with a husband.
The building is older than any of its stories: a plain stone Hawkshead house of the 1600s, Grade II listed, with the low doorways and small windows of the wool-town years. In the nineteenth century it became the office of W. H. Heelis & Son, solicitors, and by the early 1900s the junior partner was William Heelis, a tall, quiet, sporting man in his thirties who handled property for the farmers of the valley.
In 1905 a London client called Beatrix Potter bought Hill Top, a working farm at Near Sawrey, with the money her little books had made. She kept buying — fields, cottages, then whole farms — and the local solicitor who acted for her on those purchases was William Heelis. The professional relationship became a friendship, and the friendship, over several years and against the firm opposition of her parents, who thought a country solicitor beneath their daughter, became an engagement. It is believed the two of them first met in this building. They married in London in October 1913, she was forty-seven, and for the next thirty years she was Mrs Heelis of Castle Cottage, Sawrey: a sheep farmer, a landowner, a breeder of Herdwicks and a woman who was in and out of her husband's office on estate business all the time.
When she died in 1943 she left fifteen farms and more than four thousand acres to the National Trust. William survived her by less than two years, and his office came to the Trust after him. There is a separate article about William Heelis here.
In 1988 the National Trust opened the old office as the Beatrix Potter Gallery, and for a generation it was where you came to see the real thing: the original watercolours, postcard-sized and astonishingly precise, that had been reproduced in the books. The paintings were shown in rotation, a few dozen at a time, because watercolour fades and a seventeenth-century stone house is a damp place to keep paper. In the end that was the problem. The Gallery closed in 2022 — the Trust said the building could no longer give the artwork the conditions it needed — and the paintings were taken away for safer keeping and for showing elsewhere. They are not in Hawkshead now. If you want to stand in front of Beatrix Potter's originals, the largest collection in the world, the Linder Bequest, belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Trust lends its own works to exhibitions from time to time.
For three years the office stood shut, which in a village this size is noticed.
On 12 August 2025 it reopened as Tabitha Twitchit's Bookshop. Tabitha Twitchit is the cat in The Tale of Tom Kitten and The Tale of Ginger and Pickles — a respectable tabby with three unruly children and, in the second book, a shop. Beatrix Potter set that shop in Hawkshead, in a building not far from this one, so the name is a local joke as well as a literary one.
It is a proper bookshop: donated second-hand books, well chosen and well arranged, sold for the Trust's conservation work, with a timeline of Beatrix Potter's life along the wall, a map of the places she painted and protected in and around the village, and a programme of small exhibitions and events in the rooms upstairs. Entry is free. It is the first second-hand bookshop the Trust has opened in England that is not attached to one of its own properties, and it is run, as these things usually are, by people who like books and like talking about them. Opening days vary through the year, so check before making a special journey.
It is not a gallery of the illustrations any more, and it is worth being clear about that, because plenty of guides and websites still say it is. What it is instead is the building where the story of Beatrix Potter's Lake District life turned — the room she walked into as a client and out of as a wife — and a good place to buy a second-hand copy of Ginger and Pickles on the spot where it is set.
Hawkshead is one of the finest small villages in the Lake District — whitewashed houses, slate roofs, two little squares and alleys narrow enough to touch both sides — and its centre is closed to cars, so it is explored on foot at whatever pace suits. It is flat and compact, a gentle stroll rather than a walk. Wordsworth was at school here for eight years and carved his name on a desk that is still in the schoolroom; the church stands on a green knoll above the roofs with the whole vale below it; and the old solicitor's office is two minutes from either. There is a whole article about the village here.
Tabitha Twitchit's Bookshop is a stop on both our Beatrix Potter tours. On the Beatrix Potter Morning Tour your guide stays with you in Hawkshead and brings you here after Hill Top and Near Sawrey; on Beatrix Potter's Hill Top and a Windermere Cruise the village is the last call before the sailing down the lake to Bowness. From £79 per person, seven guests at most.
We are an independent local tour operator. This article is provided for general visitor interest and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the organisations listed. Access arrangements, opening times and site conditions can change — please check current advice before visiting.