Max Gate
As well as being an eminent novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy was also an architect of some renown. He built Max Gate in Dorset as a home for himself and his wife Emma. The name Max Gate comes from the fact the site was once occupied by a man called Mack!
For aficionados of Thomas Hardy’s life and work, Max Gate is a place that simply must be visited. So different to the rural idyll of his earlier home nearby (now named Hardy’s Cottage), it is simple and suburban. Despite Hardy’s efforts to shield if from the exposed public view by planting over 200 trees, his wife Emma hated the place and it was the source of soured relations between the two.
Despite the misgivings, Hardy welcomed many a literary luminary to Max Gate, including Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and Lawrence of Arabia. Hardy’s classics Tess of D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obsure and the Mayor of Casterbridge were all written here, as well as much of his poetry which he concentrated on for the last 30 years of his life. Thomas Hardy died at Max Gate in 1928 aged 88, but was buried with the madding crowds far away at Westminster Abbey.