Hatton GardenNow the home of jewellery shops and media types, in Bleak House Hatton Wall was an undesirable neighbourhood – the place the Jellybys retreat to after their bankruptcy: “As soon as her papa had tranquillized his mind by becoming this shorn lamb, and they had removed to a furnished lodging in Hatton Garden (where I found the children, when I afterwards went there, cutting the horse hair out of the seats of the chairs and choking themselves with it), Caddy had brought about a meeting between him and old Mr Turveydrop; and poor Mr Jellyby, being very humble and meek, had deferred to Mr Turveydrop's deportment so submissively that they had become excellent friends.”

Tom-All-Alone's Although Tom-All-Alone’s is fictional, Dickens's description of poverty and unsanitary conditions was all true: "Jo lives - that is to say, Jo has not yet died - in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings.” This 1853 illustration by Phiz gives some sense of the atmosphere Dickens sought Illustration: Philip V Allingham

The entrance to Old Buildings and Old Square which leads into Lincoln's Inn Fields“And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery."Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.”This 1951 photograph was taken at a time when London was still home to "pea soupers", and retains some Dickensian ambience – but visitors today can still get some sense of it

Bleak House

In the novel, we are told that Bleak House is in Hertfordshire, but the model for Jarndyce’s home, with its eccentric collection of mangles, was Dickens’s summer retreat, Broadstairs in Kent. Since renamed Bleak House it was a museum for many years until it was closed by a new owner in 2005.“It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them.”

Cook’s Court“On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more particularly in Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby, law-stationer, pursues his lawful calling. In the shade of Cook's Court, at most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper—foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands—glass and leaden—pen-knives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention, ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer.”

Chesney WoldDickens often visited Rockingham Castle in Leicestershire and was a friend of its owners Richard and Levinia Watson. He told Levinia: “In some of the descriptions of Chesney Wold I have taken many bits, chiefly about trees and shadows, from observations made at Rockingham.” Thus, the following:“Weather affects Mrs Rouncewell little. The house is there in all weathers, and the house, as she expresses it, 'is what she looks at'. She sits in her room (in a side passage on the ground floor, with an arched window commanding a smooth quadrangle, adorned at regular intervals with smooth round trees and smooth round blocks of stone (as if the trees were going to play at bowls with the stones), and the whole house reposes on her mind.