Charles Dickens' fans host garden party for Kent chalet

Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations in the wooden chalet

Fundraisers hoping to save the wooden chalet in which Charles Dickens wrote some of his most famous works have organised a charity garden party.

The Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship wants to raise £100,000 to repair the chalet, which has fallen into disrepair.

It wants visitors to dress in Victorian costume for a party at the chalet on 3 July.

The chalet once stood in the grounds of Dickens' house at Higham.

It was dismantled in 1864 and rebuilt in the council gardens of Eastgate House, Rochester.

The building has already been restored twice, but plans are in place for it to re-open in time for the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth in 2012.

The fellowship said Dickens wrote Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend in the chalet, which he used as a study.

He was working on his last, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the day before he died in 1870