Barnet is celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens with a range of displays showing the links between the writer and the borough.

East Finchley library has a Dickens in Finchley display, and in April there will be a travelling performance of Oliver Twist in Barnet circulating between the libraries in East Barnet, Chipping Barnet and Hendon.

There are a number of links between Dickens and Barnet; in Dickens’s Dictionary of London, 1879, he describes the borough as: “A pretty and still tolerably rural suburb, but on the north side of London and on clay.”

Barnet Museum’s archivist, Gillian Gear, believes that the writer took his wife to dine at the Red Lion in Barnet on a number of occasions during the 1830s.

At the time Dickens was writing Oliver Twist and, in the novel, Oliver meets the Artful Dodger in Barnet.

Ms Gear believes that there is a strong chance that Dickens also visited Barnet Union workhouse, which was on the site now occupied by Barnet Hospital, and that it was the inspiration for the workhouse in Oliver Twist.

In March 1843 Dickens rented Fallow Farm in Finchley while he worked on Martin Chuzzlewit, he also visited the Green Man in East Finchley.

There are a range of other events planned at the Barnet libraries to mark the bicentenary including a Dickens virtual tour, and an Oliver Twist workshop for children.