Bloomsbury Walk

Bloomsbury Walk
This handout is based on Walk 1 in Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Virginia Woolf’s London (pp 177-83).
Woolf lived in five different houses in Bloomsbury, two of them still standing (the two shown on this page). Each of them is on a square that we will walk through, as shown on the map handout. Note that our hotel is in the center of that map, just north of Russell Square.

The walk moves from west to east, starting at Fitzroy Square, the square furthest from her personal center of Bloomsbury, which was Gordon Square. It ends at Mecklenburgh Square, the site of her last London home

29 Fitzroy Square
(1907-11)
This house off on the southwest corner is where Virginia lived with her brother Adrian after Vanessa married. Like Septimus Warren Smith’s flat, it is off Tottenham Court Road.
#22 Fitzroy Square, was Duncan Grant’s studio at that same time. Roger Fry had a studio next door, t #21.
#26 Fitzroy Square. Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes shared a flat here, about the same time.
#29 Fitzroy Square. George Bernard Shaw lived here when he wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man and Candida (1887-98).
#33 Fitzroy Square. Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops were here from 1913 to 1919. Fry was an art critic and painter, a close friend of Virginia and Vanessa (he was Vanessa’s lover for a short time). He had been curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and in 1910 he brought to London the first exhibit of post-impressionist art (Cezanne, Manet, Picasso, Gaugin, and more). Fry coined the term “post-impressionist,” and brought another exhibit to London in 1912, with Leonard Woolf as secretary.

Leave Fitzroy Square by the southeast corner and walk along Grafton Way.

Cross Tottenham Court Rd and turn RIGHT down Gower St. Woolf’s friend Lady Ottoline Morrell lived at #10 Gower, 1927-1938?

If there is time, turn into Bedford Square on the right and look at #44, where the Morrells lived before WWI and where Virginia visited for “Ott’s” Thursday evenings about 1910.

From Bedford Square, walk back up Gower St to Dillons Bookshop.
Turn RIGHT along Torrington, Mallet, and Byng Place to Gordon Square. 46 Gordon Square
(1905-07) the center of Woolf’s Bloomsbury
This was Woolf’s first Bloomsbury home and the place where the “Bloomsbury Group” began. Vanessa Stephen picked it out and set up housekeeping for the four Woolf siblings in 1904. They began to invite friends in for “Thursday evenings,” and some of the people who came there for conversation about literature, art, and politics became known as the Bloomsbury Group (familiarly “Bloomsberries”). Most of these were Cambridge friends of Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s older brother, including Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, and Saxon Sydney-Turner. The Stephen household broke up in 1907 when Vanessa married Clive Bell, very shortly after Thoby died of typhoid fever at the age of 25.

For decades various members of the Bloomsbury Group lived in houses around Gordon Square.
Woolf lived at #46 from 1904 to 1907, and always tried to find London housing near there.
Vanessa Bell continued to live at #46 after her marriage, but in 1914 began a long-term affair with Duncan Grant. In 1916, they moved to a country house in Sussex (which we will visit), and had a child there in 1918, Angelica Bell (later Garnett). Clive Bell also had affairs, but they remained married, though seldom living together.
Maynard Keynes lived at #46 when the Bells left.
Vanessa moved into #50 in 1920,and when she moved to #37 (1922-29), Clive moved into #50.

Lytton Strachey lived at #51 from 1909 to (?). His brother James Strachey lived at #41 (1919-1956) with his wife Alix, sometimes joined by Ralph Partridge, husband of Dora Carrington, who lived with Lytton in his country house, Ham Spray, in Wiltshire.

From the south end of Gordon Square, walk eastwards towards Tavistock Square.

52 Tavistock Square
(1924-39; her house gone)
The Bloomsbury house Woolf lived in the longest, and where she wrote most of her novels, was destroyed in WWII and replaced by part of the Tavistock Hotel.
#52 was on the south side of the square, three houses from Southampton Row.

On the west side of the square are houses similar to it.
At 52 Tavistock Square, Virginia and Leonard lived on the top two floors, with a firm of solicitors on the ground two floors, and the Hogarth Press in the basement, where Virginia also had a writing room.

Tavistock House, on the east side of the square was the home of Charles Dickens (1851-60) and was where he wrote Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), and A Tale of Two Cities (1860-61). Now rebuilt, this is the current home of the British Medical Association.

From Tavistock Square, turn left into Tavistock Place and walk down to Hunter St.

Turn RIGHT on Hunter St. and walk to Brunswick Square
From the northeast corner of Brunswick Square, walk through a small alley, past a nursery school to Mecklenburgh Square, which abuts Brunswick Square on the east.

37 Mecklenburgh Square
(1939-40, her house gone)
The Woolfs left Tavistock Square in 1939 because so many houses near them had been bombed. Unfortunately, the house they chose on Mecklenburgh Square was damaged by bombing within the year, and they moved permanently to their country house, Monk’s House, in Sussex, near Vanessa’s country house, Charleston. (We will visit both of those on Saturday.)

Their house was on the north end of the square, and that block has been rebuilt, though Wilson says it is not exactly as it was. She recommends looking at the houses on the north side next to Coram’s Fields, original structures that look more like the original #37.
38 Brunswick Square (1911-12, her house gone; was on the east end)
The School of Pharmacy stands on the site of the house that Virginia and her brother Adrian moved into in 1911, sharing it with Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf. Leonard had recently returned on leave from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he was a civil servant. At Brunswick Square, they became friends, he living on the top floor, she on the floor below (Duncan and Maynard shared the ground floor, Adrian the floor above that). In 1912, Virginia married Leonard and they moved out of Bloomsbury, first to Clifford’s Inn, then Richmond.

Next door was the Foundling Hospital (now renamed the Coram Trust), the source of many jokes.
At this point, Wilson suggests going down to see Roger Fry’s house at 42 Bernard St.

From Mecklenburg Sq, go down Guilford St, turning right into Grenville St., and left into Bernard St. Fry lived here in the 1920s with his lover Helen Anrep (Fry’s wife was incurably insane).

From Bernard St., it is an easy walk down to Russell Square and back to our hotel (north side of Russell Sq.) or on over to Montague Place, where the British Museum is.

Drawings of houses are from Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Virginia Woof’s London. They were done by Leonard McDermid in 1987. The maps are by Tamsin Hickson (1987).