The Bloomsbury Group — or Bloomsbury Set — was an enormously influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists,^[1] the best known members of which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts".^[2] Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.^[3]

Detailed overview of the better and lesser known members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Membership[link]

Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable".^[4] The group did not hold formal or informal discussions on particular topics, but talked about a range of topics at all times. Identifications of the membership of the circle have varied considerably depending on who drew up the lists, and when.

"Leonard Woolf, in the 1960s, listed as 'Old Bloomsbury' Vanessa and Clive Bell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Adrian and Karin Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, with Julian, Quentin and Angelica Bell, and David Garnett as later additions".^[5] However, the claim has been made that (though factually accurate) Woolf's formulation is "a little too dogmatic and definite and contributes to the false view that Bloomsbury was an entity, almost a formal body", as opposed to "an informal group of friends, and nothing more".^[6]

Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were sisters, and their brothers, the older Thoby and the younger Adrian, can also be considered original members of the group, (as were some other Cambridge figures - indeed, to some, "Bloomsbury was really Cambridge in London").^[7] Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant – later Vanessa’s partner – were cousins, so that a web of kinship, intellectual, social, sexual and amicable ties bound the group, while throughout the group’s history there were various (and complicated!) affairs among the individual members, most of whom lived for considerable periods of time in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury.

An historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all predated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers. Yet close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury: Keynes’s wife Lydia Lopokova was only reluctantly accepted into the group,^[8] and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh Walpole".^[9] Members cited in "other lists might include Ottoline Morrell, or Dora Carrington, or James and Alix Strachey";^[10] but even such a close associate as Virginia Woolf's long term lover Vita Sackville-West - "Vita would be the Hogarth Press's best-selling author"^[11] - belonged to a different literary grouping.

Shared ideas[link]

The lives and works of the group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together, reflecting in large part the influence of G. E. Moore: "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'".^[12]

Bloomsbury reacted against the social rituals, "the bourgeois habits ... the conventions of Victorian life"^[13] - its valorisation of the public sphere - in favour of a more informal, private-oriented focus upon personal relationships and individual pleasure: E. M. Forster lauded for example "the decay of smartness and fashion as factors, and the growth of the idea of enjoyment".^[14] His famous (or infamous) assertion that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country"^[15] belongs here.

The Group "believed in pleasure ...They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric figures, well then, one accepted that too".^[16] Yet at the same time, theirs was a sophisticated, civilized, and highly articulated shared ideal of pleasure: as Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years".^[17]

Politically, Bloomsbury held mainly left-liberal stances (opposed to militarism, for example); but its "clubs and meetings were not activist, like the political organizations to which many of Bloomsbury's members also belonged", and they would be criticised for that by their Thirties successors, who by contrast were "heavily touched by the politics which Bloomsbury had rejected".^[18]

Their convictions about the nature of consciousness and its relation to external nature, about the fundamental separateness of individuals that involves both isolation and love, about the human and non-human nature of time and death, and about the ideal goods of truth, love and beauty – all these were largely shared^{[citation needed]}. These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are also reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction, influenced above all by Clive Bell's "concept of 'Significant Form', which separated and elevated the concept of form above content in works of art":^[19] it has been suggested that, with their "focus on form ...Bell's ideas have come to stand in for, perhaps too much so, the aesthetic principles of the Bloomsbury Group".^[20]

Origins[link]

The Bloomsbury Group came from mostly upper middle-class professional families; formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to the Clapham Sect".^[21] E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell had independent incomes. Others such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, the MacCarthys, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry needed to work for their living. Of the "set", perhaps only Clive Bell could be called wealthy^{[citation needed]}. Of the male members of the early Bloomsbury Group, all but Duncan Grant were educated at Trinity or King’s. At Trinity in 1899 Strachey, Woolf, Sydney-Turner and Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, who introduced them to his sisters Vanessa and Virginia in London, and in this way the Bloomsbury Group came into being. All the Cambridge men except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers were also members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the 'Apostles'";^[22] there they met older members such as Desmond MacCarthy and Roger Fry as well as E. M. Forster and J. M. Keynes, who were all from King’s College.

Through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the turn of the century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value. As with the distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behavior), Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable intuition of good and a concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not proportionate to the sum of its parts. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake".^[23] But more important than these for the group’s values was the recurrent questioning of human behaviour in terms of instrumental means and intrinsic ends^{[citation needed]}.

Old Bloomsbury[link]

Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys (neither members of Bloomsbury), Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell.

When they came down from college, the men of Cambridge began to meet the women of Bloomsbury through the Stephen family. Thoby’s premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together. Lytton Strachey became a close friend of the Stephen sisters as did Duncan Grant through his affairs with Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, and Adrian Stephen. Clive Bell married Vanessa in 1907, and Leonard Woolf returned from the Ceylon Civil Service to marry Virginia in 1912. Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his wife Molly, and E. M. Forster.^[24] Except for Forster, who published three novels before the highly successful Howards End in 1910, the group were late developers. It was also in 1910 that Roger Fry joined the group. His notorious post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second revolution following on the Cambridge philosophical one. This time the Bloomsbury painters were much involved and influenced. Bloomsbury was also part of Fry’s extension of post-impressionism into the decorative arts with his Omega Workshops, which lasted until 1920.^[25] Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art, as can be seen at Charleston Farmhouse near Lewes in Sussex where Vanessa Bell, her children and Duncan Grant moved in 1916 for the rest of their lives. (Charleston is now open to visitors, as is Monk's House, the Rodmell cottage the Woolfs moved to in 1919, now owned by the National Trust.)

The establishment’s hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell polemicized post-impressionism in his widely read book Art (1914), basing his aesthetics partly on Roger Fry’s art criticism and G. E. Moore’s moral philosophy; and as the war came he argued provocatively that "in these days of storm and darkness, it seemed right that at the shrine of civilization - in Bloomsbury, I mean - the lamp should be tended assiduously".^[26] The campaign for women’s suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as Virginia Woolf and some but not all members of the group perceived the connections between the politics of capitalism, imperialism, gender and aesthetics^{[citation needed]}.

Old Bloomsbury’s development was inevitably impacted on, along with just about everything else in modernist culture, by the First World War: indeed, "the small world of Bloomsbury was later said by some on its outskirts to have been irretrivably shattered", though in fact its friendships "survived the upheavals and dislocations of war, in many ways were even strengthened by them".^[27] None of the men fought in the war. Most but not all of them were conscientious objectors, which of course added to the group’s controversies. Politically the members of Bloomsbury were divided between liberalism and socialism, as can be seen in the respective careers and writings of Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf. But they were united in their opposition to the government that involved them in the war and then in an impermanent peace.

Though the war dispersed Old Bloomsbury, the individuals continued to develop their careers. E. M. Forster followed his successful novels with Maurice which he could not publish because it treated homosexuality untragically. In 1915 Virginia Woolf brought out her first novel, The Voyage Out. And in 1917 the Woolfs founded their Hogarth Press, which would publish T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and many others including Virginia herself along with the standard English translations of Freud. Then in 1918 Lytton Strachey published his critique of Victorianism in the shape of four ironic biographies in Eminent Victorians, which added to the arguments around Bloomsbury that continue to this day, and "brought him the triumph he had always longed for ... The book was a sensation".^[28]

The following year came J. M. Keynes’s influential attack the next year on the Versailles Peace Treaty: "The Economic Consequences of the Peace immediately established Maynard as an economist of international eminence".^[29]

Later Bloomsbury[link]

In March 1920 Molly MacCarthy began a club to help Desmond and herself write their memoirs; and also "for their friends to regroup after the war (with the proviso that they should always tell the truth)",^[30] thus bringing the members of Old Bloomsbury back together. The comedy of a group of friends in their forties reading one another their memoirs was not lost on Bloomsbury. Many of the ensuing memoirs, such as Virginia Woolf on her Hyde Park Gate home and Maynard Keynes on his early beliefs, are ironic in ways not always recognized by later commentators. The Memoir Club testifies to the continuing cohesion of Bloomsbury. For the next thirty years they came together in irregular meetings to write about the memories they shared in growing up together, at college, and later in Bloomsbury. The members of The Memoir Club were not quite equivalent to those of Old Bloomsbury, however; the club did not include Adrian Stephen, for example, or Sydney-Turner, who certainly belonged to Old Bloomsbury. Yet all but one of the other members belonged to Old Bloomsbury, and indeed Old Bloomsbury itself became a popular subject for the Club’s memoirs.

The 1920s were in a number of ways the blooming of Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf was writing and publishing her most widely-read modernist novels and essays, E. M. Forster completed A Passage to India which remains the most highly regarded novel on English imperialism in India. Forster wrote no more novels but he became one of England’s most influential essayists. Duncan Grant, and then Vanessa Bell, had single-artist exhibitions. Lytton Strachey wrote his biographies of two Queens, Victoria then Elizabeth (and Essex). Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard Woolf engaged in friendly rivalry as literary editors, respectively of the New Statesman and the Nation and Athenaeum, thus fuelling animosities that saw Bloomsbury dominating the cultural scene. Roger Fry wrote and lectured widely on art; while Clive Bell applied Bloomsbury values to his book Civilization (1928), which Leonard Woolf saw as limited and elitist, describing Clive as a "wonderful organiser of intellectual greyhound racing tracks".^[31] Leonard, who had helped formulate proposals for the League of Nations during the war, offered his own views on the subject in Imperialism and Civilization (1928). In many respects throughout its history Bloomsbury’s most incisive critics came from within.

In the darkening 1930s Bloomsbury began to die: "Bloomsbury itself was hardly any longer a focus".^[32] A year after publishing a collection of brief lives, Portraits in Miniature (1931), Lytton Strachey died; shortly afterwards Carrington shot herself. Roger Fry, who had become England’s greatest art critic, died in 1934. Vanessa and Clive’s eldest son, Julian Bell, was killed in 1937 while driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War. Virginia Woolf wrote Fry’s biography but with the coming of war again her mental instability recurred, and she drowned herself in 1941. In the previous decade she had become one of the century’s most famous feminist writers with three more novels, and a series of essays including the moving late memoir “Sketch of the Past”, It was also in the Thirties that Desmond MacCarthy became perhaps the most widely read – and heard – literary critic with his columns in The Sunday Times and his broadcasts with the BBC. John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) made him the century’s most influential economist. He died in 1946 after being much involved in monetary negotiations with the United States.

The diversity yet collectivity of Later Bloomsbury’s ideas and achievements can be summed up in a series of credos that were done in 1938, the year of Munich. Virginia Woolf published her radical feminist polemic Three Guineas that shocked some of her fellow members including Keynes who had enjoyed the gentler A Room of One’s Own (1929). Keynes read his famous but decidedly more conservative memoir My Early Beliefs to The Memoir Club. Clive Bell published an appeasement pamphlet (he later supported the war), and E. M. Forster wrote an early version of his famous essay “What I Believe” with its choice, still shocking for some, of personal relations over patriotism: his quiet assertion in the face of the increasingly totalitarian claims of both left and right that "personal relations ... love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State".^[33]

Posthumous Bloomsbury[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The Memoir Club continued meeting intermittently until Clive Bell’s death in 1964. Younger members of the group and the club included the writer David Garnett, and later his wife Angelica Garnett, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Her half-brother the artist and writer Quentin Bell eventually became the club’s secretary, and later wrote his aunt’s biography. Sister and brother wrote very different memoirs about Bloomsbury, Angelica’s being Deceived by Kindness (1984) and Quentin’s Elders and Betters (1995). Among other younger members were Lytton’s niece the writer Julia Strachey, and the diarist Frances Partridge who had married into Lytton Strachey’s ménage in the thirties.

Following Virginia’s death Leonard Woolf began editing collections of her writings including a selection from her diaries, A Writer’s Diary (1953), which revealed publicly for the first time what the Bloomsbury Group had been like. Leonard’s own volumes of autobiography in the 1960s (he died in 1969) gave the fullest account, but he remained reticent about the sexual lives of the members, as had the excerpts from Virginia’s diary. Subsequent biographies of Strachey then Virginia Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Grant removed all veils. Indeed much of the interest in Bloomsbury has been biographically driven, yet it is their achievements as writers, artists, and thinkers that have ultimately made their lives biographically interesting. The case of Virginia Woolf provides an example. There have now been more than half a dozen biographies of her, yet a good deal of the basic scholarship of locating and editing her work remains unfinished; significant unpublished writings of hers are still being found in library archives.

The Bloomsbury Group has featured in many works of fiction, including, notably, Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Susan Sellers' Vanessa and Virginia.

Criticism[link]

If "the contempt or suspicion - the environment that a person or group creates around itself - is always a kind of alter ego, an essential and revealing part of the production",^[34] there is perhaps much to be learnt from the (extensive) criticism that the Bloomsbury Group aroused. Early complaints focused on a perceived cliquiness: "on personal mannerisms - the favourite phrases ('ex-quisitely civilized', and 'How simply too extraordinary!'), the incredulous, weirdly emphasised Strachey voice".^[35] After World War I, as the members of the Group "began to be famous, the execration increased, and the caricature of an idle, snobbish and self-congratulatory rentier class, promoting its own brand of high culture began to take shape":^[36] as Forster self-mockingly put it, "In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts".^[37]

The growing threats of the Thirties brought new criticism from younger writers of "what the last lot had done (Bloomsbury, Modernism, Eliot) in favour of what they thought of as urgent hard-hitting realism"; while "Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, which called Bloomsbury élitist, corrupt and talentless, caused a stir"^[38] of its own. The most telling criticism, however, came perhaps from within the Group's own ranks, when on the eve of war Keynes gave a "nostalgic and disillusioned account of the pure sweet air of G. E. Moore, that belief in undisturbed individualism, that Utopianism based on a belief in human reasonableness and decency, that refusal to accept the idea of civilisation as 'a thin and precarious crust' ... Keynes's fond, elegiac repudiation of his "early beliefs", in the light of current affairs ("We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own")".^[39]

After the outbreak of war, with the group accused of "intellectual elitism its reputation faltered in the 1940s and 1950s, but from the 1960s critical interest in their achievements began to revive".^[40] However controversy continues to accompany Bloomsbury wherever it goes. Much work on Bloomsbury continues to focus on the group’s class origins and alleged elitism, their satire, their atheism, their oppositional politics and liberal economics, their non-abstract art, their modernist fiction, their art and literary criticism, and their non-nuclear family and sexual arrangements.

See also[link]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Bell, Quentin, Bloomsbury (new edition, 1986).
• Edel, Leon, Bloomsbury : a house of lions (stops at 1920), Philadelphia : Lippincott, c1979
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
• Kromhout, Rindert, "Soldaten huilen niet" (Dutch Young Adult novel about the youth of Quentin 2010)
• Reed, Christopher, Bloomsbury Rooms (2004).
• Rosenbaum, S. P (ed), A Bloomsbury Group Reader (1993); (ed), The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary (revised edition, 1995); "The Early Literary HIstory of the Bloomsbury Group: Victorian Bloomsbury (1987), Edwardian Bloomsbury (1994), Georgian Bloomsbury (2003)
• Shone, Richard, Bloomsbury Portraits (1976).

Photograph Albums[link]

• Monk's House photograph album 1, 1863-1938. Digital Facsimile at Houghton Library, Harvard University
• Monk's House photograph album 2, 1909-1922. Digital Facsimile at Houghton Library, Harvard University
• Monk's House photograph album 3, 1890-1933. Digital Facsimile at Houghton Library, Harvard University
• Monk's House photograph album 4, 1890-1947. Digital Facsimile at Houghton Library, Harvard University
• Monk's House photograph album 5, 1892-1938. Digital Facsimile at Houghton Library, Harvard University
• Monk's House photograph album 6, 1850-1900. Digital Facsimile at Houghton Library, Harvard University

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bloomsbury Group

• Manuscripts and Woodcuts: Visions and Designs from Bloomsbury – Duke University Libraries Digital Collections Includes 12 woodcuts by Roger Fry and the manuscript of Elizabeth and Essex written in Lytton Strachey's hand with 7 miscellaneous manuscript letters.
• The Bloomsbury Group Collection at the Victoria University Library at the University of Toronto Victoria University Library has a number of special collections concerning the Bloomsbury Group. Chief among these is the Virginia Woolf Collection consisting of more than 3000 items.
• http://www.communitywalk.com/map/41999
• Bloomsbury Group in the Tate Gallery Archives
• Charleston homepage
• http://archive.tate.org.uk/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqServer=tb-calm&dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqPos=2&dsqSearch=(UserWrapped5='charleston')
• http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-03/Manners.html
• "A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections" traveling exhibition website.

v t e Bloomsbury Buildings Barbadian H.C. · Brunswick Centre · Church of Christ the King · Connaught Hall · Hotel Russell · The Lamb · Montagu House · Senate House · St. George's · St George the Martyr Holborn · St Pancras New Church · UCL Main Building Squares and parks Bedford Square · Bloomsbury Square · Brunswick Square · Coram's Fields · Gordon Square · Mecklenburgh Square · Queen Square · Russell Square · Tavistock Square · Torrington Square · Woburn Square Roads Gower Street · Great Russell Street · Guilford Street · Gray's Inn Road · Lamb's Conduit Street · Malet Street · Museum Street · Southampton Row · Woburn Place History The Bedford Estate · Bloomsbury Gang · Bloomsbury Group  Commons

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Coordinates: 51°31′34″N 0°07′04″W / 51.5262°N 0.1178°W / 51.5262; -0.1178

Bloomsbury
Bedford Square, one of Bloomsbury's garden squares
Bloomsbury  Bloomsbury shown within Greater London
OS grid reference	TQ305825
London borough	Camden
Ceremonial county	Greater London
Region	London
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	LONDON
Postcode district	WC1
Dialling code	020
Police	Metropolitan
Fire	London
Ambulance	London
EU Parliament	London
UK Parliament	Holborn and St Pancras
London Assembly	Barnet and Camden
List of places: UK • England • London

Bloomsbury is an area of central London between Euston Road and Holborn, developed by the Russell family in the 17th and 18th centuries into a fashionable residential area. It is notable for its array of garden squares,^[1] literary connections (exemplified by the Bloomsbury Group) and numerous cultural, educational and healthcare institutions. While Bloomsbury was not the first area of London to have acquired a formal square, Bloomsbury Square, laid out in 1660 by Thomas Wriothesley, 4th Earl of Southampton as Southampton Square, was the first square to be named as such.^[2]

Bloomsbury is home to the University of London's central bodies and departments, including the Senate House Library and School of Advanced Study, and several of its colleges, including University College London, Birkbeck, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the School of Pharmacy and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Numerous healthcare institutions are located in Bloomsbury, including the British Medical Association, Great Ormond Street Hospital, the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, University College Hospital and the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine. The British Museum and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art are also located in the area.

Bloomsbury comes under the authority of the London Borough of Camden, and is in the Parliamentary constituency of Holborn and St Pancras.

History[link]

Queen Square, Bloomsbury in 1787. The fields to the north reach as far as Hampstead.

The earliest record of what would become Bloomsbury is the 1086 Domesday Book, which records that the area had vineyards and "wood for 100 pigs".^[2] But it is not until 1201 that the name Bloomsbury is first noted, when William de Blemond, a Norman landowner, acquired the land.^[3] The name Bloomsbury is a development from Blemondisberi – the bury, or manor, of Blemond. An 1878 publication, Old and New London: Volume 4, mentions the idea that the area was named after a village called "Lomesbury" which formerly stood where Bloomsbury Square is now,^[4] though this piece of folk etymology is now discredited.

At the end of the 14th century Edward III acquired Blemond's manor, and passed it on to the Carthusian monks of the London Charterhouse, who kept the area mostly rural.

In the 16th century, with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII took the land back into the possession of the Crown, and granted it to Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton.

In the early 1660s, the Earl of Southampton constructed what eventually became Bloomsbury Square. The area was laid out mainly in the 18th century, largely by landowners such as Wriothesley Russell, 3rd Duke of Bedford, who built Bloomsbury Market, which opened in 1730. The major development of the squares that we see today started in about 1800 when Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford removed Bedford House and developed the land to the north with Russell Square as its centrepiece.

Governance[link]

William de Blemond in the 13th century, a Norman, was the first landowner. Edward III acquired Blemond's manor, and passed it on to the Carthusian monks who governed it until Henry VIII granted it to the Earl of Southampton. The Russell family became landowners in the 18th century.

The area lay within the parishes of St Giles in the Fields and St George's, Bloomsbury,^[5] which were absorbed into the St Giles District as part of the Metropolis Management Act 1855.^[6] It is now controlled by the London Borough of Camden, and is in the Parliamentary constituency of Holborn and St Pancras.

Geography[link]

A map of the Bloomsbury district – click to expand

Bloomsbury has no official boundaries, but can be roughly defined as the square bounded by Tottenham Court Road to the west, Euston Road to the north, Gray's Inn Road to the east, and either High Holborn or the thoroughfare formed by New Oxford Street, Bloomsbury Way and Theobalds Road to the south.^[2] Bloomsbury merges gradually with Holborn in the south, and with St Pancras in the north-east and Clerkenwell in the south-east.

The area is bisected north to south by the main Southampton Row-Woburn Place thoroughfare, which contains several large tourist hotels and links Tavistock Square and Russell Square – the central points of Bloomsbury. The road runs from Euston and Somers Town in the north to Holborn in the south.

The area east of Southmpton Row/Woburn Place includes the Brunswick shopping centre and cinema,^[7] and Coram's Fields recreation area. The area to the north of Coram's Fields consists mainly of blocks of flats, built both as private and social housing, and is generally considered part of St Pancras^[8] or King's Cross^[9] rather than north-eastern Bloomsbury. The area to the south is generally less residential, containing several hospitals, including Great Ormond Street, and gradually becomes more commercial in character as it approaches the boundary with Holborn at Theobalds Road.

The area west of Southampton Row/Woburn Place is notable for its concentration of academic establishments, museums, and formal squares. It is this side that contains the British Museum and the central departments and colleges of the University of London, including Birkbeck College, University College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of London's School of Advanced Study. The main north-south road in west Bloomsbury is Gower Street which is a one-way road running south from Euston Road towards Shaftesbury Avenue in Covent Garden, becoming Bloomsbury Street when it passes to the west of the British Museum.

Location in context

Neighbouring areas of London.

	Regent's Park	Somers Town	St Pancras
	Fitzrovia		Clerkenwell
		Bloomsbury    East
	Soho	Covent Garden	Holborn

Parks and squares[link]

Bloomsbury contains some of London's finest parks and buildings, and is particularly known for its formal squares. These include:

Tavistock Square

• Russell Square, a large and orderly square; its gardens were originally designed by Humphry Repton. The square is adjacent to the Russell Hotel and a short distance from Russell Square Tube Station.
• Bedford Square, built between 1775 and 1783, is still surrounded by Georgian town houses.
• Bloomsbury Square, a small circular garden, but called a square, is also surrounded by Georgian buildings including the former Victorian House and state home of the Lord Chancellor.
• Queen Square, home to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.
• Gordon Square, surrounded by the history and archaeology departments of University College London, as well as the former home of John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist. This is where the Bloomsbury Group lived and met.
• Woburn Square and Torrington Square, home to other parts of University College London.
• Tavistock Square, home to the British Medical Association; its eastern edge was the site of one of the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
• Mecklenburgh Square, east of Coram's Fields, one the few squares which remains locked for the use of local residents.
• Coram's Fields, a large recreational space on the eastern edge of the area, formerly home to the Foundling Hospital. It is only open to children and those adults accompanying children.
• Brunswick Square, now occupied by the School of Pharmacy and the Foundling Museum.

Culture[link]

Some members of the Bloomsbury Group: Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

Historically, Bloomsbury is associated with the arts, education and medicine. The area gives its name to the Bloomsbury Group (also Bloomsbury Set) of artists, the most famous of whom was Virginia Woolf, who met in private homes in the area in the early 1900s,^[10] and to the lesser known Bloomsbury Gang of Whigs formed in 1765 by John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford. The publisher Faber & Faber used to be located in Queen Square, though at the time T. S. Eliot was editor the offices were in Tavistock Square. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais's parents' house on Gower Street in 1848.

Educational institutions

Bloomsbury is home to Senate House and the main library of the University of London, The Bloomsbury Colleges (Birkbeck, University of London, Institute of Education, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, School of Pharmacy, School of Oriental and African Studies and the Royal Veterinary College) and University College London (with the Slade School of Fine Art), the College of Law, London Contemporary Dance School, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and Goodenough College. Other colleges in the area include the University of London's School of Advanced Study, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in Bedford Square, and several London campuses of American colleges including the University of California London Centre, University of Delaware London Centre, Florida State University London Study Centre, Syracuse University London Facility, NYU London, and the London campus of the Hult International Business School.

Museums

The British Museum, which first opened to the public in 1759 in Montagu House, is at the heart of Bloomsbury. At the centre of the museum the space around the former British Library Reading Room, which was filled with the concrete storage bunkers of the British Library, is today the Great Court, an indoor square with a glass roof designed by British architect Norman Foster. It houses displays, a cinema, a shop, a cafe and a restaurant. Since 1998, the British Library has been located in a purpose-built building just outside the northern edge of Bloomsbury, on Euston Road.

Also in Bloomsbury is the Foundling Museum close to Brunswick Square, which tells the story of the Foundling Hospital opened by Thomas Coram, for unwanted children (foundlings) in Georgian London. The hospital, now demolished but for the Georgian colonnade, is today a playground and outdoor sports field for children, called Coram’s Fields; adults are only admitted with a child. It is also home to a small number of sheep. The nearby Lamb’s Conduit Street is a pleasant thoroughfare with independent shops, cafes and restaurants.

The Dickens Museum is in Doughty Street. The Petrie Museum and the Grant Museum of Zoology are at University College London in Gower Street.

Hospitals[link]

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine (formerly the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital) are both located on Great Ormond Street, off Queen Square, which itself is home to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (formerly the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases). Bloomsbury is also the location of University College Hospital, which re-opened in 2005 in new buildings on Euston Road, built under the government’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI). The Eastman Dental Hospital is located on Gray’s Inn Road close to the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital administered by the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust.

Business[link]

In February 2010, businesses were balloted on an expansion of the InHolborn Business Improvement District (BID) to include the southern part of Bloomsbury. Only businesses with a rateable value in excess of £60,000 could vote as only these would pay the BID levy. This expansion of the BID into Bloomsbury was supported by Camden Council.^[11] The proposal was passed and part of Bloomsbury was brought within the InHolborn BID.^[12]

Controversy was raised during this BID renewal when InHolborn proposed collecting Bloomsbury and the historic areas of St. Giles and Holborn under the name of "Midtown".^[13][14][15]

Whilst businesses were informed about the BID proposals there was little consultation with residents or voluntary organisations. InHolborn produced a comprehensive business plan aimed at large businesses.^[16]

Churches[link]

Church of Christ the King

Bloomsbury contains three notable churches. St. George's Church, located on Bloomsbury Way in the south of the area, was built by Nicholas Hawksmoor between 1716 and 1731. It has a deep Roman porch with six huge Corinthian columns, and is notable for its steeple based on the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus and for the statue of King George I on the top.

The second is the Early English Neo-Gothic Church of Christ the King on Gordon Square. It was designed for the Irvingites^[17] by Raphael Brandon in 1853. Since June 10, 1954 it has been a Grade I listed building.

The third is St Pancras New Church on the northern boundary, near Euston station. This church was completed in 1822, and is notable for the caryatids on north and south which are based on the "porch of the maidens" from the Temple of the Erechtheum.

The church of St George the Martyr in Queen Square was built 1703–1706,^[18] and was where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath married on Bloomsday in 1956.^[19]

Transport[link]

The area surrounding Bloomsbury is served by several London Underground stations, although only two of these (Russell Square and Euston Square) have entrances in Bloomsbury itself. The other stations, located on the fringes of Bloomsbury, are Euston, Goodge Street, Warren Street, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Chancery Lane and King's Cross St. Pancras.

The mainline rail stations Euston, King's Cross and St. Pancras are all located just north of Bloomsbury. Since Wednesday, November 14, 2007 (2007-11-14), Eurostar services have relocated to St Pancras, promising shorter journey times to Paris and Brussels and better connections to the rest of the UK.

Bloomsbury is also home to the disused British Museum tube station.

It is well served by buses, with over 12 different routes running south down Gower Street, and both north and south through Russell Square.^[20] Route 7 goes along Great Russell Street, past the British Museum, and on to Russell Square.

One of the 13 surviving taxi driver's shelters in London is in Russell Square^[21] where drivers can stop for a meal and a drink.

Notable residents[link]

• Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), painter, sister of Virginia Woolf lived at 46 Gordon Square.
• William Copeland Borlase M.P. (1848–1899)
• Randolph Caldecott (1846–1886), illustrator, lived at No 46 Great Russell Street.
• Charles Darwin (1809–1882) lived at 12 Upper Gower St in 1839.^[22]
• George Dance (1741–1825), architect lived at 91 Gower Street.
• Charles Dickens (1812–1870), novelist lived at 14 Great Russell Street, Tavistock Square and 48 Doughty Street.
• Philip Hardwick (1792–1870) and Philip Charles Hardwick (1822–1892), father and son architects lived at 60 Russell Square for over ten years.
• John Maynard Keynes, lived for thirty years in Gordon Square.
• Bob Marley lived in 34 Ridgmount Gardens for 6 months in 1972.
• Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) lived at 24 Great James Street from 1921–1929.
• John Shaw Senior (1776–1832) and John Shaw Junior (1803–1870), father and son architects lived in Gower Street.
• Catherine Tate (b.1968), actress and comedienne, was brought up in the Brunswick Centre, close to Russell Square.
• Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), author, essayist, and diarist resided at 46 Gordon Square.
• Emanuel Litvinoff (1915-2011) author, poet, playwright and human rights campaigner lived for 46 years in Mecklenburgh Square.
• Thomas Henry Wyatt (1807–1880), architect lived at 77 Great Russell Street.
• William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), poet, dramatist and prose writer lived at Woburn Walk.
• Ricky Gervais, comedian, until recently lived in Southampton Row and Store Street.
• George du Maurier (1834–1896), artist and writer, lived at 91 (formerly 46) Great Russell Street
• JM Barrie (1860–1937), playwright and novelist, lived in Guilford Street and Grenville Street when he first moved to London; it's where the Darling family in Peter Pan live.
• John Wyndham lived at the Penn Club in Tavistock Square (1924-38) and then (except for 1943-46 Army service) at the Club's new address at 21-22 Bedford Place, off Russell Square (its present address), until his marriage to fellow Penn Club adjoining room resident Grace Isabel Wilson in 1963.

References[link]

[edit] External links

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Leonard Woolf
Bust of Leonard Woolf at Monk's House
Born	Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880-11-25)25 November 1880 Kensington, London, England, United Kingdom
Died	14 August 1969(1969-08-14) (aged 88) Rodmell, East Sussex, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant
Spouse	Virginia Woolf (m. 1912–1941; her death)

Leonard Sidney Woolf (25 November 1880 – 14 August 1969) was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.

Early life[link]

Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney, a Jewish barrister and Queen's Counsel and Marie (née de Jongh). After his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St Paul's School in London, and in 1899 won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge,^[1] where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, G.E. Moore and E. M. Forster, as well as Bertrand Russell. Thoby Stephen, Virginia Stephen's brother, was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his B.A. degree in 1902 but stayed for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination.

In October 1904 Woolf moved to Sri Lanka to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, in Jaffna and later Kandy,^[2] and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year's leave. Instead, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Adeline Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf).

As a couple, Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury group, which also included various other 'Apostles'.

Writing[link]

After marriage, Woolf turned his hand to writing, publishing in 1913 his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, based on his years in Sri Lanka. A series of books was to follow at roughly two-year intervals. On the introduction of conscription in 1916 during World War I, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds, and turned to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government, proposing an international agency to enforce world peace.

As his wife began to suffer greatly from mental illness, Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her (Leonard Woolf himself suffered with depression/mental illnesses). In 1917 the Woolfs bought a small, hand-operated printing press; with it they founded the famous Hogarth Press. Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years, the Press had become a full-scale publishing house with a highly distinguished authors list. Woolf continued as its director until his death. His wife's mental problems continued, however, until her suicide in 1941. After Virginia Woolf's suicide, Leonard fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons.

In 1919 Woolf became editor of the International Review, and edited the international section of the Contemporary Review (1920–1922). He was literary editor of Nation Athenaeum (1923–1930), joint editor of The Political Quarterly (1931–1959), and for a time served as secretary of the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and colonial questions.

In 1960, Woolf revisited Sri Lanka and was surprised at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered, according to E.F.C. Ludowyk in his introduction to The Village in the Jungle.^[3]. Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, but declined the CH in the Queen's Birthday honours list in 1966.[1]

Family[link]

Among his nine siblings Bella was also an author.

Death[link]

Woolf died on 14 August 1969 and was cremated with his ashes being buried beneath an elm tree in his beloved garden at Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex. (The tree subsequently blew down; Woolf's remains since have been marked by a bronze bust). His papers are held by the University of Sussex at Falmer.

Works[link]

• The Village in the Jungle – 1913
• The Wise Virgins – 1914 (Republished in 2003 by Persephone Books)
• International Government – 1916
• The Future of Constantinople – 1917
• Cooperation and the Future of Industry – 1918
• Economic Imperialism – 1920
• Empire and Commerce in Africa – 1920
• Socialism and Co-operation – 1921
• Fear and Politics – 1925
• Essays on Literature, History, Politics – 1927
• Hunting the Highbrow – 1927
• Imperialism and Civilization – 1928
• After the Deluge (Principia Politica), 3 vols. – 1931, 1939, 1953
• Quack! Quack! – 1935
• Barbarians At The Gate – 1939
• The War for Peace – 1940
• A Calendar of Consolation – selected by Leonard Woolf, 1967

Autobiographical works[link]

• Woolf, Leonard (1960). Sowing: an autobiography of the years, 1880–1904. London: Hogarth Press. OCLC 185524636.  Published in America as Woolf, Leonard (1960). Sowing: an autobiography of the years, 1880–1904 (1st American ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace. ISBN 978-0-15-683945-7. OCLC 1346957.  Also OCLC 1339821.
• Woolf, Leonard (1961). Growing: an autobiography of the years 1904–1911 (1st American ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. OCLC 494500.  Also OCLC 21246847 (1977), OCLC 67527334 (1967).
• Woolf, Leonard (1963). Diaries in Ceylon, 1908–1911, and Stories from the East: records of a colonial administrator. London: Hogarth Press. OCLC 30240642.  Also OCLC 4194108
• Woolf, Leonard (1964). Beginning again: an autobiography of the years 1911–1918. London: Hogarth Press. ISBN 978-0-7012-0250-7. OCLC 186031278.  Published in America as Woolf, Leonard (1964). Beginning again: an autobiography of the years 1911–1918 (1st American ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. OCLC 264298. 
• Woolf, Leonard (1967). Downhill all the way: an autobiography of the years 1919–1939 (1st American ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. OCLC 1065888. 
• Woolf, Leonard (1969). The journey not the arrival matters: an autobiography of the years 1939–1969. London: Hogarth Press. ISBN 978-0-7012-0326-9. OCLC 186031338.  Published in America as Woolf, Leonard (1969). The journey not the arrival matters: an autobiography of the years 1939–1969 (1st American ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. OCLC 58615. 

Biographical works on Woolf[link]

• Glendinning, Victoria (2006). Leonard Woolf: a biography. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-4653-8. OCLC 71779088. 
  • Edited excerpt of book available at Glendinning, Victoria (26 August 2006). "A fresh spirit". The Guardian. UK. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview27. Retrieved 9 December 2008. 
  • Review of book with details about Leonard Woolf available at Gross, John (December 2006). "Mr. Virginia Woolf". Commentary. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/-mr--virginia-woolf--10801. Retrieved 9 December 2008.