Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
standing. It was here that Woolf wrote her most famous novels -
To the Lighthouse
,
Mrs
Dalloway
,
Orlando
and
he Waves
- in a little studio decorated by her sister Vanessa and
Duncan Grant. At the centre of the square's gardens is a statue of
Mahatma Gandhi
,
who studied law at UCL, and whose presence has transformed the square into
something of a garden for peace, with trees and benches dedicated to the cause. That
peace, however, was shattered on the morning of
July 7, 2005
,
when a suicide bomber
blew himself up on bus #30 as it approached the northeast corner of the square, killing
thirteen people. The blast occurred shortly after three tube trains had been hit by
bombs (see p.461) - a plaque on the BMA building commemorates the victims.
Woburn Walk
A short distance up Upper Woburn Place from Tavistock Square, not far from where
the July 7, 2005, blast occurred, is the beautifully preserved Georgian terrace of
Woburn
Walk
, designed in 1822 by Cubitt as London's first purpose-built pedestrianized
shopping street.
W.B. Yeats
moved into no. 5 in 1895, shortly afterwards losing his
virginity at the age of 31 to fellow writer Olivia Shakespear. He and Olivia went to
Heal's to order a bed before consummating the relationship, and Yeats found the
experience (of ordering the bed) deeply traumatic, as “every inch added to the expense”.
The same address was later occupied by the unrequited love of Yeats' life, Irish
nationalist Maud Gonne, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Ireland, with, in
Yeats' own words, “the carriage and features of a goddess”.
7
Coram's Fields
Guilford Street • Daily 9am-7pm or dusk • Free •
T
020 7837 6138,
W
coramsfields.org •
!
Russell Square
Halfway along Guilford Street stands the old entrance to the
Foundling Hospital
,
established in 1739 by
Thomas Coram
, a retired sea captain. Coram campaigned for
nearly twenty years to obtain a royal charter for the hospital, having been shocked by
THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
The
Bloomsbury Group
were essentially a bevy of upper-middle-class friends who lived in and
around Bloomsbury, at that time “an antiquated, ex-fashionable area”, in the words of Henry James.
The group revolved around siblings Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian Stephen, who moved into
46 Gordon Square in 1904. Thoby's Thursday-evening gatherings and Vanessa's Friday Club for
painters attracted a whole host of Cambridge-educated types who subscribed to Oscar Wilde's
theory that “aesthetics are higher than ethics”. Their diet of “human intercourse and the enjoyment
of beautiful things” was hardly revolutionary, but their behaviour, particularly that of the two sisters
- unmarried, unchaperoned, intellectual and artistic - succeeded in shocking London society,
especially through their louche sexual practices (most of the group swung both ways).
All this, though interesting, would be forgotten were it not for their individual work. In 1922,
Virginia declared, without too much exaggeration, “Everyone in Gordon Square has become
famous”: Lytton Strachey was the first to make his name with a series of unprecedentedly frank
biographies; Vanessa, now married to the art critic Clive Bell, became involved in Roger Fry's
prolific design firm,
Omega Workshops
; and the economist John Maynard Keynes became
an adviser to the Treasury. (He later went on to become the leading economic theorist of his
day.) The group's most celebrated figure, Virginia, now married to Leonard Woolf, had become
an established novelist; she and Leonard had also founded the
Hogarth Press
, which
published T.S. Eliot's
Waste Land
in 1924.
Eliot was just one of a number of writers, such as Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and
E.M. Forster, who were drawn to the Bloomsbury set, but others, notably D.H. Lawrence, were
repelled by the clan's narcissism and narrow-mindedness. Whatever their limitations, the
Bloomsbury Group were certainly Britain's most influential intellectual coterie of the interwar
years, and their appeal shows little sign of waning.
