Gordon Square: The Salon of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
Why is it significant?
Step into the dappled shade of Gordon Square and approach the blue commemorative plaque at number forty-six.
Key Facts
| Place | Gordon Square: The Salon of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group |
|---|---|
| Address | Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.52440, -0.13050 |
| Part of Walk | Literary Bloomsbury & The British Museum: Rosetta Stone to Virginia Woolf |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the dappled shade of Gordon Square and approach the blue commemorative plaque at number forty-six. Stand on the pavement where in nineteen oh four, following the death of their father, a young Virginia Stephen—later to become Virginia Woolf—moved with her sister Vanessa Bell and brothers to establish a daring, bohemian household that rejected stuffy Victorian moral codes.
Every Thursday evening in this drawing room, brilliant Cambridge graduates gathered for whiskey, buns, and uninhibited intellectual conversation. Economist John Maynard Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M. Forster, and art critic Roger Fry created here the famous Bloomsbury Group, which transformed twentieth-century literature, aesthetics, and economic policy.
Satirists famously quipped that the Bloomsbury Group loved in triangles and lived in squares, yet their radical commitment to pacifism, feminist liberation, and modernist experimentation revolutionized Western culture.
Turn south toward Woburn Square and Bloomsbury Way to admire Nicholas Hawksmoor's extraordinary pyramid spire.