The Bloomsbury Group in Sussex: Woolf, Bell & Charleston

Who were the Bloomsbury Group?

The Bloomsbury Group was an informal circle of writers, artists and thinkers who began meeting in the Bloomsbury district of London in the early 1900s. At its heart were the sisters Virginia (later Woolf) and Vanessa (later Bell), joined by figures who would become household names: the novelist E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry, and the painter Duncan Grant. Strikingly modern in their attitudes to art, gender, politics and love — it was later said they “lived in squares and loved in triangles” — they reshaped English culture. And from 1916, more and more of that life happened not in London, but in the countryside just outside Eastbourne.

Charleston Farmhouse: the painted house

The story begins with the First World War. Duncan Grant and his partner David Garnett were conscientious objectors, and to avoid prison needed farm work of “national importance”. It was Virginia Woolf who spotted the answer on her walks along the Downs: a remote farmhouse called Charleston, near Firle. In October 1916 Grant moved there with Garnett and with Vanessa Bell and her two young sons, and over the following half-century Charleston became the country meeting-place of the whole Bloomsbury circle. Bell and Grant treated the house itself as a canvas — painting walls, doors, fireplaces and furniture in their distinctive style, inspired by Italian fresco and Post-Impressionism — and laid out a glorious walled garden of intense colour, mosaics and statuary. Clive Bell and Maynard Keynes lived there for long spells; the Woolfs, Forster, Strachey and Fry were regular guests. Today Charleston is a celebrated house-museum, its interiors preserved exactly as the artists left them.

Did you know? The tangled Bloomsbury relationships ran deep at Charleston: Vanessa Bell had a daughter, Angelica, with Duncan Grant, though the girl grew up believing Clive Bell was her father — and Angelica later married David Garnett, Grant’s own former lover.

Monk’s House and Virginia Woolf

Three miles across the Downs, in the village of Rodmell near Lewes, stood the other pole of Bloomsbury’s Sussex world. Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, the writer and publisher, bought Monk’s House — a modest weather-boarded cottage — in 1919. In a simple writing lodge in its orchard garden, with views to the Downs, Virginia wrote most of her major novels; here she had, quite literally, a room of her own. The Woolfs moved to Monk’s House permanently in 1940 after their London home was bombed, and both spent their final years there. Virginia would often walk the six miles over the hills to Charleston to see her sister — a path through the landscape that fed directly into her writing. Now owned by the National Trust, Monk’s House keeps the cottage and that famous writing lodge much as they were.

The painted church at Berwick

The group’s most public artwork sits in a tiny country church. During the Second World War, the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, commissioned Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Vanessa’s son Quentin Bell to decorate the medieval parish church of St Michael and All Angels at Berwick with murals — an experiment in reuniting the Church with modern art. Working from nearby Charleston, the artists filled the little church with luminous painted scenes, some using local Sussex people and the surrounding Downs as their models. It’s an exceptionally rare example of a rural English church decorated in this way, reviving a tradition of wall-painting that had largely vanished at the Reformation — and it remains quietly astonishing to step into.

Visiting Bloomsbury country

The three great Bloomsbury sites lie close together in the countryside north-west of Eastbourne, and make a wonderful day (or two) out. Charleston, near Firle, and Monk’s House, at Rodmell, are both seasonal and popular — booking is recommended, and opening days vary — while Berwick Church is generally open daily and free to enter. Between them lies some of the loveliest walking in Sussex, the same hills the group crossed on foot and bicycle and painted endlessly; the Downs artist Eric Ravilious was working the same landscape in the same years. Handsome Lewes makes a natural base, and pretty Alfriston is close by. Do check opening times and admission before you travel.

Good to know: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett are all buried at Firle churchyard, close to Charleston — the village where so much of this remarkable story unfolded.

The Bloomsbury Group in Sussex: FAQs