Literary London

Where the books were written, set, sold, printed and buried: from the Globe to the graves, the bookshops to the presses.

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22 Hyde Park Gate

The tall dark house where Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were born and grew up, and the Victorian childhood they spent the rest of their lives escaping.

Bloomsbury GroupWriters' housesFree

Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, filled the house with two families' children, and Vanessa was born here in 1879 and Virginia in 1882; their mother died in 1895, their half-sister Stella two years later and their father in 1904, and the mourning, the Duckworth half-brothers and the closed curtains are the background to everything Woolf wrote about her early life. To the Lighthouse is this household moved to Cornwall. The siblings sold up within months of Stephen's death and moved to Gordon Square, which is where the modern part of the story begins.

Where
22 Hyde Park Gate, SW7 5DH
Nearest station
Gloucester Road · 7 min walk

A private house in a cul-de-sac; the plaque is on the front. Churchill died at No. 28, a few doors up.

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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