Literary London

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Gordon Square

Where the Bloomsbury Group began: No. 46, the Stephen siblings' house of 1904, later Keynes's for thirty years, with Strachey at 51 and the group's plaque on 50.

Bloomsbury GroupWriters' housesFree

Photo by Paul Downey from Berkhamsted, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When Leslie Stephen died in 1904 his four children left Kensington for a tall house on the east side of this square, which respectable people thought a comedown, and Thoby Stephen's Cambridge friends began coming on Thursday evenings: Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner. Vanessa married Bell and kept the house; Virginia became Woolf; Keynes took over No. 46 in 1916 and lived there with the ballerina Lydia Lopokova until his death in 1946, writing the General Theory upstairs. The Stracheys were at 51, Clive Bell and then Adrian Stephen at 50, which carries the group's plaque, and the garden in the middle was the one they all looked out on.

Where
Gordon Square, WC1H 0AG
Nearest station
Euston Square · 5 min walk

The garden is locked at dusk; the plaques are on the houses along the east side, outside it.

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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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