Circling the Squares of Virginia Woolf ‘s London

LONDON —  The ghost of Virginia Woolf hangs lightly over Bloomsbury. A blue plaque on the wall of a building in which she once lived is all that remains to tell of her life here.

There are no homes to visit, no museums and no shrines either to her or to other members of the literary “group” that once stirred and shocked English sensibilities.

What remains are the squares of Bloomsbury, each a green retreat from the pressures of the city. Despite the ravages of World War II and development, these squares are very much as they were in Woolf’s day.

Some are oblong, others round. A few could even be called square. Surrounded by iron fences, for the most part they are tree-lined parks. Gateways lead to numerous benches where one can rest and contemplate the daffodils of spring, the blooms of summer or the falling leaves of autumn.

Around these squares the Bloomsbury Group clustered in the 1920s when, as one writer said: “A handful of young, generally lovely, extraordinarily talented Londoners decided to change the world and . . . in stunning measure succeeded.”

Bloomsbury is bounded by Euston Road on the north, Southampton Row to the east, New Oxford Street on the south and Tottenham Court Road to the west.

Starting Underground

We found that a good place to start a walking tour of the area was from the Russell Square underground station, easily reached from any part of London.

Before setting off we took our bearings from a London street map while sipping a cup of coffee at a cafeteria in a corner of the square. With outside tables, the cafeteria offers light snacks and is open every day from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Running north from Russell Square is Woburn Place, a heavily traveled way filled with buses, taxis and traffic-dodging pedestrians.

After a few minutes we reached Tavistock Square. Woolf and her writer-editor husband, Leonard, came to this square in March, 1924, to live at No. 2 Tavistock Square, in the basement of which Hogarth Press had its beginnings.

Destroyed during World War II, the site is now occupied by the Tavistock Hotel.

Circling the square, we passed the Jewish Museum. Across the road is the blank-faced front of the British Medical Assn. building with its plaque announcing that Charles Dickens once lived there. While staying here between 1851 and 1860 Dickens wrote “Bleak House,” “Little Dorrit” and “Hard Times.”

We moved on, but not before a guidebook made us aware that on that same site two brothers fought a duel over a woman who watched both of them die. Legend says that their 40 paces remained imprinted in the ground and no grass has ever grown on them.

Gordon Square was next on our itinerary. The first to discover the square were Woolf (then Virginia Stephen), her sister Vanessa and her brothers, Thoby and Adrian, all of whom moved into No. 46 in 1904 after the death of their father, Sir Leslie Stephen.

At Cambridge, Thoby befriended Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, who was to revolutionize the art of biography, and Clive Bell, a rising art critic.

They all ended up in Gordon Square. Others who became part of the group were economist Maynard Keynes, painter and critic Roger Fry and artist Duncan Grant.

“Gordon Square is not the most romantic of the Bloomsbury squares,” Virginia Woolf wrote later. “It is prosperous, middle class and thoroughly mid-Victorian. But I can assure you that in October, 1904, it was the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most romantic place in the world.”

Today Nos. 46, 50 and 51 are owned by London University, which uses No. 50 as its Careers Advisory Service central office. We walked into the office and asked if it were possible to view the building.

“I’m afraid that there is nothing to see,” the office manager said. “There once were some murals here by Duncan Grant, but they disappeared during a renovation.”

Photographic Reproductions

We walked to Woolf’s former home at No. 46, where we learned that although no tours of the building are given, there was a standing exhibition at London University’s Birkbeck College on Malet Street.

Being close by, we decided to pay it a visit, but were disappointed.

Titled “Bloomsbury Portraits” and occupying the walls of one corridor, the exhibit is little more than uninspiring reproductions and photographs, relieved only by two or three original pencil drawings of Bloomsbury figures by Grant.

Leaving--and casting a glance at the gadget-festooned post office tower that punctuates the skyline in this area--we continued until we reached Bedford Square, the most elegant of the squares and one that still retains much of its 18th-Century charm.

At No. 44 the fashionable London hostess, Lady Ottoline Morrell, held soirees for the Bloomsbury Group.

Thinking of lunch, we made our way back toward the Russell Square tube station, walking south on Bloomsbury Street and then turning left onto Great Russell Street with its booksellers and print shops.

Great Russell Street, which passes in front of the main entrance to the British Museum, also has its selection of pubs, including the Museum Tavern in which Karl Marx had a pint or two when not studying in the museum’s reading room.

Just past the museum on the right is tiny Bloomsbury Square, which gives the district its name and which is of interest in its own right.

When built in 1661 it represented a new concept in town planning. The Fourth Earl of Southampton put together a complex of buildings around a central park with a mansion for himself on one side and houses for the wealthy on the other three, all supported by a network of service roads and a nearby market.

The London square was born. Not one of the original buildings remains, but one of the present structures was home to Benjamin Disraeli, Victorian British prime minister.

A little distance from Bloomsbury Square we reached the main thoroughfare of Southampton Row, which runs south toward Covent Garden and north back to Russell Square. While walking north on the right side of the road past an array of pizza places we came across Queen Square.

We wandered down a narrow passageway called Cosmo Place, passing first one pub, the Swan, and then another, the Queen’s Larder.

Outside, notices told us that the latter watering hole was so named because in the days when George III (he of unfortunate memory during the American Revolution) was being treated for a mental disorder nearby, his wife, Queen Charlotte, rented a cellar on the premises to keep a supply of delicacies for her spouse.

Opposite the pub stands St. George the Martyr Church, built in 1706 and sometimes called the Sweeps’ Church because on Christmas Days of old a free dinner was given to 100 chimney-sweep boys from the district.

At the corner of the church stands an outdoor flower stall (“bouquets made to order”) that seemed in an unusual location until we became aware of the nature of the neighborhood.

Surrounding this tiny square are a remarkable collection of hospitals and healing establishments--the Italian Hospital, the Royal Institute of Public Health, National Hospital, Institute of Neurology, Royal London Homeopathic Hospital; nearby, the Hospital for Sick Children--such an accumulation that Robert Louis Stevenson described the area as being dedicated to the “alleviation of all hard destinies.”

Walking back up the passageway we stopped in at the Swan, all dark wood and pictures of swans abounding. We settled back in one of the Victorian booths and ordered a pub lunch. Then we raised a silent glass to Virginia Woolf and all the squares of Bloomsbury.

For more information on travel in London, write to the British Tourist Authority, 350 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles 90071, or call (213) 628-3525.