The Setting

With its leafy squares and quaint streets, Bloomsbury was a genteel suburb of London when it was laid out and built in the 18th and 19th centuries. Once the area fell out of favour, grand homes were converted into studios and boarding houses with affordable rents. With its educational establishments and the British Museum Reading Room nearby, by the end of the 19th century, Bloomsbury was a magnet for impoverished writers, independent women, scholars, thinkers, and activists from across the world.

Radical social and political movements burgeoned here, resulting in the Working Men's College, various socialist organisations, the campaign for women's suffrage, and a host of other lasting achievements. Bloomsbury’s writers and artists have long been full of the same pioneering spirit, with many of the most eminent proponents of what we now call Modernism – and some its various subsets, like Imagism and Vorticism – developing their early twentieth-century work here.

The Characters

There's Yeats and Tagore, with their desire for independence in their native countries; the Americans, Eliot, Pound and Doolittle, reaching for a new poetic sensibility; the Bloomsbury Group, counting the likes of John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster as its members, with their friends and foes; mavericks like Wyndham Lewis; Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, whose novels exhibited the groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness writing style; and the vibrant individual voices of D.H. Lawrence, Charlotte Mew, and others.

It's a rich palette of characters, and guests will get to see how their lives intertwined, what they had to say about each other, and what they got up to when they thought no one was looking. They will find an area buzzing with invention and ideas, and writers testing new ways of living, working, and getting noticed.

Make your booking

This tour can only be reserved directly via The Montague on the Gardens and is subject to availability. The tour is priced at £264 for two to 12 guests. Call us at +44 (0) 207 612 8425 or contact us below to enquire.