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.
