Charleston Farmhouse

In which I visit the house that was the heart and soul of the Bloomsbury Group.

It will be an odd life, but…it ought to be a good one for painting…

-Vanessa Bell

The walk from the bus stop to the farm is long and dusty. Cows linger along the fence that lines the way, looking hot and tired and completely fed up with the swarms of flies that buzz and hover under the mid-day sun. Buckets of flowers sit in front of a stone wall nearby, and old garden tools lay next to an abandoned antique lawn mower. Behind the short wall is a garden, and just past the garden a vine-covered house with a red tile roof comes into view.

At first glance, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is just another ordinary - if charming - English farmhouse, nestled in the heart of the South Downs of Sussex. And yet it is far from ordinary. The Guardian newspaper recently called this particular dwelling “the most fashionable house in England”, and people come from far and wide to visit every year. Throngs of them: they come to walk in the footsteps of a select group of people, whose names conjure up images of intellectualism, artistry and free living.

This is Charleston Farmhouse - the home of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and for a good part of the early twentieth century the heart of the modernist circle known as the Bloomsbury Group.