A private collection of Bloomsbury paintings is to be sold on behalf of the Charleston Trust at Gorringes Auctioneers on 8th September. Featuring works by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Angelica Garnett, the pictures have been donated to the Trust to raise funds for the ongoing conservation and running of the house museum as it embarks on a major development project.

Charleston was the country home of the renowned Bloomsbury group of writers and artists and its forthcoming development, the Charleston Barn Project, will deliver much-needed facilities to the thousands of visitors that flock there each year.

Press Enquiries: Francesca Collin on 01273 473503 or 0774 8654134

http://www.gorringes.co.uk/content/show_news.asp?id=73

Seventy years ago, on Friday 28 March 1941, Virginia Woolf famously weighted her pockets with stones, and waded into the fast-running River Ouse near her home in the village of Rodmell in Sussex. Her body was recovered three weeks later, but in the interim none of her intimates, neither her husband Leonard Woolf nor her sister Vanessa Bell, could doubt that she had drowned herself. For suicide had long been a possibility during crises in Virginia Woolf’s life. After her father’s death in 1904, she had thrown herself out of a window. Then in 1913, following a consultation with Sir Henry Head, a mind doctor who had recently sent Henry James ‘down into hell’, Virginia Woolf had swallowed an overdose of veronal.

‘So we discuss suicide’, she records in her diary at the age of fifty, in March 1932, when the artist Carrington, who loved Lytton Strachey, shot herself after his death. Mary Hutchinson (Clive Bell’s mistress) thought this a great romantic gesture. ‘Nonsense,’ Leonard said, impatient of ‘mausoleum’ talk. Virginia took a different line, ruminating on the mutability of memory and reputation: ‘the ghosts … change so oddly in my mind; like people who live, & are changed by what one hears of them.’ Carrington’s suicide changed her memory of Lytton: ‘he absorbed her[,] made her kill herself.’ This opened him to ‘dislike’.

In a similar way, Virginia Woolf’s suicide clouded her reputation as a leading novelist. It suggested to many that she was unstable, reinforced by memories of her as an uninhibited performer at Bloomsbury parties. These performances were linked with what she and her family called ‘madness’ for want of a better word.* I remember a senior lecturer called Philip Segal at the University of Cape Town, saying to a class in 1963: ‘Shall we do The Waves? No. It makes me seasick.’ The class guffawed on cue. In these decades after her death, when Virginia Woolf’s reputation was at its lowest ebb, she was cast as the invalid lady of Bloomsbury.

As we know, the complete editions of her diaries and letters revealed a different, more political, more feminist Virginia Woolf evident, say, in her correspondence with Dame Ethel Smyth. The ex-suffragist and composer (she had composed ‘The March of the Women’ and conducted it with a toothbrush from her window in Holloway Prison) called out the fighter and reformer who came strongly to the fore in the 1930s. And yet the popular notion of her as a hothouse plant cut off from the normal world persists to this day, most visibly in Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours, closely based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham. Fictive scenes include a Virginia Woolf who torments poor Leonard, bickers with him on Richmond station and lies eye to eye with a small dead bird – all belittling images that remove a woman from what she was.

Both book and film of The Hours offset a moody, suicide-bent Virginia Woolf against the supposed normality of a sister who shops. This humdrum character is not the artist Vanessa Bell was in actual life, but an obedient consumer loaded with parcels.

A beautiful Hollywood star, Nicole Kidman, with an elongated false nose (playing down the novelist’s more distinguished beauty), admitted in an interview that she had not read Virginia Woolf. The question did not appear to embarrass Kidman, surrounded at the time with praise for her performance as a droopy, dowdy and rather cross writer tugging on her cigarette. Does it matter that this writer’s diary denies gloom, declaring that she enjoys more happiness than nine out of ten people? The real woman was robust enough to tramp for miles each day, as she thought out her next day’s work – and her energy for work was prodigious. Doris Lessing stood almost alone in the sureness of her protest against the image Kidman perpetuates: the writer, Lessing said, is played by a star ‘whose permanent frown shows how many deep and difficult thoughts she is having. Good God! The woman enjoyed life when she wasn’t ill; liked parties, her friends, picnics, excursions, jaunts. How we do love female victims; oh, how we do love them.’

Virginia Woolf’s triumph over family tragedies and illness offers a counter-narrative to the plot of doom and death often imposed on the lives of women – as though genius in a woman were unnatural. The Woolf episode in The Hours opens with jolting retakes of a scene no one actually witnessed: the writer wading into the water. ‘Look at it!’ the camera insists, closing in, ‘Look at it!’ This approach slams home a ready message: be appalled.

Such narratives of women writers invite us to see death as the crucial fact in the life. Will it ever be possible to detach Charlotte Brontë from the brooding tombstones that open Mrs Gaskell’s narrative of her friend’s life? Like The Hours’ insistence on looking, look again: the Brontës’ tombstones are fixed before us at the outset of the story. Mrs Gaskell is intent on presenting a slave to duty in the shadow of tombstones; she has less to say about the burning centre of Charlotte’s existence: the creative fire. The biographer directs our attention away from the exhilaration of writing, stressing in place of genius its obliteration. Such an approach distorts our response. It whips up a dubious blend of sentimentality, pity and prurience.

Sex provides another routine narrative: female wantonness en route to death. In the bio-pic Carrington, our eyes are directed towards her irregular sex-life – the banality of heaving bottoms – followed by the sensationalism of suicide, with only a belated glimpse of Carrington’s prime gift: her paintings. These appear only at the very end, obscured by the credits, as viewers are gathering up their coats to leave the cinema.

A similar narrative prevails in the bio-pic Iris, where we view the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch at two points in her life: a promiscuous young woman alternates with an old woman who is losing her mind – as though nothing of note happened between these scenes. Again, a popular view of an accomplished woman manages to skip all those times when she was immersed in her work.

In the same year as Virginia Woolf published her feminist treatise A Room of One’s Own, in 1929, she wrote a biographical essay, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’. This succinct piece offers a possible model for a narrative designed to do justice to a great woman, in this case the first to make a systematic case for women’s rights in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Woolf’s focus is on Wollstonecraft’s resilience, instead of stressing her two attempted suicides – both responses to the serial infidelity of her partner, and allying her with the standard pejorative images of unruly womanhood, casting her as a self-indulgent, depressive and licentious termagent. For 200 years Wollstonecraft’s life has been distorted by emphasis on attempted suicide. The image put about in the last years of the eighteenth century has been perpetuated in deprecating biographies published in our time, in 1974 and 2001. The latter has Wollstonecraft behaving badly on her deathbed when all the evidence available tells us that she conducted herself with gratitude to her husband and others. In contrast to a full-scale tome, it took Virginia Woolf only three pages to reveal that what was crucial to this life was not depression, which is common, but political honesty, which is rare: that and Wollstonecraft’s capacity to ‘cut to the quick of life’.

Distortions of Wollstonecraft and Carrington, as well as the popular obsession with Sylvia Plath’s suicide at the expense of her poetry, reveal a wider context for popular fascination with Virginia Woolf’s death. What promotes this? Can it be that pity alleviates envy of greatness? A Room of One’s Own recalls how odd a female writer used to appear to her contemporaries, and how forbidding it would have felt to put pen to paper in times gone by. ‘That singular anomaly the female novelist’, sings the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado. ‘I don’t think she’d be missed. I’m sure she’d not be missed.’ Could there still be a lurking notion that female creativity is of its nature freakish?

If so, it’s open to biography and future bio-pics to select in favour of the creative aspect, as Woolf recommends in ‘The Art of Biography’(1940). The biographer, she says, ‘can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.’ One such fact is that when German invasion seemed imminent, it was the supremely sane Leonard who proposed suicide to a somewhat reluctant Virginia. Leonard’s apprehension was justified: as a Jew, he and his wife were already on Himmler’s list for immediate arrest.

‘There would be no point in waiting’, Leonard told Virginia. His first idea was that they asphixiate themselves, and he laid by a supply of petrol for that purpose. ‘We would shut the garage door and commit suicide.’ As an alternative in June 1940, he obtained a vial of ‘protective poison’ (a lethal dose of morphia) from Virginia’s brother, Adrian Stephen. ‘No,’ Virginia said to the first suicide pact, ‘I don’t want the garage to see the end of me. I’ve a wish for ten years more, and to write my book [Between the Acts] which as usual darts into my brain.’

Another ‘fertile’ fact: as Nigel Nicolson, the editor of her Letters, noted, Virginia Woolf wasn’t mad when she ended her life; she feared ‘madness’. The letter she left for Leonard expresses a considerate wish to spare him. She assures him of her gratitude for all he did to care for her.

Popular interest in suicide has muffled somewhat the politicised public voice that Virginia Woolf developed in the 1930s, extending the feminism of the 1920s to a confrontation of power in all its manifestations. In her chosen role as ‘Outsider’, calling on like-minded women to form a Society of Outsiders, she speaks out against vainglorious rhetoric, militarism, medals and the strutting aspect of honour. She despised honorary degrees (on offer in 1933 and 1939) as ‘mere baubles distributed by the pimps of the brain-selling trade’. In the same way she refused public honours coming her way (the Clark lectures at Cambridge for 1933 and a Companion of Honour in 1935) because ‘it is an utterly corrupt society’.

This level of integrity reflects on Westminster today. The powerful won’t of course admit that economic unfairness and the demoralisation of unemployment undoes society. In the comparable context of the post-Crash 1930s, Virginia Woolf aligned herself with the disempowered. She was trying out an alternative public voice designed to address a national audience. She wished to become no less than arbiter of the national conscience and preserver of what she judged the national treasure – its civilisation, chiefly its literature.

In ‘The Leaning Tower’ (a talk for the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton in May 1940) she exhorted workers and women, ‘the commoners’ and ‘the outsiders’, to join forces as critics: ‘we are not going to leave writing to be done for us by a small class of well-to-do young men who have only a pinch, a thimbleful of experience to give us.’

With huge courage she put the case for pacifism in Three Guineas. In the run-up to the Second World War, this position was unwelcome to Maynard Keynes, Quentin Bell and other members of her milieu like Vita Sackville-West. Some friends sent her to Coventry and Leonard was lukewarm. She shrugged off opposition: ‘I do my best work & feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.’ As it turned out, her pacifism would survive the current of the time, and speak to civilised Americans of the late 1960s during the Vietnam War; the great wave of her posthumous fame would rise there and then.

As German bombers flew nightly over Rodmell in August 1940, she shook free from war propaganda which attributed insane love of power to an occasional madman. Reframing her forebears’ attacks on slavery, she suggested that we are all enslaved, irrespective of nationality, by ‘a sub-conscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’: the wish to dominate. The word ‘slavery’ reverberates through one of her most original essays, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’. It warns that ‘Hitlerism’ will not be confined to ‘the enemy’, but will infiltrate the mindset of fighters on one’s own side. This warning speaks to us in an age when Blair and Bush deceived their countries into going to war, and did not care to look too closely at the degradations and torture inflicted in the cause of freedom from tyranny.

In her last years Virginia Woolf conceived a right to vote not for one party or another but against the whole edifice of power. ‘I feel myself enfranchised till death, & quit of all humbug’, she records in her diary. On her long daily walk near Rodmell, a new sense of independence had whirled her ‘like a top miles upon miles over the downs’. The exhilaration of such ‘moments of being’ will surely outlast a stale fixation on the writer’s death.

This article appeared in our spring 2011 issue of Canvas, our tri-annual newsletter.

News ReleaseHome of the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ wins £2.4million Heritage Lottery Fund grant

The Charleston Trust – keepers of the Grade II* listed Charleston Farmhouse, the vibrant independent house museum and former Sussex retreat of the renowned Bloomsbury group – has been awarded a grant of £2.4 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) towards its Charleston Barn Project.

Set in an idyllic country spot near Lewes, and now lying in the heart of the South Downs National Park, Charleston became a country retreat for a group of influential writers, artists and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf, T.S Elliot, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey – all of whom had a profound influence on the shaping of early 20^th century British and international modernism. The HLF grant, part of a £6.3 million scheme, will see the former home of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant reconnected to its surrounding agricultural buildings and the landscape that inspired so much of their work.

The expansion will deliver much-needed facilities to the thousands of visitors that flock to this iconic literary site each year. It will offer exciting new education and exhibition spaces and heritage activities designed to embrace the site’s fascinating heritage. New training opportunities will also be offered to 200 volunteers and 15 internship positions will be created.

Capital works include the restoration of the magnificent Charleston Barn, the recreation of the granary that stood on the site until the 1970s and the creation of new buildings in a hidden courtyard behind the barn.

The project will also see the creation of a dedicated auditorium, a beautiful new studio learning space, proper storage for the Trust’s reserve collection of over 8,000 works, and an expanded café and shop.  A new access route will take traffic away from the heart of the site to a new and less obtrusive car park, and the sensitive restoration of existing buildings, removal of traffic and the recreation of the lost granary will return Charleston to the way it looked in the 1950s.

Stuart McLeod, Head of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said:

“This inspirational and important project showcases our heritage at its very best, by providing the local community and visitors with a special look into the past. Heritage Lottery Fund money continues to revitalise and transform historic sites like Charleston into sustainable places for the future, offering a wide range of training and volunteering opportunities as well as working to improve it as a fascinating tourist attraction.”

The Trust’s Director, Colin McKenzie, said:

“We are enormously grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for this major grant to one of the most important house museums in Sussex.  Having the HLF’s support and their endorsement of our plans will make a huge difference to our ability to realize this important and exciting project”.

Nigel Newton, Chairman of the Charleston Trust commented:

“We are delighted that this fantastic support from the Heritage Lottery Fund will enable us to take Charleston towards its ambitious new goals”.

Virginia Nicholson, granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, said:

“I have known and loved this house and its surrounding buildings for over fifty years. I played on the farm as a child, and I am delighted to think that Charleston has such an exciting future in the 21st century”.

Finally, Norman Baker, MP for Lewes, said:

“This is great news and I want to applaud those who have worked so hard to secure the funding, and the Heritage Lottery Fund for providing the grant.  Charleston is an important cultural centre in the area with beneficial economic effects for tourism and I know the money will ensure that it can become even more accessible, and valuable to the public.”

Have your say: HLF’s three-month consultation Shaping the future – for heritage, for everyone is now live on our website and all views will help shape HLF’s strategy from 2013 to 2019. This is people’s chance to tell us what they think we should continue to do and what we should do differently. For further information, to view our consultation video and to respond to the consultation, please visit: www.hlf.org.uk/consultation2011 until 26 April 2011.

See the full ‘need it now’ feature on the American Vogue website

Monday morning in Jamie Fobert’s office in Clerkenwell. He has just got back from Berlin. The Neues Museum has just re-opened after a ten-year restoration and re-design by David Chipperfield. Jamie led Chipperfield’s team in the first competition for the bomb-damaged ruin, in 1994. ‘I saw David’s building when it was empty, and it looked amazing,’ he says. ‘It’s even better with all the stuff in.’ He smiles in an acknowledgement of the cliché that the architects of the new generation of bare, luminous galleries like their interiors uncluttered by ‘stuff’ – the collection, that is. His work has been praised by one critic as ‘glacial good design’.

Fobert, who is Canadian, studied at the University of Toronto and came to Britain to work for Chipperfield. In 1996, at 35, he set up his own practice and has become one of Britain’s most collectable architects. In Moscow he transformed a 1920s bus garage – an icon of Modernism – into the Garage Center of Modern Art, managed by Daria Zhukova – yes, the girlfriend of Roman Ibramovich. In Paris he has designed the interior of Givenchy’s most luxurious shop in which the clothes seem to purr on their immaculate racks.

It’s a long way from Givenchy to Charleston and the cows bellowing in the barns next door. Or is it? I first came across Fobert’s work in a house in Kennington, where Charlotte Verity – artist in residence at the Garden Museum, where I work – and her painter husband live. It’s a kitchen and dining room extension that steps lightly into their garden. ‘Who designed this?’ I asked. Fobert is masterful at striking the balance between enclosure, and openness: Charlotte’s kitchen is designed to frame the views of her beautiful garden. I didn’t want to leave.

Fobert has built houses and studios for artists such as Anthony Gormley. Artists like him. And he enjoys collaborations with other disciplines. At this year’s Chelsea Flower Show he designed the bronze pavilion in Tom Stuart-Smith’s Gold Medal-winning garden for
Laurent Perrier (a playful gazebo which has been snapped up by a television producer). [fig.1]

Six of the most critically admired practices in Britain were shortlisted for Charleston. Why do you think you won? ‘It’s a lot because I’m collaborating with Julian,’ he replies. Julian Harrap is best known as a conservation architect: I met him working at Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he has restored room by room over two decades. He supported Norman Foster’s transformation of the Reichstag and collaborated with Chipperfield on the restoration of the Neues Gallery. That’s when he first met Jamie. Why, I asked Julian, has he become the conservation architect of choice for Britain’s cutting-edge Modernist stars? ‘Foster and Chippie and Jamie are architects who do architecture. Not ephemeral or commercial stuff. They have a process
of preparation, analysis, and thought that I admire.’

And they like working with Julian, I realise, because of his understanding of design at its most rigorous – and ambitious. Conservation architects can over-focus on the detail: their approach can be associated – unfairly, perhaps – with the Young Fogey-ism which required corduroys and iron fireplaces, and puts the right shape of wine glasses beside the right joinery detail. To Harrap, conservation is ‘an act of creative architectural design’.

He studied under Leslie Martin, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson, three teachers who were admired – or reviled – for their overturning of tradition. Each experimented with new shapes of buildings – as in Wilson’s British Library – and a rigorous but inventive assembly of brick, glass and metal. These tutors are ‘the parentage of the practice’s design philosophy’. I had no idea that Julian worked for Stirling, the enfant terrible of ‘60s architecture – or that he designed the furniture in Stirling’s controversial History Library at Cambridge. (The Library – if not the chairs – has made generations of history students puzzle at Modernism, including me). But ‘rigour’ is the word Julian returns to time and time again, and it is evident that his collaboration with Jamie Fobert is based on an intense analysis of the site and its character.

The farmhouse and garden at Charleston were restored between 1981 and ’86. Potential architects were asked to show how the barns across the lane from the house and gardens could be converted and extended to provide extra space. The Small Wonder Festival requires an auditorium for up to 200 people and the May Festival needs to seat almost 400. The adult workshops are popular throughout the year. The education programme requires a classroom, with space for sinks and lunchboxes and coats. Angelica Garnett’s collection of her parents’ works on paper is currently kept in cardboard boxes in the attic of the house. It needs to be stored properly – and to be exhibited. Finally, Charleston requires a bigger restaurant and shop. Every independent museum is up against the odds, and Charleston depends on the money its visitors spend.

‘It was a difficult brief,’ reflects Jamie. ‘It’s a lot to get on the site without ruining it. And within the budget … We haven’t solved it yet.’ The ink is still wet on the ground plan he prints out, and his pen walks me through the ideas at this stage. [fig.3] The project – called ‘Four Barns and Three Courtyards’– is still developing, he emphasises, as does the Director, Colin McKenzie.

The first and most noticeable change will be the reconstruction of the Granary, an historic structure taken down in the 1970s. That will be Barn No.1: the learning centre. Behind and at right angles is Barn No.2, the Hay Barn, which will be rebuilt for adult talks and workshops. Barn No.3 is the Threshing Barn, facing back across the courtyard to the Granary. It caught fire in the 1980s and its current interior is a patch-up. This will be converted into the restaurant and visitor services.
You’ll walk through the big, central doors into a second courtyard. Here you will see the first brand-new structure, Barn No.4, which will enable staff offices to be moved out of the former cowshed, and for the collection to be stored with all the gleaming, whirring kit it deserves. Finally – and turning back towards the farmhouse – there will be a gallery for changing exhibitions. And the Festival auditorium? It is proposed to have a temporary wooden structure to be erected in the first courtyard for two weeks each year.

What will it look like? At this stage, the architects would rather concentrate on their analysis of the site, and the ‘character’ of what they’d like to build. It is ‘intensely rural’, with milk lorries jolting up and down the drive each evening from the big metal sheds. ‘It’s not bucolic cattle farming,’ says Jamie, wrinkling his nose. ‘It’s noisy, smelly industrialised agriculture, right on the doorstep.’ And it’s here to stay.

Duncan Grant’s paintings were important in Fobert and Harrap’s submission to the trustees. ‘I see him as the key intellect of the Bloomsbury set – in a visual sense, that is’, says Julian. They want to recapture the ‘authenticity’ of the farm as it was first ‘discovered’ during the First World War, pointing to the muddy raw-banked farm pond outside the window that appeared in Vanessa Bell’s The Pond. (The view out of a writer’s house is as important as the artefacts on the desk and – as with so much of Fobert’s work – these designs are as much about what you see out of the window as what he actually builds.)

The challenge, I realise, is not to make Charleston too polite. ‘It should be very different to a National Trust property,’ says Julian. And then, with greater relish, ‘And not suburban.’ What do you mean by ‘suburban’, exactly? He points to the wooden gate in a Duncan Grant painting. ‘That is a gate made with big pieces of oak, and hand-forged iron. It can resist the push of a cow. Grant understands that, and paints that.’ Some years ago it was replaced by a gate carefully modelled on the original. To Harrap, however, it looks rural, but is not. He wants his interventions to go beyond visual replication to engage with the process of making.

Harrap took Fobert to his project at Three Mills where he has restored a structure of the 1790s. Muscular, bare, heroic carpentry will be a feature of Charleston Barns. Initial ideas include a proposal to work with the Weald and Downland Museum on the reconstruction of the Granary. ‘The whole process. The felling of the timber. The design. The construction technique.’ The Threshing Barn will be rebuilt with a new interior of soaring, bare timber. Harrap and Fobert have superimposed a Duncan Grant stage set design on to the interior, and will try to translate its intersecting angles into the actual design [fig.5]. The Festival marquee will also be a heroic piece of wooden assembly. ‘Working with timber is a belief system,’ says Julian. ‘It’s a feeling.’

Each architect will spend a lot of t ime at Charleston. Fobert has been designing stores for Givenchy across the Middle East and Asia. ‘But it’s all on the computer. I never get to go there.’ It’s evident that he enjoys a hands-on project, and an engagement with materials and landscape. ‘Glacial’ is too glib a phrase: his work can be tactile, and warm. One salon in the new women’s shoe store in Selfridges is inspired by shoe lasts – a delicious idea, I think – and the texture of the interior of Givenchy in Paris was suggested by the artist David Nash’s use of willow charred by lightning.

‘Engaging with a client is about challenging a client to think what he really wants,’ says Julian. It’s evident that Charleston has set itself a challenge by appointing two practices with such a strong-minded belief in authenticity, materiality and conceptual logic. Each practice is enjoying huge success, but Fobert’s and Harrap’s ambitions are not to build bigger and bigger buildings. What motivates their work is the challenge of engaging with a new site and a new project. And, very simply, they make beautiful buildings. With an emphasis on the word ‘make’.

by Margaret Timmers

‘It is surprising what alacrity and intelligence people can show in front of a poster which if it had been a picture in a gallery would have been roundly declared unintelligible’ observed the art critic Roger Fry, reviewing an exhibition of posters by Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) in The Nation and The Athenæum, 23 May 1925. Fry was fascinated by the poster’s ability to evoke a quick-witted response that differed from what he called ‘the picture-gallery attitude’. Artists of the Bloomsbury Group attracted to the medium included Fry himself, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, while Mark Gertler, an occasional co-exhibitor with the Group, also made a foray into the field.

The earliest ‘Bloomsbury’ posters spring from the 1910s, the decade when Roger Fry sensationally introduced Post-Impressionism to the London art world through two exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries -– and also founded the Omega Workshops, with the aim of applying artistic talent to the decoration of furniture, furnishings and ceramics. Manet and the Post-Impressionists (8 November 1910 – 15 January 1911) was organised by Fry with the assistance of literary critic Desmond MacCarthy. It featured prominently the work of Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, as well as work by younger artists including Matisse and Picasso. Reproducing an image of Gauguin’s painting Poèmes Barbares (1896), an anonymous poster which must have originated from Fry or his close circle of artist friends aptly announced an exhibition that by the very nature of its art aimed to shock and disconcert. This pioneering show did indeed arouse public wrath and ridicule, but also intense admiration in some artistic circles.

The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which opened on 5 October 1912, showed works by British, French and Russian artists chosen by Clive Bell, Fry and Boris Anrep, and was weighted towards the contemporary. The poster for the exhibition reflected its challenging modernity (fig.1). It was a remarkable communal effort, prefiguring the co-operative working practice of the Omega Workshops founded the following year. The concept of this poster originated with Fry and Vanessa Bell, the design was executed by Duncan Grant, whose own work was represented in the show, while the lettering was added by the artist Frederick Etchells (1886-1973). As Fry wrote to Grant in autumn 1912:

Vanessa and I have tried a lot of things, of which I send you some; I think the head and hand the best. If you agree, will you do something of that sort?

I think you could draw it better and perhaps make it more attractive without being less mysterious.

The image of the face with its disconcerting gaze and the gesturing upraised hand is indeed enigmatic, and at the same time arresting and compelling. Drawn with bold, rhythmic lines and incisive hatch strokes, embellished with swirls and zig-zags, the asymmetric composition may be intended to give a primitive feel, and perhaps also to indicate the decorative possibilities inherent in Post-Impressionism. The same design was used for the cover of the exhibition catalogue, and a collector’s edition of the poster, overprinted in orange or green, was also issued.

A fascination with decorative form and a delight in the spontaneous are revealed in a First World War poster by Duncan Grant entitled Wanted! Musical Instruments for the Front (fig.2). Between scalloped curtains, a fantastical French horn holds centre-stage, its snaking tube echoed by the free-flowing loops of the patterned border in a playful, almost Rococo, fantasy. The composition, including the delightfully impromptu lettering, is held together with a natural musical rhythm. Speculating upon the impetus for this poster, it may be significant that the impression in the Victoria and Albert Museum was presented in 1955 by Roger Fry’s sister, Margery Fry (1874–1958). From 1915, Margery (later a prison reformer and magistrate) had been involved in Quaker war relief efforts in France.

Margery Fry also gave to the V&A original designs for Omega artefacts and further rare posters, including one for an Exhibition of Modern Paintings, Dresses and New Omega Pottery held at the Omega Workshops in 1918, which is probably by Roger Fry (fig.4). Remarkably, the Omega Workshops had survived the Great War and, until 1919 when they folded, were still creating works of art and design in an individual aesthetic that challenged the orthodox and the commercial mainstream. The poster’s apparently simple design is open to various interpretations, offering a composite message about Omega productions. The symmetrically-curved white shape suggests both a mannequin (referring to the dresses of French seamstress Mlle. Gabrielle Soëne) and a double-hipped vase (connecting to the pottery), and also perhaps a paper cut-out. The dark textured background is painterly and intriguing. Below the text is lettered within a square the Greek letter W (Omega), its curves reflecting the outline of the main design. At Fry’s behest, Omega designs were anonymously produced, bearing only the W group symbol.

Posters by members of the Bloomsbury Group that were intimately connected with their own projects – conceived and executed within their own artistic milieu, local and short-term in scope, and with small print runs – were in the same individualistic genre as their designs for book covers, invitation cards, and other graphic ephemera. By the 1930s, however, a different challenge was offered – the opportunity to create designs for large-scale mass-produced commercial advertising. The poster was flourishing in an age of enlightened patronage, led by bodies such as London Underground, the railway companies, the Post Office, the Empire Marketing Board and Shell-Mex and B.P. While the choice of the right artist was seen as crucial for the commercial success of particular campaigns, artists themselves were attracted to an art form with contemporary, popular appeal.

Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland were among a prodigious array of artists invited to design posters for Shell, one of the best patrons of modern art between the Wars. Shell’s publicity aimed to create goodwill for the company and, responding to concerns about the despoliation of the countryside by obtrusive roadside hoardings, the company developed a new form of mobile advertising by placing their posters on the backs and sides of their delivery lorries. This initiative reaped praise for responsible advertising. By the 1930s, in campaigns such as See Britain First On Shell and Everywhere You Go You Can Be Sure Of Shell, the company sought to associate its name with nature and with art. Posters targeted a middle-class audience, encouraging motorists to explore the countryside while reassuring them of Shell’s presence everywhere: paradoxically, a timeless rural idyll was now accessible thanks to modern urban technology. Artists for the series, most commissioned by Shell’s enterprising Publicity Manager, Jack Beddington, were given their theme, but encouraged to develop it in their own idiom.

In Alfriston / See Britain First On Shell (1931) (fig.3), Vanessa depicted in almost Pointillist technique a shimmering view of the Sussex village that lies not far from Charleston in the Cuckmere Valley. With others from the same series, her original painting was shown alongside the lithographic poster in an Exhibition of Modern Pictorial Advertising by Shell at the New Burlington Galleries in 1931. In his landscape St. Ives, Huntingdon for the second ‘countryside’ series, Everywhere You Go You Can Be Sure Of Shell (1932), Duncan Grant transformed the historic St. Ives Bridge into a proscenium arch through which are viewed riverside buildings reflected in the Great Ouse. He had painted St. Ives on visits to David Garnett in nearby Huntingdonshire. Shell gained prestige from the way such art was conceived, displayed and reviewed.

Among the most enthusiastic patrons of the poster was the Empire Marketing Board, the public body set up by Government to promote trade with the Colonies and Dominions. Its Secretary was the visionary civil servant Stephen Tallents, while Frank Pick chaired its Poster Sub-Committee. Recognising the power of propaganda, the Board launched a sophisticated poster programme to influence consumer choice in buying Empire foodstuffs. Specially-designed wooden hoardings were erected at nearly 1000 sites around the country, each composed of three large landscape-format panels interspersed with two smaller portrait-format panels and headed by a title strip.

Pick approached a range of distinguished artists, among whom were Frank Brangwyn, Paul Nash and William Nicholson. Duncan Grant was considered, but does not seem to have been formally approached. However, the painter Mark Gertler, whom Fry had helped professionally early in his career, and who had been drawn into the Bloomsbury group through the social milieu of his patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, was one whom Pick did commission. His proposed designs took the form of three large oil paintings entitled Spring (fig.5), Summer and Autumn (1931). Displaying the artist’s love of form, texture and vibrant colour, each is a still life depicting a lavish display of home-grown and exotic fruit, signifying that thanks to trade links with the Empire, fruit in abundance was available all year round. The designs were duly accepted for £100 each, but unfortunately their use was ruled out on grounds of printing costs. In March 1934, a year after the Board was abolished, they were exhibited with other original EMB designs at the Imperial Institute, and subsequently presented to the V&A.

Although the Post Office was late in exploiting the full potential of commercial advertising, once launched its publicity output was admirable and distinguished. Sir Stephen Tallents became Public Relations Officer in 1933, and with his formidable Poster Advisory Group including Kenneth Clark, Clive Bell and Jack Beddington, had access to a great range of artistic and design talents. A major initiative launched in 1934 was the School Posters series, in which sets of posters were offered free of charge to approximately 26,000 schools on subjects such as the history and development of postal communications. Some of these poster designs were also displayed in Crown post offices in a larger size to fit the frames available there. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were among a roll call of prominent British artists invited to submit designs.

Then as now, encouraging the public to use postal services efficiently (post early, address letters clearly, etc.) was a key element of publicity, and Tallents’s invitation to Vanessa of 25 July 1934 explored the notion that she might create a satirical design to enlist the help of the public:

Instead of merely commanding them to post early, we will show how ridiculous they look, and what inconveniences they suffer, when they post late… From time to time our Post Office walls shall be a mirror of the public’s folly. This should amuse the public and delight our staff, who cannot individually answer back our more tiresome customers.

On 17 March the following year, Vanessa replied disarmingly about the length of time it had taken her to do her design entitled The Last Minute Posters (fig.6):

I don’t know why it has been so, but for some reason it has taken me ages to do anything I thought would do at all – I think partly because of the difficulty of getting several figures into a small space and yet making them tell at a distance. I have stood about in Post Offices until your employees looked so suspicious I had to leave! – and yet I don’t know that in the end what I have done has much resemblance to a Post Office. However, there it is…

These letters are preserved in the British Postal Museum & Archive. Vanessa’s design presented a visual contrast between the cool, calm space occupied by the counter clerk to the left of the dividing screen, and the crushed confines to the right, crammed with hot, flustered customers desperate to catch the post. Colour proofs in the collection of the BPMA, one meticulously corrected by the artist herself (‘the colour of the counter clerk’s face is rather too pink …the dial of the weighing machine should be a little more blue…’) show the subsequent stages, yet in spite of Vanessa receiving a fee of 50 guineas, and the design being printed by Vincent, Brooks, Day and Son, the poster was never actually issued.

Duncan Grant’s designs for the Schools series fared better, and his roughs for four types of Post Office workers were accepted in 1937. With interim amendments, they were eventually issued as a set in 1939, the titles illustrating the staff strengths in various parts of the Post Office organisation: 79,242 Postmen; 7,681 Telegraph Messengers; 20,011 Telephonists; and 14,272 Engineering Workmen. Grant’s individualised portraits – the first image in the set, for example, shows a modern postman studying an envelope that he is about to deliver – transformed promotional statistics into sympathetic portrayals of human industry. Indeed Bell’s and Grant’s designs for Shell and the Post Office are fascinating examples of how their artistic statements could be ingeniously harnessed to the cause of corporate publicity.

Thanks are due to the following for their help in the preparation of this article:

The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA): www.postalheritage.org.uk
The Charleston Trust: www.charleston.org.uk
The Victoria and Albert Museum: www.vam.ac.uk

Duncan Heyes describes the choices made in compiling the British Library’s latest contribution to the oral history of Bloomsbury.

September saw the release of the CD ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, the eighteenth release in the British Library’s series The Spoken Word, which so far has included many writers and poets – among them H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Robert Graves, and a pair of 2-CD sets of Ted Hughes. Compiling this Bloomsbury CD marked a departure from my usual work with printed collections at the British Library, as it was the first time I had worked with recorded sound. However, when I was approached to get involved with this particular project I realised it was an opportunity not to be missed.

The first task was to gain a sense of the amount of existing material and whether there would be sufficient for a 2-CD set or a single CD. Our first idea was to release a single CD of recordings of the core members of Bloomsbury, but on consideration we felt that this would miss the opportunity to make available a selection of more general recordings about Bloomsbury, from the younger generation and those associated with the group. Once we had established that there was more than enough suitable material available for two CDs, the question arose of who to include on both.

Membership of Bloomsbury is not clearly defined, and we are all no doubt familiar with the discussions in biographies and studies of the group about who was or was not Bloomsbury, as even among the writings of its core members accounts vary as to its membership. The difficulty arises because, as we know, Bloomsbury was not in any sense a formal card-carrying club or a cohesive artistic movement which produced a manifesto of its aims; as we hear Leonard Woolf saying on the opening track, Bloomsbury was ‘simply a fortuitous aggregation of friends’. Leonard then lists the original thirteen members as himself, Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Adrian Stephen, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster, and Desmond and Molly McCarthy.

It was decided that CD1 would comprise all those people associated with ‘Old Bloomsbury’ who had left recordings. I was fairly certain, however, that no recordings existed of Roger Fry or Lytton Strachey. At the time of the release of the film Carrington a good deal of discussion took place about the Strachey voice but no recordings of him were discovered, though there is some extant silent home movie footage.

The Strachey voice is much referred to as the archetypal Bloomsbury voice and was said to be characteristic of the Strachey family, so, in the absence of a recording of Lytton, I have included a recording by his sister Marjorie on CD2. Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry died in 1932 and 1934 respectively. Unfortunately, no commercial recordings were made of either of them – only a handful of spoken word recordings of literary figures date from as early as this, and it was only in the early 1930s that the BBC started to appreciate the value of archiving radio broadcasts. We know from Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry that he did appear on radio as she described his great book as ‘perpetually pushed aside to make room for lectures, for reviews and broadcasts….’ Unfortunately, it would seem that Lytton Strachey never took to the airwaves.

Having settled on members of ‘Old Bloomsbury’ to be represented on the first CD1 was quite happy to include recordings of them talking about subjects other than Bloomsbury itself if that was all that was available. For example, I have included an extract from a programme first broadcast in 1945 by Maynard Keynes talking about the establishment of the Arts Council, an organisation he worked tirelessly to promote. I have also included a recording of Desmond MacCarthy discussing tears in literature, from a broadcast in 1947. This recording is preceded by a talk by E.M. Forster about Desmond MacCarthy in which Forster describes Desmond’s character and, amusingly, how efforts were made by his friends to encourage him to write his ever-postponed novel by forming their own novel-writing group. I was also pleased to be able to include a recording by Leonard Woolf describing with affection the quiet man of Bloomsbury, Saxon Sydney-Turner. The other speakers on CD1 are Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Vanessa Bell, with a very telling anecdote about the Stephen sisters’ childhood.

We are extremely fortunate that an extract of a talk by Virginia Woolf from 1937 has survived. In the 1930s and 40s, before the use of magnetic tape, recordings were made directly on to a record (a ‘coursegroove disc’) which was a cumbersome and expensive process. The capacity of the disc was around four minutes per side, which accounts for the surviving eight minutes of Virginia Woolf on two sides. This is the only extant recording of Virginia Woolf, though she had made two earlier broadcasts. The first was with Leonard in July 1927, entitled ‘Are too Many Books Written and Published?’ And in 1929 she gave the second talk in the three-part series ‘Miniature Biographies’ on Beau Brummell, the text of which appeared in The Listener in November 1929 (the other two speakers in the series were Harold Nicolson and Desmond MacCarthy).

The recording of Virginia Woolf on this CD set is an extract from a broadcast she gave in April 1937 entitled ‘Craftsmanship’. The typescript of the complete talk survives in the BBC Written Archives with her manuscript annotations, and a published version of the talk was printed in The Listener in May 1937.

The broadcast was part of a four-part series entitled ‘Words Fail Me’. The other speakers in the series were Professor A. Lloyd James, Allan Ferguson, and Logan Pearsall Smith.

The themes of the talks have an eerie resonance today. Lloyd James’ talk was on the importance of grammar. Allan Fergusson asked ‘…if there has ever been an age in

our history that has seen so rapid an extension of the vocabulary of our language – so many new words born, so many old words diverted to new meanings,’ and Pearsall Smith’s talk intended to show ‘by what methods our language has been enriched. The first great source of new words has always been that of borrowing from other languages.’

The theme of Virginia Woolf’s talk was that ‘craftsmanship is a word that can be applied to the meaning of pots and pans, but not to words in the way in which writers use them. There is a distinction to be made between the useful use of words and their literary use. The novelist and the scientist use words differently.’ The earlier broadcasts may not have been preserved, but we are incredibly fortunate to still have the recording of Virginia Woolf talking about the importance of words.

The majority of the recordings we used come from the BBC Sound Archive and are a mixture of prepared talks and interviews. Another important source for recordings was Charleston’s own archive. Among my favourite recordings are those of Duncan Grant interviewed by Quentin Bell.

The interviews with Duncan took place in the studio at Charleston and have a refreshing informality which perhaps offers a taste of what a Bloomsbury conversation was like.

I think the recordings of Duncan also convey something of his famous charm. On these tracks we hear Duncan’s vivid account of the public horror at the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910. ‘Did you witness the scenes of violence, people actually brandishing umbrellas?’ asked Quentin.

‘Not destroying the pictures,’ Duncan replied but ‘rage, real outrage … and letters sometimes from my aunts, complaining … one of them did a very pretty little imitation of Matisse; saying this must be easy to do – delightful’.

He also talks in some detail about Roger Fry, his extensive influence, the beginnings of the Omega Workshops, and what it was like to work there. He is very perceptive about the reasons for their demise. And he tells the story of the ‘Cézanne in the hedge’, which Quentin Bell described in an article for the Charleston Newsletter.

Also included is an extract from Duncan’s appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1975 in which he recounts the story of the famous ‘Dreadnought’ hoax, when he was one of a number of friends including Virginia and Adrian Stephen who disguised themselves as Abyssinian princes to fool the Royal Navy into hosting an official visit and tour of HMS Dreadnought. The practical joke caused a minor scandal at the time resulting in questions being asked in the House of Commons. Although undoubtedly a familiar story to many, it is amusing to hear Duncan’s first-hand account of the escapade, delivered in his typically droll manner.

The selection for CD1 of core members of Bloomsbury was unproblematic simply because there were not a great number of surviving recordings from which to choose. The choice of who of the younger generation, and those associated with Bloomsbury, to include on CD2 was more difficult, as after the First World War Bloomsbury became a far more amorphous group, with people moving in and out of its orbit all the time. I decided that only recordings directly bearing on some aspect of Bloomsbury would be included. I also wanted to include recordings which shed some light on the attitudes and ethos of Bloomsbury as well as giving a more general sense of the Bloomsbury lifestyle.

Perhaps an eyebrow or two may be raised at some of the speakers – Bertrand Russell may be of an older generation than the original members of Bloomsbury but he shared many Bloomsbury attitudes, such as pacifism, and Bloomsbury can perhaps be regarded as his spiritual home. In addition, he knew many of the members of Bloomsbury, meeting them frequently at Garsington Manor and Bedford Square, the homes of their mutual acquaintance Ottoline Morrell. His inclusion on CD2 is justified by the amusing account he gives of his first meeting with the Strachey clan and his description of Lytton.

George ‘Dadie’ Rylands was a particularly entertaining speaker and it was difficult to choose which of his recordings to use. I eventually decided on the talk he gave about how his rooms at Cambridge provided the setting for the luncheon party described in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. He cannot resist comparing the inspired inaccuracy and exaggeration of her written account with his own more modest recollections of the occasion. He also recounts the story of the Bloomsbury party where Virginia Woolf met the popular novelist Berta Ruck who had threatened Virginia with legal action after she had used her name in one of her novels (although Dadie was mistaken in thinking it was in To the Lighthouse; it was actually Jacob’s Room). The dispute was settled amicably and Virginia and Berta went on to become friends. During her lifetime Frances Partridge was called on to comment on all things Bloomsbury and she has left a legacy of many recordings. I was happy to include a recording of her from 1999, when she was approaching her hundredth birthday, in which she describes the influence of the Bloomsbury group on her life. I was also particularly pleased to be able to include a recording by her husband Ralph Partridge and one by his great friend Gerald Brenan, whom many Bloomsberries visited in Spain. Other speakers on CD2 include Harold Nicolson, Angelica Garnett, Quentin Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and David Cecil.

A recent area of interest has focused on the domestic staff of Bloomsbury, notably in Alison Light’s book Mrs Woolf and the Servants, so I felt the inclusion of recordings of Grace Higgens, Lottie Hope and Nellie Boxhall would add another dimension, and recognise the contribution that they have played in the history of Bloomsbury. In 2006 the British Library acquired the archive of Grace Higgens comprising diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings, photographs, exhibition catalogues, scrapbooks, and film shot at Charleston. Items from the archive were displayed at the British Library in 2008 in an exhibition which proved to be very popular with visitors. A recording of Grace is included on the CD describing life at Charleston where she lived and worked for over fifty years. Also included are recordings of Nellie Boxhall and Lottie Hope, who worked mostly for the Woolfs but also at other Bloomsbury households including Roger Fry’s, and a spell at Charleston. The CD closes with a moving account by Louie Mayer, the Woolf’s housekeeper, describing the circumstances surrounding the day of Virginia Woolf’s suicide in March 1941, which seemed an appropriate recording with which to end.

By the 1940s the cultural importance that Bloomsbury had enjoyed in the 1920s and 30s had started to wane. However, a renewed interest started to grow in the 1960s as biographies, memoirs and letters began to appear and the values of Bloomsbury struck a chord with the mood of the time. Since then there has been an almost continual interest in the lives and work of the Bloomsbury Group, evidenced today in the recent publication of biographies of Frances Partridge and Lydia Lopokova, in exhibitions such as Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913-1919 at the Courtauld, and of course in the growing popularity of visits to Charleston.

One of the attractions of Charleston for many visitors is the sense of Charleston as a home and not a museum. Such is the success of the restoration that one feels that Duncan or Vanessa may have just left the room. I hope that these recordings will enhance that experience. We can see how they lived; now we can hear the voices of many of those who knew the house so well.

‘The Bloomsbury Group’ CD set is available from the Charleston shop at a discounted price of £13.50 (plus £3.50 p&p), or from the British Library Bookshop priced £15.50 or online at http://shop.bl.uk.

In the August 2007 edition of Canvas, Colin McKenzie told Charleston’s Friends for the first time about the possibility of the Charleston Trust acquiring the magnificent Sussex barn adjacent to the house. Since then much has been happening behind the scenes to develop the Trust’s vision for what it could achieve through this acquisition and the Trustees and Director are keen to bring Charleston’s Friends and supporters up to date with progress. The Trust has a rare and not to be missed opportunity to acquire and preserve a vital and beautiful part of Charleston’s historic site, something that has been one of the Trust’s charitable objectives since its first creation. It is clear, however, that acquiring and making full use of the barn is every bit as important to the Trust’s ability to thrive in the future as its preservation. As a result of the support we have received from the Firle Estate for our plans and their willingness to sell Charleston a long lease on the barn and adjacent spaces, we are at the start of an exciting new chapter in Charleston’s history which will ensure that this important and historic building is removed from risk, preserved for the future enjoyment of all Charleston’s visitors, and given new uses that will help the Trust to continue to thrive.

The Charleston Barn, with its brick and flint walls and red tiled roof, is a familiar sight to Charleston’s visitors and, though there have been a number of significant changes to its outward appearance since the 1950s, it is still clearly recognisable from Duncan Grant’s painting of 1959 (which today hangs in Clive Bell’s study). Its history is inextricably linked to that of the farmhouse and the surrounding countryside, however, and goes all the way back to the Domesday Book (1086), when there was first recorded a farm on this site. A lease of 1689 suggests that by the seventeenth century Charleston was a substantial farmstead, referring to ‘all that messuage farme commonly called Charleston … with all the barns stables buildings yards gardens orchards and arable lands meadows pastures seedings sheepe downes and pasture for sheepe.’ The house itself, well-built and of handsome proportions, expresses this status.

What is less clear is when the current barn was built. Only a detailed excavation and dendro-chronological tests on the timbers could establish this information for certain but the timber structure suggests that it dates back in large part to the seventeenth or even the sixteenth century. We do know that it was originally intended for the threshing and storage of grain; harvest wagons would enter through the large openings on either side of the building to the threshing floor in the centre, and the sections on either side were used for the storage of grain.

Its recent history, however, has seen it exposed to all the risks commonly associated with agricultural buildings that can’t easily be adapted to modern farming methods. From the start of the nineteenth century (when it seems that large amounts of money were expended on it by the Firle Estate) the barn complex included not only the buildings we see today but a granary. This feature, such an important and beautiful part of the ensemble, was demolished in the 1970s and replaced by a modern open-sided shed (though the roof line of the original granary is still visible on the barn wall). Its disappearance has detracted from what must have been a pleasant sense of enclosure in the farm courtyard, suggested by Duncan Grant’s 1959 painting. Then in 1981 a major part of the barn was severely damaged by a fire which destroyed two thirds of the original timber frame. The damaged sections of the barn were rebuilt with a steel frame but in the years that followed it was used less and less for agricultural purposes.

Its final agricultural use, just seven years ago, was to accommodate calves from the adjacent dairy farm. The barn building very effectively screens Charleston and its visitors from the modern, working farm buildings including cow sheds and milking parlour, still in active use by the Firle Estate. One of the most appealing elements of life at Charleston today is the presence, just over the wall, of a rich agricultural life and particularly of the cows, who have a forceful way of expressing their views of proceedings at the Charleston Festival. For the last five years the barn has been used by Charleston for special events in the summer (such as the Small Wonder Festival and the Quentin Follies) but because it is effectively unconverted and unheated its use, though atmospheric, is strictly limited.

Since the creation of the Charleston Trust in 1981 and the opening of the house to the public in 1986, Charleston has worked hard to maintain, as far as possible, the atmosphere of the house when Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant lived there. Its apparent tranquillity and picturesque shabbiness conceal a great deal of hard work and thoughtful reconstruction, in which family descendants have played a crucial part. But this intelligent tradition of preservation has gone alongside an expanding programme of events that have ensured that Charleston remains a vibrant and exciting organisation rather than a mausoleum, successful at attracting and engaging new visitors and supporters as well as providing reasons for its longstanding supporters to return year after year to visit and to support events. And it has been to the other things it does each year that Charleston owes its continued survival, generating through its events, its Friends scheme and its retail operation (to say nothing of its fundraising) the money required each year to run and maintain the house.

Last year the Trust recorded its busiest year ever, and already this season the record for attendance on a single day has been broken twice. This success comes at a price and the original facilities simply don’t meet the requirements of the number of visitors we now receive. The café is crammed into the old wash house, only able to accommodate existing numbers because on sunny days visitors can spill over into the Folly Garden. Special events have to be accommodated in the barn, in a tent or outside, and there is no dedicated space at all for creative workshops or school parties.

So the opportunity to move some of this activity to newly created spaces in the barn, thereby restoring the historical relationship between it and Charleston Farmhouse, is a particularly timely one. The barn is ideally placed in relation to the farmhouse, close at hand but sufficiently far away to have its own life and to operate in a way that doesn’t impact negatively or detract from the remarkably unchanged atmosphere of the house and garden.

Charleston’s trustees and staff are very conscious of the quiet character of Charleston, with its roots in agriculture and the countryside. One of the appeals of the place is the relationship between the sophistication of the twentieth-century inhabitants of the house and the rural heritage they lived with and painted, well within living memory. Retaining this character will be our guiding principle with the barn project and an important part of the scheme will be to reconstruct the form of the old granary, which was demolished a generation ago, and to adapt this form for contemporary uses.

What does Charleston need? It needs, above all, spaces that will allow us to continue to do what we do now, only better. Firstly, practical space. A café that could accommodate special groups of visitors as well as other members of the public, all at the same time. A flexible space that can be used as an auditorium, for smaller Festival activities such as Small Wonder, for meetings and conferences. Proper facilities for visitors, and a place where they can be greeted and where background information about the history of the house can be given.

Secondly, artistic purposes. More room for the expanding collection, both the reserve collection of pictures but also the important donation of the contents of the studio, made by Angelica Garnett (see page 2). These objects are currently uncomfortably stored in the attic of the house. A flexible exhibition space, larger than the present one (but not large enough to be a burden), with suitable environmental controls that would enable us to develop the programme of shows we put on each year, including both loan exhibitions and the display of items from our reserve collection.

Thirdly, space for learning activities, for which there are currently no dedicated space at all: in particular a studio where adults and children could have an opportunity to study art, whether through practical art sessions or the history of Bloomsbury.

In recent months substantial progress has been made towards developing our plans for the barns. As a result of positive discussions with the trustees of the Firle Estate over the acquisition by the Trust of a long lease on the barn, an application was made to the Heritage Lottery Fund and in April of this year we heard that Charleston had been awarded a £69,000 grant towards development funding. This allows us – with the additional help of a very generous grant from the Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement – to start to refine our plans. A feasibility study has been carried out by the architectural firm of Purcell Miller Tritton and this has suggested how the barn and adjacent spaces might be adapted for the uses we have in mind. We hope to select architects through a competitive tender process this summer and to be able to announce the name of the successful architect in the autumn.

There is a long way yet to go. Not least of our objectives is the need to raise some £5 million to carry out the building works. Our fundraising plans are currently being developed and will include a further application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a substantial part of that total. We are also looking to raise a significant endowment for the Trust; and a great deal of thought is being given to the preparation of a sound business plan. The new spaces created by the project will need to be as economical as possible to maintain and run, and will be expected to make a positive financial contribution to the Trust.

As this is a project of such importance to Charleston we want to make sure that we consult as widely as possible about it.  Over the coming months we will be consulting with staff and volunteers, and then with our many friends and supporters, to ensure that we keep everyone who is involved with Charleston informed about our progress and provide an opportunity for them to play a part in it. We will welcome suggestions and would like to hear about the sort of facilities that people would like to see at Charleston. The plan has begun well with generous initial support. We hope very much that it will continue to run, if not always smoothly (that is a lot to expect) then certainly vigorously and successfully.

Future issues of Canvas will, we hope, take the story further!

Giles Waterfield

This article is indebted to the historical research undertaken by Judy Woodman for The Charleston Trust in 2008.