News and articles

Charleston in Vogue

Posted on February 10, 2011

A detail of one of the beautiful doors at Charleston, painted by Vanessa Bell, illustrates this article about Bloomsbury-style plates:

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

Vanessa Bell painted door and Bloomsbury plates


Posted in Press |

American Vogue features Bloomsbury stationery

Posted on February 10, 2011


page from American VogueCrop of American Vogue feature on Bloomsbury Stationery by Anna Fewster

Posted in Press |

Designing the future

Posted on January 13, 2011

Christopher Woodward interviews Jamie Fobert and Julian Harrap, the architects of Charleston’s barns project

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’.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Interviews |

Art for advertisement

Posted on January 13, 2011

Posters by the Bloomsbury Group

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles |

Bloomsbury voices: Duncan Heyes

Posted on January 13, 2011

Canvas Issue 26

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Canvas |

The barn at Charleston

Posted on January 13, 2011

Giles Waterfield, Chairman of the Trustees, brings us up to date with the Barns Project.

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles |

Looking back on 20 years of the Charleston Festival

Posted on January 13, 2011

Canvas Issue 24

20 Stellar Years: Virginia Nicholson in conversation with Olivier Bell

Even if they don’t know her, Charleston Festival regulars will have seen her there. White hair swept back in a bun, and quietly colourful with a string of beads, she sits in the auditorium taking her audience duties seriously: attentive, intelligent, appreciative. Between events, seated with a glass of wine and a sandwich in the book tent, she’s often surrounded by festival-goers almost as eager to shake her hand and engage her in chat as they are to snatch a word with the famous speakers – the Salman Rushdies, Doris Lessings and Andrew Marrs signing their books for the eager queue at the next table. Olivier Bell is a fixture at the Charleston Festival, and for twenty years now she’s never missed one.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Canvas, Interviews |

Painter’s model and poet: Paul Roche

Posted on January 13, 2011

Canvas Issue 23 by Paul E.H. Davis

Shortly before Paul Roche’s death, aged 91,on 30 October 2007, Darren Clarke, Charleston’s Visitor Manager, went to Mallorca to interview him and record his memories of Duncan Grant and Charleston.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Canvas, Interviews |

The utmost for the highest – Memories of Duncan Grant

Posted on January 13, 2011

Canvas Issue 22 by Simon Watney

Angelica Garnett was interviewed by Simon Watney at Charleston on 26 May 2008. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Simon Watney: For the dwindling band of us who actually remember Duncan and life at Charleston it’s hardly credible that it’s thirty years since he died. I want to start at the beginning. Did Duncan speak much about his childhood?

Angelica Garnett: No, very little. I knew he was born in Rothiemurchus on the Spey, but a few months after that he was taken to Burma; his family were Anglo-Indian. I know he had an ayah whom he adored. And he was sent back to England when he was about seven – because of the climate, I think.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Canvas, Interviews |

Bloomsbury ballerina

Posted on January 13, 2011

Canvas Issue 21 by Judith Mackrell

Anyone who has read even a sample of Bloomsbury memoirs and biographies will be familiar with the name of Lydia Lopokova. The witty, vivid little ballerina who danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and was married to the economist John Maynard Keynes has flitted through hundreds of footnotes and anecdotes attached to the lives of Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey et al. Yet these anecdotes reveal very little detail about Lydia herself. Based on the literature of Bloomsbury, readers could hardly know that at the peak of her career Lydia’s celebrity was greater than that of any of the writers or artists whom she encountered at Charleston or Gordon Square. They could not know that when journalists flocked to her wedding with Maynard in 1925, it was Lydia who was the main draw. ‘Famous ballerina marries British economist’ was the evening headline – revealingly stressed.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Canvas |