📍46 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, UK
1925 – 1946“In August 1925 I married John Maynard Keynes, the economist, and came to live with him at 46 Gordon Square, a tall terraced house on a leafy square in Bloomsbury, in the heart of London. I was a ballerina from Saint Petersburg, trained at the Imperial Ballet School, and I had danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes across Europe and America, famous for my sparkle and comedy in La Boutique fantasque. Maynard had fallen in love with me when he saw me dance. Gordon Square was the home ground of the Bloomsbury Group, and our neighbours were Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and their friends, writers and painters who were clever, unconventional and sometimes unkind to an outsider like me, who mixed up her English words and said exactly what she thought. Virginia Woolf thought me a bird-brain at first, but I made my own friends and my own way. I kept dancing, and I acted on stage and on the radio, and in 1930 I helped to found the Camargo Society, which gave British ballet its start. Maynard and I were devoted to each other, and our home was full of music, art and laughter. Maynard loved the theatre, and in 1936 he founded the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, where I acted in plays by Ibsen and others. We spent our weekends at Tilton, our farmhouse in Sussex. During the war, I cared for him as he worked himself to exhaustion on the peace and the new world economy. A blue plaque on 46 Gordon Square remembers Maynard, but I like to think the house remembers the Russian dancer who filled it with life.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today