📍46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD, UK
1904 – 1907“I grew up at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a tall, dark house crammed with Victorian furniture, gaslight and grief — my mother died when I was thirteen, and my half-sister Stella soon after, and my father's mourning filled every room. Summers in St Ives, by the lighthouse at Godrevy, were the bright counterweight, and I wrote them into To the Lighthouse. When father died in 1904, Vanessa, Thoby, Adrian and I fled across London to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. It was everything Kensington was not: airy and spacious, lit by electricity, its windows looking onto the trees of the square. I had two rooms of my own at the top of the house. We painted the walls white and stayed up half the night with Thoby's Cambridge friends — Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf — at Thursday evenings where anything could be said. That was the beginning of the Bloomsbury Group, and of my life as a writer. Freedom, I learned here, starts with a room of one's own.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today