They lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles
7.00pm Wednesday 24th May 2023
Admission: Tickets £8.00/ £10.00 in advance only HERE
Join Historians CINDY LAWFORD and ROMANY REAGAN in the heart of Bloomsbury as they explore its extraordinary, intellectual, esoteric soul.
BLOOMSBURY is one of the areas of London that has changed the least in the last century and remains associated with learning, literature, museums and medicine.
Home to dozens of world-famous writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, the area was awash with literary communities – most notably gathering around Virginia Woolf in Gordon and Tavistock squares; Lady Ottoline Morrell in Bedford Square; and Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in what was then Devonshire Street.
CINDY LAWFORD will take us on a tour of this intense urban landscape, and look at those it excluded like T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Mew and Wyndham Lewis. Dorothy Parker said "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles” - but the rivalry, jealousies and outbreaks of bitchiness that often resulted produced work that deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
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In parallel to its literary and intellectual pretensions Bloomsbury was also the birthplace of British Spiritualism. During an increasingly secularised age, interest in spirituality and connections ‘beyond the veil’ touched almost every apectof Victorian life - in particular via the séance. Tracing spiritualism’s lines of origin, Dr. ROMANY REAGAN guides us along occult pathways into the heart of Bloomsbury darkness, exploring the domains of both intellectual elites discussing Swedenborg and Blake, and those for whom the area was a centre of esoteric experimentation, female liberation, drunkenness, gothic intrigue and secret societies.
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Along with her fashion tours of Savile Row and Jermyn Street, historian CINDY LAWFORD has partnered with playwright Mike Carter to create London Literary Tours delivering fully-scripted performances packed with excerpts from poems, novels, letters and nasty reviews.
Dr.
ROMANY REAGAN is a research fellow with Museum of the Home in London, studying the hidden histories of women in medicine. Her exhibition 'Women's Weeds' will run this summer at the Museum of the Home, July-September 2023. Since completion of her PhD, Romany has documented her ongoing research into lost histories and place-based folklore and legends on her blog Blackthorn & Stone.
