The Bloomsbury Set’s radical spirit restored
The £8m expansion of Charleston in East Sussex would have made Woolf et al proud, says Alastair Sooke
This gender fluidity reminds us of the ‘queerness’ of Bloomsbury, and feels especially resonant today
Charleston Firle, East Sussex
One of the perennially baffling things about the Bloomsbury Group is how they acquired a reputation that feels quite so cosy and “safe”. Here was a pioneering group of 20th-century painters, writers and intellectuals, who bravely flouted Victorian strictures governing the way they should behave socially, artistically and sexually. In short, they were radicals. Yet, today, they are remembered as much for interior design as for bed-hopping intrigue, and their conformity-defying courage tends to be neglected.
Well, not for much longer. At least, that is the intention of those responsible for tending the flame at Charleston – the gorgeously decorated, romantically ramshackle late-16th-century farmhouse by the South Downs, where the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in 1916.
Full of wonderful paintings, faded, fraying fabrics and witty visual flourishes, the house was occupied and embellished, on and off, by them and their family and friends for more than six decades.
Its unique atmosphere offers a definition of “spirit of place”.
To preserve that spirit, however, the Charleston Trust has always felt obliged to limit visitor numbers since the house was opened to the public in 1986 (less than a decade after Grant’s death, in 1978). With a tiny café crammed into an old garage and apple shed, the fragile site wasn’t equipped to receive many more than the 27,000 people who visited every “season”, from March to October. Space was always at a premium.
All that is set to change. On Saturday, the Trust will unveil a major new development at Charleston, which has been 12 years in the planning, and cost around £8million – and visitors will be welcome all year round.
Across a track from the house, a few yards from a working dairy farm, two flint-walled 18th-century barns – acquired from the
Firle Estate, and badly damaged by fire during the Eighties – have been beautifully renovated by Julian Harrap
Architects, best known for their work at Sir John Soane’s Museum and the restoration, with David Chipperfield, of the Neues Museum in Berlin.
There are many clever and sensitive touches, such as steel-framed glass doors that evoke the French windows installed by Bell when she converted a ground-floor dairy and larder at Charleston into her bedroom, after making the house her principal home in 1939. The bigger barn, with underfloor heating, will offer a flexible space for events, such as the annual Charleston Festival, which has been running at Charleston for almost three decades. Meanwhile, the Threshing Barn has been fitted out as a substantial, and much-needed, restaurant.
Next door, another firm of architects, established by Jamie Fobert, whose reconfiguration of Tate St Ives has been shortlisted for the 2018 RIBA Stirling Prize for Britain’s best new building, has designed five interlinked galleries, constructed out of cross-laminated timber, for temporary exhibitions.
The new structure occupies a curious site, in that it is effectively hidden from view by barns and outhouses from almost every direction – even, apparently, from atop the Downs. It thus forms a sort of semiinvisible cloister. In a sense, this is a shame, since Fobert – a keen cyclist, who spent time pedalling down the Sussex lanes to study the vernacular architecture – has done a thoughtful, sympathetic job, which deserves to be seen.
Eventually, a sloping, rust-coloured weathering-steel roof (for which fundraising is ongoing; the Trust hopes it will be installed next year) will complement the bright orange lichen that covers Charleston’s higgledy-piggledy russet roofs – the same “wonderful tiled roofs” that Bell lovingly described in a letter of 1916.
Inside, the scale of the galleries mimic the variously sized proportions of the rooms of Charleston itself, where visitors stumble along low-ceilinged corridors before coming across areas that are higher and (relatively) grander, such as Bell and Grant’s magnificent studio. Here, the pair would paint companionably, like two animals in a stable munching at their mangers side by side, to paraphrase Bell’s son Quentin, the writer and potter who fashioned Charleston’s whimsical ceramic lampshades.
With the new development, the intention was to create not the sort of super-slick gallery space that one might find in a city, but something more relaxed and in keeping with the rustic surroundings. In this sense, it adheres to a successful formula established by the rural outpost of commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth at Durslade Farm in Somerset.
At Charleston, even the new, unisex lavatories, with their trough-like stainless steel sinks, evoke machinery on the neighbouring farm, which emits moos and grunts, and wafts of dung, in equal measure. The hum of the milking machine is audible most afternoons.
The galleries are being inaugurated with three separate exhibitions. One is what you would expect: a display of a recently acquired, 50-piece dinner service commissioned from Bell and Grant by Kenneth Clark, shortly before his appointment as director of the National Gallery. Each plate is decorated with a different famous woman, from the Queen of Sheba to Greta Garbo. Next year, the textile designer Cressida Bell, daughter of Quentin, will curate a show of 20th-century British colourists.
The other exhibitions, though, are more surprising. In the South Gallery, we encounter 84 arresting black-andwhite portraits of black trans and lesbian people by South African artist Zanele Muholi. Perhaps, if they were still alive today, Bell and Grant would decorate a dish with one of them.
Muholi’s photographs complement the main event: a group show featuring work relating to or directly inspired by Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf ’s quicksilver novel Orlando. Published 90 years ago, this nimble exploration of gender fluidity reminds us of the “queerness” of Bloomsbury, and feels especially resonant today.
The novel was inspired by, and dedicated to, Woolf ’s lover, Vita Sackville-west. A first edition annotated by the latter’s scandalised mother is displayed, complete with a spiteful note above Woolf ’s portrait: “The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each other.” It encapsulates the sort of prejudice that Bloomsbury’s bohemians were adamant they would resist.
Here, then, is a manifesto for the Charleston of tomorrow: a place designed to appeal to a younger, wider audience than the ageing heritage tourists who currently make up its primary constituency – without, of course, wishing to alienate those who have supported it over the years.