From 2006 my office settled in Mortimer Market on the ‘other side’ of Tottenham Court Road. I was now closer to UCL in Gower Street in more than a geographical sense. As well as constantly retracing the long familiar route to Dillons/Waterstones I found I was making more extended use of UCL’s classrooms and facilities. I also inevitably spent more time in Bloomsbury; and Bloomsbury was very different from Fitzrovia and Soho.
But Bloomsbury was not always a land of toffs and privilege. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Sir Leslie Stephens’ four children – Thoby, Adrian, Virginia and Vanessa – moved out of their house in Hyde Park Grove and took a house at 46 Gordon Square in 1904, their peers were astonished and concerned: this was not a place upper middle-class women could be expected to inhabit with equanimity.
Now I’d best get the Bloomsbury Group done and dusted having introduced them. The Stephens became the focus of a collection of like-minded friends, most of whom had first met whilst attending Trinity College Cambridge. This is where Thoby, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf had all studied. They specialised, it seems, in art and sex. Nor was it all talk. As well as imbibing and propagating Post-Impressionist art, the members of the Bloomsbury Group were unabashed innovators in the field of relationships. Vanessa married art critic Clive Bell but had affairs with the artist and critic Roger Fry and the painter Duncan Grant. The bisexual Grant had several relationships with men, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, the novelist David Garnett and Lytton Strachey. Strachey was adored by Dora Carrington, although she married Ralph Partridge, who was an object of Strachey’s interest. Vanessa’s daughter Angelica thought her father was Clive bell but was told when she was 18 that it was actually Duncan Grant. A few years later Angelica married David Garnett, who had been her true father’s lover more than two decades earlier. And on it goes!
I confess to very mixed feelings about the Bloomsbury Group. Undoubtedly a density of talent and propensity for cultural, sexual and moral innovation; but also a home for snobbish arrogance and a disdain for the less fortunate.
Interestingly, I taught last year in the university facilities that now occupy 46 Gordon Square, once the home of the Stephens and, between 1916 until his death in 1946, Keynes. There’s not much evidence of prior occupation left, but the views over the Square remain and an active imagination can fill in some detail.
As with Fitzrovia and Soho, historical memories abound. But this is not a randomised tour guide, so I will focus on a few personal encounters and memories.
One way of broaching my long association with UCL is via a mention of The Jeremy Bentham pub. Originally called the Duke of Wellington, the name was subsequently altered to celebrate Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, who is frequently seen as a founder of UCL. Given that he was 78 at the time his role was doubtless more philosophical than practical. Bentham’s contribution, whatever it amounted to, is preserved, as an ‘auto-icon’, in a glass case in the South Cloisters of UCL (‘he’ apparently used to be wheeled into committee meetings to keep an eye on things). The foundation stone for UCL was laid on 30 April 1827 and it was from its opening in 1828 – and controversially – open to students unable or unwilling to declare Anglican faith (the three principal benefactors were Catholic, Jewish and Noncomformist). UCL was mocked as ‘The Cockney College’, and the poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed wrote a spoof ‘Discourse’ delivered by a port-soaked Oxford college tutor to his peers in 1825 while the new university was under consideration:
Ye Dons and ye Doctors, ye Provosts and Proctors,
Who are paid to monopolize knowledge,
Come, make opposition, by vote and petition,
To the radical infidel college …
But let them not babble of Greek to the rabble,
Nor teach the Mechanics their letters;
The labouring classes were born to be asses,
And not to be aping their betters.’
I got to know the warren which is the UCL campus quite well over the years, but became especially familiar with one specific lecture theatre. This was the Darwin LT. The Darwin Building, which extends to Torrington Place, actually displaced the former home of Charles Darwin. Darwin lived in what is now 112 Gower Street but was then 12 Upper Gower Street between 1838 and 1842. In a letter of October 183 he wrote: ‘We are living a life of extreme quietness … we have given up all parties, for they agree with neither of us; and if one is quiet in London there is nothing like its quietness; there is a grandeur about its smoky fogs and the dull distant sounds of cabs and coaches; in fact you may oerceive I am becoming a thorough-paced cockney, and I glory in thoughts that I shall be here for the next six months.’
I taught medical students in the Darwin LT for many years, and I miss my contact with these undergraduates more so than with postgraduates in fact, mainly because one could actually see (some of their) minds opening up to receive novel ideas. One memory: for fun, and hooked up to a roving microphone, I once walked up one side of the theatre, left the building to enter Gower Street, then re-entered the theatre to descend on its other side, lecturing the whole time. I got a round of applause! I have always wondered since if it might be possible to leave the theatre and walk round Waterstones while continuing to lecture.
Back to The Jeremy Bentham pub briefly. It was here that I tended to meet students fresh from lectures or seminars, or more occasionally involved in various forms of political activism. Again, fond memories.
There is one other Bloomsbury pub I must mention, and one I have blogged about in its own right. The TCR in Tottenham Court Road became in my later years at UCL and into retirement a favourite port of call to read and, mostly, to write. I even found its staff willing to dissuade other customers from occupying ‘my table’ by the plugs, and pouring my glasses of pinot grigio and tap water as I entered and before I was seated and my laptop sorted. It is difficult to under-estimate the significance of these ‘familiarity bonds’.