Virginia Woolf at Tavistock Square

Yesterday in 1924, Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought the third floor flat at 52 Tavistock Square. Tavistock Square is located in Bloomsbury, a notoriously literary district of London (an area where I conveniently work...) that gave its name to the highly influential and well-regarded Bloomsbury Set of which the Woolfs were members. The square is a stone's throw from the British museum.

Virginia Woolf's relationship with Bloomsbury began in 1902 when she and her her three siblings moved there following their father's death. It was not until 1924, though, that Tavistock Square became home. 64 years since Virginia Woolf's death, the square has gained a more somber reputation as the location where the Number 30 bus was destroyed by one of the explosions on 7th July 2005. This was not, however, the first time that war visited number 52. In October 1940 the Woolf's home fell victim to a direct hit from a German bomb:

So to Tavistock Square. With a sigh of relief saw a heap of ruins. Three houses, I sh. say gone. Basement all rubble. Only relics an old basket chair (bought in Fitzroy Sqre days) & Penmans board To Let. Otherwise bricks & wood splinters. One glass door in the next door house hanging. I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books. Woolf, Virginia, 'Sunday 20th October 1940', Patrick Rosenbaum, Stanford, The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, (University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 62

The site where Number 52 Tavistock Square stood now forms part of the Tavistock Hotel but Woolf has not been forgotten; a statue of her stands today in the gardens of Tavistock Square.