Bloomsbury by Lamplight, Denouement

The Hotel at Tavistock Square

It was built post war, so does that make it faux-deco? Could it be that already, in this period of austerity, people were harking back to jammier earlier times?
      As we know, reader, there was no time in history when things were somehow more correct or morally upright than they are now, only periods of harmony and relatively good design. The deco era was eventually killed off by a surfeit of burnished wooden parts and gilt lines, or perhaps people just wanted something a little more functional and reliable. In any case, many of these sorts of detail are still visible in the Tavistock hotel.
      These days, it would be a cheap place to come for a pint of IPA (at London prices). Afterwards, during the hours of daylight, you can go for a stroll through the pleasant green area outside - one of many around here.


War (what is it good for? Apparently nothing)

Around the park you can see where the original railings once ran. These must have been stripped out in the Great Iron Swindle of the Second War. Most of this metal, the story goes, so patriotically given up (a huge propaganda effort), ended up dumped in the Thames as un-usable. As historical portents go this seems a symbol of the kind of unpleasant future we were heading for, something the unadorned buildings and public spaces shorn of their trimmings tend to testify to... one in which people will be continually deluded into parting with any kind of precious metal they may have accumulated should they be fortunate enough.
      You can say what you like about Britain in the 200 years or so pre-C20, in which public parks and (so-called) altruistic ventures like this one were popular, but there must have been at that time a great deal of, if not public spirit, then at least civic pride. I say so-called altruistic ventures because it seems to me that the kind of public spaces I'm taking about were good for everybody, and that the philanthropists who gave up their time, cash and land for such places - and built a fair sort of terraced housing for the workers they employed - were safe in the knowledge that they were giving something back, and fulfilling their part of the bargain with the land that had allowed them to become rich men. That 'social contract' was torn up now, in favour of blind patriotism, to pay for the wars of the 21st century - the irony being that it probably did no good at all, if indeed killing Germans can be construed as good.
      You can still see the stumps around any of our major towns, like cheery domestic reminders of the stumps on some of the veterans who came back from those wars. The ones here in Tav. Square have been replaced, with the effect of making the park about a foot smaller on each side. Nothing that is taken away can ever be restored without losing a little something.
      If you think that this kind of argument is just dumb commie socialist thinking, and not particularly relevant in a discussion of a part of London lived in (historically, since it isn't homes any more) by fairly or very well-off people, then try to imagine a property developer today reconstructing a large area of the middle of one of our major cities and building a large public park for every dozen or so houses. More likely they would be packed in like our lives depended on it.
      I am trying to establish an idea of the kind of world into which the Bloomsbury's of the tens and the twenties were born, and the kind of world in which they found themselves living only 20-30 years later. Not one that was wonderful, for sure, if one was lower class, but one in which the upper-middle could afford to be less mean, with class war still primarily a thing of the future.


The attitude of the Bloomsbury's towards the Second War appears to have been: Not again. Whilst the first one may have been a terrible thing against which those who did not fight were insulated to some extent, Vanessa and Clive Bell did lose a child, their eldest son Julian, to the Spanish Civil War. Mark Hussey has edited a volume of essays on Virginia Woolf's personal opposition to war, in both her fiction and nonfiction writing. Having said all that, they may have had vested interests: Leonard Woolf was a Jew. He and Virginia were both rumoured to be on a death list that would have been enacted had the mooted German invasion ever gone ahead.
      Any cultural advantages we may have enjoyed in this country in the later part of the twentieth century are due entirely to the fact that this pogrom never took place.
      Personally I have often thought that the rock band Queen is what popular culture would have looked like, and sounded like, had the Nazis won the Second World War. I cannot say why.


Leaving Tavistock Square


At the opposite end of the square there is even less left to find - one corner has been turned into a Starbucks now. The British Medical Association is next door. Charles Dickens used to have a house on this site. On the Seventh of July 2005, at this corner of Tavistock Square, a double decker bus exploded in a terrorist attack on London, the fourth and final of several devices that would go off on public transport that day. So it goes.


From where her bust stands, at the opposite corner of the square from where events on 7/7 took place, if she were to turn to her right Virginia might just be able to make out the British Telecom Tower (what Alan Moore re-dubbed in V for Vendetta as 'The Ear') - 'we are at least listening to you, if not actually watching you,' behing the implication here. It's little wonder that Thomas Pynchon found such paranoia present in this city to fuel his encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow (published 1973. The tower was finished in 1966, though its existence remained an official 'secret' until the nineties, when it was finally allowed to appear on OS maps).
      On my particular pilgrimage Virginia Woolf was ultimately as elusive as another of Pynchon's characters, V, who is both woman and symbol, who may once have existed but ultimately affects us from the realm of the inanimate, to which all worlds, eventually, tend. Now, almost seventy years gone, Virginia exists in the mass consciousness on the written page, ethereal, not the electronic proof we demand of our present-day public figures (only one recording of her exists; it is well worth hearing). She might have been amused that people have seen fit to erect a work of statuary to her at all: 'if I had received that kind of adulation in my lifetime,' she might have said, 'I should have killed myself.'
      Down the way, informal students sit gathered under the tarpaulin of a small café, smoking shishas. Many of them may not have heard of Virginia Woolf, but seventy years ago she wrote her thoughts down, and they are still present, in a real way, that I doubt any of our electronic media will be in a hundred years time. Informational entropy seems to have reached a near-maximum in the city: everyone is talking, but no-one is saying anything. Did she present a part of this, with her stream-of-consciousness, her constant talk about her self; or did she represent something different, a genius, someone for whom life was truly worth celebrating, for whom words were the medium?
      I went to London to find her; she was not there. Anyone else who wants to look for her would be well advised to try somewhere else. The books would be a good place to start.