BLOOMSBURY by LAMPLIGHT pt.1

Notes on a trip to London, 2.10.2010

Housmans (Housmans.com)

A stonesthrow away from the Kings Cross station, around the corner on the Caledonian road stands Housmans ('London's oldest radical bookshop'), a little socialist-radicalist bookseller with an array of London-centric titles and leftist propaganda published by everyone from tiny-run individuals who have doctored the sleeves of their job centre booklets to make a 'zine to 'serious' books from (ironically) the big corp. publishers. A mouldering basement formerly held stacks of second hand travel books, periodicals and lousy paperback fiction, unfortunately on the occasion of my last visit this was closed for the foreseeable. Upstairs, at the back, a man sat at a computer behind a curtain eating a Marks & Spencer's sandwich and, presumably, planning world revolution.
    Housman's opened in 1945, when a wave of optimism about what was possible if we all 'pulled together' saw a brief turn towards socialism in this country, at a point when such thinking was popular. It seems to have been re-emerging, blinking and brushing the dust off, into fashion and people's consciousness at intervals, when the moment has allowed it, ever since that time.
    A quick, cursory glance at the stand that holds those limited works of vitriol, comix and pamphleteering that we might for want of a better word term 'fanzines', reveals those that have been accepted for display to date back, mostly, to the nineties or earlier, suggesting that no one has seem fit to cull the stock since that time. One such august publication looks at the possibillity of global one-world government becoming a possibility in 1984, in line with Orwell's fictional depiction of that year. Might we be, it suggests, in the nineteen eighties, in a new age of austerity, echoing the spirit of fifty years earlier?
    Up the road, twenty minutes away or a short hop by underground train or London taxi, art-deco lamps from the guilded age are burning in the foyer of the Tavistock Hotel, Bloomsbury.


Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, authoress of essays and exponent of modernism who killed herself in 1941 when she decided the modern world we had created was not worth living in any more. She was somewhat upper-crust: her mother seems to have been a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters including Edward Burne-Jones; her father Leslie Stephen was an editor and critic, which means that she would have grown up around the detritus of Victorian literary society. They were a large family; both parents had been married before, and both had children from an earlier marriage.

Woolf's mother?

    Her beloved mother and father died while she was still young, and, following a series of nervous breakdowns, Virginia went to live with sister Vanessa and brother Adrian in a house at 49 Gordon Square.
    Gordon Square is reached if one walks up Bloomsbury Street from Centre Point past the British Museum, turning right at Bedford Sq. past the unbelieveably Orwellian ('Ministry of Truth') menacing Senate House building, where the rather grand facades of Georgian terraces face on to green spaces in the shape of small parks, now closed up at night, which must have looked roughly the same in Virginia's time. But, by the end of her girlhood, it must have become quite clear to her that the world was changing in ways she never previously could have envisioned.

next: a trip around Gordon Square.