Charleston House. Formerly the home of Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister) and Duncan Grant. We visited this wonderful home just at the end of our stay in England. To get there you take a train from Victoria Station to Lewes, and a taxi from there to Charleston House. It is out in the countryside with rolling hills of green and yellow all around. The house was a mainstay for the Bloomsbury Group during the Second World War when the bombing was going on in London and they all wanted to escape. Vanessa and Duncan spent a lot of time in this place painting. Not just canvases but all over the house. There are mantels in several rooms that have been painted, all kinds of furniture including the dining room table. It was a very lived in house. There has
been so much written about who these people were and how they lived that I won't go into that here. Suffice it to say that they invented the Bohemian Lifestyle. What I did want to say was that while all the artwork was great to see, all or most of it original --it is the feeling of the lives lived here that make the place different. It is the sum of the friendships and loves that changed it from an ordinary house to the unusual.

The gardens and the pond are as beautiful as the house itself. Most of the statuary and mosiac work is just as it is presented in the history books. There is a sense of peace about the entire property that is hard to convey. It is not surprising that they came and stayed such a long time.