Bloomsbury Group Guided Reading Tour, Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival

This lovely event forms part of the Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival 2014, which will play host to a range of different authors in celebration of their works.  

As well as the living writers filling the festival, this guided tour through the townhouses of Bloomsbury provides a physical history lesson on the lives of some classic British authors, including Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot. The walk will be a novel way of bringing the literary past to life with fascinating insights on the Bloomsbury group authors’ personal and professional pursuits. For example, Charles Dickens’s home at 48 Doughty Street is a Georgian terraced house where tragedy and success struck the writer’s life. The death of his young sister-in-law and muse, Mary Hogarth, occurred in the house in 1837, yet some of Dickens’s greatest novels, such as Oliver Twist, were also penned there in later years.  

The Bloomsbury walk will be hosted by a certified Blue Badge Guide, and the meeting place will be outside St Giles Casino, on the right hand side corner of Tottenham Court Road and Great Russell Street, at 1.30pm. Tickets for this event are selling fast, so book to avoid disappointment. 

If you are particularly interested in the Bloomsbury Group of authors, Jans Ondaatje Rolls will be discussing the eating habits of the intellectual circle in her talk on Sunday 14th September. The Bloomsbury Cookbook is illustrated with examples of recipes and culinary references she found in the diaries and letters of E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and others.