The Bloomsbury Group

Ah, the view from one of my Thursday evening Bloomsbury Group soirées. OK, I'm about 100 years and two days late for that - but I am at least in the right place. This is the view from the balcony of the classroom at Birkbeck where I was teaching today (digital publishing and social media marketing), overlooking Gordon Square.

Somehow, despite having taught in this building a number of times over the years, I had previously been oblivious to all the blue plaques and not realised that this very house is where the Stephen sisters Vanessa (Bell) and Virginia (Woolf) lived and hosted their Bloomsbury Group gatherings. Maynard Keynes lived here later, and Lytton Strachey was a few doors down. They would have had the same view, minus the Post Office Tower.

I was reminded of my first job in academia - a brief hedonistic period in the early 1990s when I shared offices with other psychology researchers and we referred to ourselves as The Bloomsbury Group (Staffordshire Branch). I was Lytton Strachey, obvs.