Join Historians Cindy Lawford and Romany Reagan in the heart of Bloomsbury as they explore its extraordinary, intellectual, esoteric soul..
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £8-£10
Bloomsbury is one of the areas of London that has changed the least in the last century and remains associated with learning, literature, museums and medicine. But it has a much deeper history.
It was home to world-famous writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, most notably gathering around Virginia Woolf in Gordon and Tavistock squares, but what was it about Bloomsbury that gave rise to such a flowering of literature, aesthetics and economics as well as changing attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality?
Historian Cindy Lawford takes us on a tour of this intense urban landscape where as Dorothy Parker said "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles” ..
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In parallel to its literary and intellectual preeminence, Bloomsbury was also the birthplace of British Spiritualism.
Dr. Romany Reagan guides us along occult pathways into the heart of Bloomsbury's darkness, exploring the domains of intellectual elites discussing Swedenborg and Blake, and those for whom the area was a centre of esoteric experimentation, female liberation, drunkenness, gothic intrigue - and secret societies.
Along with her fashion tours of Savile Row and Jermyn Street, historian CIndy Lawford has partnered with playwright Mike Carter to create London Literary Tours delivering fully-scripted performances packed with excerpts from poems, novels, letters and nasty reviews.
Dr. Romany Reagan is a research fellow with Museum of the Home in London, studying the hidden histories of women in medicine. Her exhibition Women's Weeds will run this summer at the Museum of the Home, July-September 2023. Since completion of her PhD, Romany has documented her ongoing research into lost histories and place-based folklore and legends on her blog Blackthorn & Stone.
