OTP 2020 Hub - Charlston, East Sussex

In 1916, the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, along with Duncan’s friend and lover David Garnett, moved to Charleston. The farmhouse was an ideal location, providing them with space and privacy to work on their art, and live free from conventions. Right from the start, Charleston was the home of queer relationships and alternative ideas.

From there, Charleston would become the Sussex home of the Bloomsbury group – a largely queer group of artists, writers and thinkers, including Virginia Woolf (Vanessa Bell's sister), Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes. Together, they forged new ways of living at Charleston in the early 20th century, with the house acting as a space of freedom where they could explore love, friendship, pacifism, atheism, same-gender relationships and polyamory.

Before Duncan Grant’s death in 1978, he had the chance to glimpse freedoms to come. He lived to see homosexual acts between men decriminalised in 1967 and, in the late 1960s, Grant met a new generation of young openly gay men. Simon Watney, then a student the University of Sussex became a regular visitor to Charleston and took Duncan to Gay Liberation Front meetings in Brighton.

Today, Charleston is a house, garden and art gallery situated in the South Downs National Park. Charleston runs festivals, exhibitions, workshops, talks and events year-round, including a Queer Bloomsbury programme.

Find out more about their OUTing The Past event HERE.