Charleston Trust

In 1916 Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved from London to a farmhouse at Charleston in Sussex, where they established a retreat for their friends and colleagues from the Bloomsbury Group and Omega Workshops. The house became an important meeting place and workshop for writers and painters of the period, such as Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. Both Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant spent the remainder of their lives there. After the death of Duncan Grant in 1978, the Charleston Trust was set up as an independent registered charity to preserve the house, with its contents and grounds, as a national monument to both the Bloomsbury Group, and the decorative art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. With the support of a Friends' Group and benefactors, the Trust has not only restored the house and its contents to their former glory, but continues to add to the collections housed there. In addition to opening the house and grounds to the public, a number of Bloomsbury-associated events are organised each year, including an annual Charleston Festival.