by anglofille

I’m lucky to call the Bloomsbury section of London home during this first year of my Ph.D. studies.  How to describe Bloomsbury?  If you look beyond the throngs of students, busloads of tourists at the British Museum and the ever-present road construction, you will find plenty of old literary ghosts.  As a literature student, it’s like living inside a carnival of dead authors.

I frequently pass 46 Gordon Square, where Virginia Woolf lived and where the fabled Bloomsbury Group began.  While most people just breeze right by, I always stop for a moment.  Laugh if you must, but it’s hallowed ground to me.  Sprinkled around this neighborhood there are plaques commemorating T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and Dickens.  And in secret corners you’ll find other landmarks, such as the apartment at 18 Rugby Street where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent their wedding night.

Right off Russell Square – the very heart of Bloomsbury – there is Senate House, a rather ugly, white and somewhat phallic-looking building.  The central administrative offices of the University of London are located inside Senate House, and more importantly, so is the central library of the university, where I spend way too much time.

Senate House has achieved a level of notoriety because it was most certainly the model for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel 1984. During World War II, Senate House served as the Ministry of Information, where Orwell worked.  In 1984, Orwell described the building thusly: “It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace three hundred metres into the air…[and] picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”

The perfect place for a library, don't you think?

Possible link to the Bloomsbury Group