It would be hard to pick a more bucolic English setting than Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. 

Once the home of Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant and, as was their modernist way, his lover David Garnett. This was a very unconventional household for 1916. 

Part of the Bloomsbury Group, they were some of the 20^th Century’s most progressive artists, writers, intellectuals and philosophers who came together to re-imagine society in a completely free and different way. Vanessa Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf, often visited along with other notable members of the group including John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. 

As soon as Bell and Grant had moved into this old farmhouse, they began to paint every surface  – walls, floors, doors and all pieces of furniture, inviting their progressive friends to stay and help transform the house into a living breathing piece of art. But, also, as a working farm, allowing the men, as conscientious objectors, to find farm work and thus avoid conscription. 

Vanessa Bell died in her bed here in April 1961, whilst Duncan Grant continued to live and paint in the house until his death in 1978 aged 93. They are buried next to each other in the nearby churchyard of St. Peter’s in Firle. Again, the church has been beautifully hand painted by members of the Bloomsbury Group, but notably Grant and Bell. It’s a stunningly beautiful yet simple church made even more magical by their enduring art. 

Today the house has been brought back to life and restored to how they would have lived in it. You’re able to freely walk around with expert but not intrusive guides on hand to tell you how they lived, who would have visited and slept there through each decade,  and who was responsible for painting each room. It’s a gorgeous flowing house with windows looking onto the walled garden below the bedrooms and through French doors from a glorious downstairs sitting room, Vanessa Bell’s bedroom and its adjoining studio.

“It’s most lovely, very solid and simple, with … perfectly flat windows and wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all round the garden part, and a little lawn sloping down to it, with formal bushes on it.” — Vanessa Bell

The walled garden at Charleston was created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant from their artist friend Roger Fry’s designs, transforming vegetable plots and hen runs into stunningly beautiful cottage gardens with Mediterranean influences. 

“Never, never have I seen quite such a wonderful place! … What excellent things there will be to paint in that garden with the pond and buildings.” – Dora Carrington

“The house seems full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes … lying about in the garden which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples.” 
– Vanessa Bell 

Our journey home took us via the Kent hamlet of Tudeley and the remarkable yet diminutive All Saints Anglican Church. For All Saints is the only church in the whole world to have all of its twelve windows created by the great Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall, creating an extraordinary jewel-like masterpiece. 

In 1963, the 21-year-old daughter of local landowners, Sir Henry and Lady D’Avigdor drowned off the East Sussex coast in a tragic boating accident. Having just enjoyed a Chagall exhibition in Paris with their daughter, her parents approached and persuaded him to accept a commission to create a memorial window in her honour. When Chagall visited the church for the first time to oversee the installation of the east window, he is reported to have said “This is magnificent, I will do them all” – the remaining eleven windows were installed between 1974 and the final one in 1985, sadly the year of his death, so he never saw the completed windows.

We were fortunate to be able to visit the church on a brilliant sunny day, with the light flooding in through the beautiful marine blue and yellow stained-glass. There was hardly anyone here when we arrived, allowing us to sit and contemplate just how stunningly beautiful these windows are. 

Truly unique and really quite surreal.