Birkbeck School of Arts to participate in Open House London 2013

Gordon Square was developed in the 1820s by Thomas Cubitt, then London’s best known builder. It is famous for its association with the Bloomsbury Set, a collective of intellectuals, writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, who lived and worked around Bloomsbury in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Vanessa (born in 1879) and Virginia (born in 1882) Stephen moved, with their brothers Thoby and Adrian, to the buildings in bohemian Bloomsbury. In 1916, 46 Gordon Square was occupied by the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). In 1925 he married the Russian Lydia Lopokova, a prima ballerina in the Diaghilev company.

Paintings by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant have been loaned to Birkbeck by Bell’s daughter, Angelica Garnett, and currently grace the walls of the Keynes Library, a striking nineteenth-century library named in honour of Keynes. 

The basement of 43 Gordon Square houses the Birkbeck Cinema, designed by Surface Architects, which opened in 2007 and won a Royal Institute of British Architecture Award (RIBA) in the London category – the gold standard in architectural prizes.

In 2012/13 the School redeveloped the reception area and adjacent spaces to provide a new exhibition space for digital and material displays and small-scale performances. The Peltz Gallery was designed by architects and urban designers Burrell Foley Fischer, and is currently hosting an exhibition entitled “Touching the Book”. The exhibition explores the history of literacy for blind and visually impaired people in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe through the development of embossed literature and runs until 30 October 2013.

At 11.30am and 1.30pm on both Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 September, Birkbeck alumni Victoria McNeile and Christopher Woodward will offer tours of "The Wider Gordon Square", setting the Birkbeck buildings in context

Source: Birkbeck