Patti Smith has a passion for the Bloomsbury Group, the influential set of upper-middle class writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals, who came to prominence in England during the early twentieth century and lasted, in various forms, until the 1960s.

The Bloomsbury Group took its name from the district in London where its main associates lived and worked. These included the writers Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey; the artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Dora Carrington; economist John Maynard Keynes; and diarist Frances Partridge.

When not in London, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at their rural retreat Charleston Farmhouse, in Lewes, Sussex—the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In recent years, one of Charleston’s regular visitors has been Patti Smith, who describes the farmhouse as “like home.”

In 2006, Smith was interviewed by the BBC’s Culture Show at Charleston Farmhouse, where she was photographing the “tea cups and saucers,” the bed where Vanessa Bell died, and the personal accoutrements of the artistic life.