Virginia Woolf's London: The Complete Map

Every location from her ten novels.

“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s better than walking in the country.”

Having mapped Wolf Hall, I thought I’d turn to Woolf’s haul. That’s right, for today’s newsletter, I read all ten novels by Virginia Woolf, and mapped every London location she mentions.

Actually, that’s a bit of a fib. I did the reading a few years ago, when I plotted the results onto a Google map. Now, prompted by the 100th anniversary of Mrs Dalloway, I’ve combined all of Woolf’s London locations into something a bit more bespoke. Here it is for your thoughts and consideration:

Click or tap for larger map.

What am I looking at here?

The map shows every London location mentioned by Woolf across her nine novels, plus Flush (a difficult-to-categorise fictionalised biography of a dog, which I’m hereafter including as a novel). I’ve also thrown in locations from her non-fiction series of essays The London Scene, because of the relevance of their subject matter. Finally, I’ve also added locations important to the author’s life, including all her known London addresses (distinguished as purple icons on the map).

The map leaves off locations that are not mentioned anywhere. Hence, you won’t find Southwark Bridge or King’s Cross or Bishopsgate on the map, because Virginia Woolf never namechecks them in her novels.

Because I like making up words, I’ve called this form of literary mapping a ‘geobibliome’. A geobibliome shows every mappable location used by an author in a given area (in this case, London). I’ve also prepared geobibliomes for the Wolf Hall novels of Hilary Mantel, the novels of Charles Dickens, the canon of Sherlock Holmes and the non-fiction masterpiece London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Geobibliomes give us insights into an author’s sense of place, including their blind spots. For example, a careful mapping of Charles Dickens revealed that he never mentioned a London railway station by name in any of his novels. I also discovered that Sherlock Holmes never sets foot in Soho, despite living 10 minutes away. What does the Virginia Woolf geobibliome reveal about the author?

The London of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest novelists. She’s also heavily associated with London, and particularly the Bloomsbury area. Woolf was the most famous of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, a group of artists, writers and thinkers who flourished in the neighbourhood in the early 20th century. As the old quip goes: “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

The entangled lives and liaisons of the Bloomsbury Group would require some kind of futuristic eight-dimensional cartographic software to map out in full. Those ‘love triangles’ were really amorous icosahedra. I went for the much easier challenge of reading the ten Virginia Woolf novels and mapping their contents.

Woolf briefly lived to the north of Brunswick Square, sharing a house with four men. This was, apparently, considered scandalous at the time (she had yet to marry Leonard). Image: Matt Brown

Of the ten novels, several are set largely or wholly in the capital. Most famously, Mrs Dalloway charts a day in the head of a well-to-do lady as she potters around London preparing for a party. In addition, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, Orlando, The Years and Flush all contain a generous dose of London scenery.

The biggest surprise was, actually, how little Bloomsbury figures in her novels. Before embarking on the challenge, I’d read very little Woolf, and assumed she would set her books in the area she is most associated with. But this is emphatically not the case. Only two books make much use of Bloomsbury. Night and Day places Mary Datchet’s suffragette office in Russell Square. Meanwhile, the eponymous Jacob’s Room is vaguely located in the armpit of Lamb’s Conduit Street and Great Ormond Street. Otherwise, Bloomsbury hardly gets a look in. The neighbourhood contains 16 named squares, but Virginia Woolf only mentions Russell Square and Queen Square in her novels.

In contrast to the works of Dickens, the Square Mile is also a bit spartan. Hardly anything north of St Paul’s gets a look-in, and most City references come in-passing and do not serve as important settings. Unsurprisingly for the era, the East End is broached on only four occasions, three of which relate to crime or sordid living conditions. Locations south of the river are similarly scant. Penge and Sidcup make surprise appearances, although both are used as examples of distant places outside the usual stomping grounds of the main characters.

Woolf’s pen, when in London, tends to linger more in the West End and Mayfair, the kind of places where the largely upper middle-class people of her novels might have lived and socialised in real life. Piccadilly is the most-mentioned location of all, present in eight of the ten novels. The next most commonly referenced places are Hampstead, the Houses of Parliament (under various names), St Paul's Cathedral and Strand — all mentioned in seven of the novels.

It’s interesting to note that, for all her ‘stream-of-consciousness’ reputation, Woolf didn’t often write about what she could see out the window. Look at the locations of her London homes. Very few of them are on streets that feature in the stories. And though she spent almost all her formative years in Kensington, the area appears only occasionally, and in passing. The one exception here might be Richmond, which pops up in four novels. These include The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), both written while the Woolfs were living in the area (1914-1924).

Beyond London

Of course, Virginia Woolf did not restrict herself to writing about the capital. Only half the novels are set principally in London, though all ten make regular mentions. I haven’t included locations beyond London in the present map, but you can find the full set of pins on my original Google map.

The most popular location outside of London is Oxford, which appears in eight novels. That’s a little curious. Most of her Bloomsbury friends attended Cambridge (which only appears in five novels), and Woolf herself went to the ‘Ladies Department’ of King’s College London. I have no idea if this tells us anything meaningful about Woolf’s creative inspirations, but I note it in case it’s of interest. After the two university towns, her most popular British references are to the Isle of Skye or Hebrides (setting of To the Lighthouse, but also mentioned in three other novels), Manchester, Scarborough and Windsor/Eton, all mentioned in four books.

Several of the novels dally overseas. Woolf’s first, The Voyage Out, takes place mostly away from London in an unidentified part of South America. Some of the key passages in Orlando visit Greece and Turkey. Every continent except Antarctica is mentioned at least twice. Even the North Pole gets two mentions (though not as a setting — imagine Clarissa Dalloway encountering a polar bear).

Memorials to Virginia Woolf

After Dickens, I suspect that Virginia Woolf is London’s most memorialised literary figure. She is mentioned on at least six plaques. These include two of the ‘official’ English Heritage Blue Plaques — for her homes at Fitzroy Square and in Richmond — putting her in a very exclusive club. Most people only get one.

She also has two statues, of sorts. The first and best known is more of a bust. It stands in Tavistock Square opposite her former home, and is a copy of one taken from life in 1931 by Stephen Tomlin. Meanwhile, a full statue was recently installed on a bench at Richmond Riverside, created by artist Laury Dizengremel.

A statue of one’s own. Image: Matt Brown

Woolf lived in two homes in this area, briefly on Richmond Green followed by nine years on Paradise Road, where she founded the Hogarth Press with husband Leonard Woolf. The modern publisher Paradise Road, which specialises in London-themed non-fiction, is named after this street and literary connection.

She also appears in at least two major artistic representations. Walk into the main entrance of the National Gallery (after the inevitable queue these days) and you might espy her picked out in tesserae on Boris Anrep’s beautiful mosaic floors. Woolf is also represented on the ‘Characters of Fitzrovia’ mural on Goodge Place, where she is depicted towering over the BT Tower (built after her time).

Woolf is the one in the blue dress on the right panel, overlooking the BT Tower. Image: Matt Brown

If you’ve never read any Virginia Woolf…

Before embarking on my Woolf crawl I’d spent very little time in Virginia’s company. I’d read A Room of One’s Own many years ago; so long ago that I could remember little beyond the famous quote. And I’d read Mrs Dalloway a couple of times. That was it. I was a little apprehensive, to be honest. Woolf can have a reputation for being a bit, well, challenging. Her novels typically linger within the minds of her characters, prioritising thoughts, feelings and introspection over narrative. That can be an absolute joy or a bit of a slog, depending on your outlook.

I did struggle a little with her later novels, particularly Between the Acts, which is part novel, part play. But, on the whole, I enjoyed the project immensely. Having read all ten stories, the one thing that stands out most is how versatile Woolf could be. Orlando tells the story of a Tudor poet who lives more than 300 years and changes sex mid-way through. The Waves, meanwhile, shuffles among the inner monologues of six characters, interspersed with italicised descriptions of scenery. And then Flush takes us inside the head of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. It’s a real mix of themes, ideas and presentation. Pure genius.

Where to start? I’d plump for Orlando, I think. It has a unique central character, whom we share brain space with through several eras of London history. It’s also laced with subtext, some of which revolves around the character’s (unexplained) change of gender. It’s the kind of novel from which everyone will take different messages. Then, of course, Mrs Dalloway is an absolute classic of London writing with enchanting passages about the streets and parks. Night and Day and Jacob’s Room are also good for London settings.

I’ll leave you as I started, with a quotation from Mrs Dalloway. The sights and sounds of London have changed, but this bustling, boisterous city can still hold a giddy thrall on its inhabitants, just as it did on Clarissa Dalloway a century ago:

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”

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Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the London of Virginia Woolf. And which London-set book(s) should I map next? Comments below, or email me any time on matt@londonist.com