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Charleston Community | Art | Ideas
Charleston in Firle: BN8 6LL
Charleston in Lewes: BN7 1AB
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The modernist home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston was a gathering point for some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they came together to imagine society differently, and has always been a place where art and experimental thinking are at the centre of everyday life. Today, we present a dynamic year-round programme of exhibitions, events and festivals. We believe in the power of art, in all its forms, to provoke new ways of thinking and living.

When the clocks went back last night, we thought of Maynard Keynes.In 1920, Keynes decided Charleston should have its ow...
25/10/2026

When the clocks went back last night, we thought of Maynard Keynes.

In 1920, Keynes decided Charleston should have its own time. Dubbed ‘Charleston Time’, it ran an hour ahead of British Summer Time.

Not everyone went along with it:
Clive Bell carried on with the normal time.

Jessie, who worked in the kitchen, simply let the clock run down.

Lytton Strachey, staying at the house that summer, described the chaos in a letter to a friend: ‘the confusion is extraordinary… But luckily the atmosphere is entirely comic… Everyone laughs and screams and passes on.’

Spend your extra hour with us!

🔗 Book your tickets via the link in our bio.

📸 Duncan Grant, Portrait of John Maynard Keynes c.1917, copyright The Estate of Duncan Grant

‘Quentin is always happy where there’s mud and water.’ – Roger Fry, 1925Quentin Bell arrived at Charleston in October 19...
21/10/2026

‘Quentin is always happy where there’s mud and water.’ – Roger Fry, 1925

Quentin Bell arrived at Charleston in October 1916, aged six. He had just seen a film about an Antarctic expedition. Told the family was moving south, he expected snow and polar animals, and was disappointed to find Sussex - although that first winter without heating was freezing all the same.

What he found instead was the pond. Quentin spent much of his childhood in and around it, digging up a vein of blue clay hidden in the mud. He shaped it into bricks and figures and buried them in the schoolroom fire, in what’s now Clive Bell’s study.

‘Here it would either explode or emerge hardened and changed into a lovely salmon pink,’ he remembered. With his brother Julian, he made soldiers and built fortifications, and turned the floor into a battlefield.

It was the start of a lifetime spent elbow-deep in clay. Decades later, Quentin was still making cups from Charleston clay. You can see two of them on display in ‘Quentin Bell’ at Charleston in Firle.

🎟️ One ticket gets you into everything at Charleston in Firle this season, including the house and all our exhibitions.

🔗Book your tickets via the link in our bio.

📷 Vanessa Bell, Photograph of Quentin Bell kneeling and playing on a rock in the pond at his home ‘Charleston’, East Sussex, photo: Tate

Meet Olivia Sterling!Turning a vivid, often playful eye on race, class, gender and domestic life, Sterling fills her clo...
19/10/2026

Meet Olivia Sterling!

Turning a vivid, often playful eye on race, class, gender and domestic life, Sterling fills her closely cropped, brightly coloured canvases with food, gesture and the human figure. She uses humour to draw out subjects that are anything but.

Born in Peterborough and based in London, Sterling studied painting at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool to Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice.

‘Cold Spell’ is a new commission, made in response to Charleston’s history and our Quentin Bell retrospective.

Inspired by Bell’s lifelong fascination with magic, levitation and the occult, Sterling explores how the language of spellcasting and mysticism works in life and politics today, finding the absurd in artificial intelligence, misinformation and political spectacle.

✨ Free to visit at Charleston in Firle until 7 March.
🔗 Find out more via the link in our bio.

‘It will be an odd life, won’t it, but it seems to me it ought to be a good one for painting.’110 years ago today, Vanes...
16/10/2026

‘It will be an odd life, won’t it, but it seems to me it ought to be a good one for painting.’

110 years ago today, Vanessa Bell wrote to Roger Fry from her new home, Charleston in Firle.

She had arrived with her sons Julian and Quentin, the painter Duncan Grant, his lover David Garnett and Henry the dog.

Duncan and David were conscientious objectors who had to work on the land instead of fighting, and the farm next door needed hands. Vanessa’s sister, Virginia Woolf, had found them the house, a few miles from her own at Asheham.

‘You must really come and see this place soon. It really is so lovely that I must show it to you… The house is really much too large at present of course, but it’s nice to have space and no doubt it will get filled in time.’

It did. Friends and lovers and came and went for decades, and Vanessa began decorating the walls almost immediately. You can still see her first decorations around the window in what’s now Clive Bell’s study.

🎟️ Book your visit via the link in our bio.
✍️ Letter from Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, 16 October 1916
📸 Clive Bell’s study, copyright the Charleston Trust

To mark World Mental Health Day, we’re announcing Pay What You Can entry at Charleston in Lewes from 4 November. Our upc...
10/10/2026

To mark World Mental Health Day, we’re announcing Pay What You Can entry at Charleston in Lewes from 4 November. Our upcoming exhibitions explore madness, illness and neurodivergence, and we want more people to be able to experience them.

‘Mad Bloomsbury’ explores how the Bloomsbury group engaged with evolving ideas of madness. Drawing on new research, it re-examines familiar histories through disability, neurodivergence and lived experience. Starting with Virginia Woolf, who described herself as mad, the exhibition includes a rare display of work made by Helen Coombe, wife of Roger Fry, while she was in a psychiatric institution.

‘On Being Ill’ marks 100 years since the publication of Woolf’s essay of the same name, which asked why illness, a universal experience, is so rarely written about. This exhibition brings together modern and contemporary art in dialogue with her text to explore the lived experience of illness and disability.

💫 Both exhibitions open 4 November 2026 at Charleston in Lewes. Pay What You Can entry, every day we’re open.

🎟️ Tickets on sale now, link in bio.

⏳ Last chance to visit our current exhibitions before they close this Sunday. Charleston in Lewes, including the shop and café, will then be closed from Monday 12 October while we install the new season, reopening 4 November. In the meantime, explore the politics, joy and power of the handmade at Firle with two exhibitions: ‘Quentin Bell’ and ‘Olivia Sterling’.

📸 Charleston in Lewes photographed by Lewis Ronald

Don’t miss your last chance to visit two exhibitions that shaped and were shaped by the Bloomsbury group.Walter Sickert ...
08/10/2026

Don’t miss your last chance to visit two exhibitions that shaped and were shaped by the Bloomsbury group.

Walter Sickert brought new ideas of modernism from Europe to Britain, insisting that art should face everyday life. The Bloomsbury group were inspired by this ethos. You can see his influence in the sombre tones and cropped interiors of Vanessa Bell’s early paintings. In 1920 Duncan Grant took over Sickert’s London studio in Fitzroy Street, later bringing furniture from it to Charleston. ‘Walter Sickert: Working Notes’ shows where those ideas began, through rarely seen works on paper.

In 1913 Bell and Grant joined the critic Roger Fry in founding the Omega Workshops, a design studio where artists made furniture and homewares. Gladys Hynes spent three years working at Omega, though none of her pieces can be identified as they were unsigned. She carried Omega’s belief in art as a vital part of everyday life with her as she moved between artistic and political movements. ‘Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives’ brings her work together for the first time.

‘Walter Sickert: Working Notes’ and ‘Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives’ are both on display at Charleston in Lewes until Sunday 11 October.

🎟️ Book via the link in our bio.

📸 Lee Robbins

🎁 Our popular Designer and Maker Fair is back!Browse over 30 carefully hand-picked stalls selling handcrafted homewares,...
01/10/2026

🎁 Our popular Designer and Maker Fair is back!
Browse over 30 carefully hand-picked stalls selling handcrafted homewares, ceramics, clothing and jewellery. 

🗓️ Join us on 21–22 November to meet the designers and makers and get your hands on some independent and locally-made gifts.

☕ Our Café will be serving up festive treats!

🎟️ Tickets on sale now – £5 in advance, £6 on the door. Booking recommended.




✨ WE’RE HIRING ✨Want to work somewhere art, ideas and creativity are part of everyday life?We’re looking for talented, p...
29/09/2026

✨ WE’RE HIRING ✨

Want to work somewhere art, ideas and creativity are part of everyday life?

We’re looking for talented, passionate people to join the team. We're currently recruiting for:

* Café Supervisor
* Café Assistant
* Workshops & Events Coordinator
* Venue Supervisor
* Digital Transformation Consultant
* Trustee

We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace and welcome applications from people with different experiences, skills and stories.

🔗 See the 'Get involved' link in bio



Charleston’s pond has been many things over the centuries: a watering place for cattle by 17th-century drovers; the subj...
26/09/2026

Charleston’s pond has been many things over the centuries: a watering place for cattle by 17th-century drovers; the subject of Vanessa Bell’s first painting at Charleston; a place where Julian and Quentin Bell played in boats and in the mud; and where Duncan Grant once dreamed of keeping flamingos.
 
When Vanessa first saw it in 1916, she wrote to Roger Fry: ‘The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all around.’
 
That wall now needs our help. This summer’s drought brought the pond to its lowest level in 100 years, revealing sections of the historic flint wall that need to be carefully dismantled and rebuilt before winter sets in.
 
This week, as we begin work to desilt the pond, the process will also reveal the blue clay at the bottom that a young Quentin Bell dug up to make his first ceramic works, firing toy soldiers in the house’s fireplaces. Some of those pieces are on display now in ‘Quentin Bell’, our new exhibition at Charleston in Firle.
 
The restoration will cost £35,000. The garden at Charleston is free for everyone to visit, which means we rely on the generosity of people like you to carry out essential work like this.

💙If you are able to help, please donate via the link in our bio.
 
🎟️ Book your tickets to ‘Quentin Bell’ via the link in our bio.

📸 The pond at Charleston in Firle, photographed by Lewis Ronald
 


Charleston’s pond has been many things over the centuries: a watering place for cattle by 17th-century drovers; the subject of Vanessa Bell’s first painting at Charleston; a place where Julian and Quentin Bell played in boats and in the mud; and where Duncan Grant once dreamed of keeping flamingos.
 
When Vanessa first saw it in 1916, she wrote to Roger Fry: ‘The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all around.’
 
That wall now needs our help. This summer’s drought brought the pond to its lowest level in 100 years, revealing sections of the historic flint wall that need to be carefully dismantled and rebuilt before winter sets in.
 
This week, as we begin work to desilt the pond, the pro

📢Just announced: Music + Word: Look StrangerMelvyn Tan and Guy Johnston with Samuel West Fifty years after his death, Be...
25/09/2026

📢Just announced: Music + Word: Look Stranger
Melvyn Tan and Guy Johnston with Samuel West
 
Fifty years after his death, Benjamin Britten’s music still resonates. 

Internationally celebrated cellist Guy Johnston and acclaimed pianist Melvyn Tan perform a programme of Britten’s work, alongside readings of work by Britten, Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden by actor Samuel West.

📅 6 December, 7pm
📍 Charleston in Firle

⏰ Priority booking opens: 29 September, 10am, General sale: 1 October, 10am





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Off A27
Lewes
BN86LL

Opening Hours

Wednesday 10am - 5pm
Thursday 10am - 5pm
Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 10am - 5pm
Sunday 10am - 5pm

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+441323811626

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