For most of his life, with whomever he travelled, and wherever he had been, Clive Bell's first concern upon returning to London was to have dinner as soon as possible with Vanessa, Duncan, Julian, Quentin, and Angelica, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, or as many of them as could be gathered together. Bell had many domiciles, but in a certain sense no ‘home’; he tended to make himself at home wherever he was. He lived, of course, at 46 then 50 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and after 1939 full-time at Charleston, yet his was in many ways a peripatetic life, with Vanessa Bell at its centre. His ‘letters home’ to the important women in his life – Vanessa, Virginia, Mary Hutchinson, Frances Partridge – were full of the gossip in which they all reveled, but they usually contained also detailed accounts of his opinions, movements and social life. When Vanessa began to travel regularly to Cassis in the south of France, that, too, became another home for Clive.

During the First World War, home for Clive Bell was Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor, which she and her MP husband, Philip, opened to conscientious objectors who could satisfy the requirement of doing ‘work of national importance’ by working its lands. Garsington became a hub for different generations of thinkers, artists, writers, politicians – Bertrand Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Mark Gertler, Dorothy Brett, the Asquiths, Aldous Huxley, and many others. Some came only for weekends; others were more permanent residents, like Fredegond and Gerald Shove.

His own family home, Cleeve House in the village of Seend in Wiltshire, was a peculiar kind of horror for Clive Bell, devoid as it was of any interest in art and culture. But he always loved the countryside in which he had grown up, and where he learned to hunt and shoot. That rural upbringing served him in good stead at Charleston, too. When Vanessa died in 1961, Bell continued to live at Charleston with Duncan Grant, until old age took its toll.

Dearest Virginia,

Everything is going on all right. Vanessa went down and sat in the sun today from about 11.30 to 4.0.