Kensington apartment in Virginia Woolf's childhood home goes on the market for £2.45 million

Before she lived in bohemian Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf was raised in well-heeled Kensington, at 22 Hyde Park Gate.

A two-bedroom apartment in the period property Woolf was born in has come on the market with Savills with a guide price of £2.45 million.

Set on the ground floor, it includes a sun room and a private garden with a patio. Blue plaques to Woolf, along with her father and sister, adorn the frontage of the white-painted house.

“This is an extremely special flat in a sought-after period building situated just off Hyde Park,” said William Hughes-Ward, director, Savills Knightsbridge.

“Once the family home of scholar, Sir Leslie Stephen, his two daughters, novelist Virginia Woolf and artist Vanessa Bell, were born in the building and the blue plaque certainly adds a sense of prestige.”

Woolf is commemorated with a blue plaque on the front (Savills)

Born in 1882, Woolf was one of eight children in a blended family. The future great novelist of the 20th century discovered her love of writing early, chronicling her family’s activities in a homemade newspaper titled the Hyde Park Gate News.

Living at 22 Hyde Park Gate did was not a happy experience for Woolf, however.

Her mother died in 1985 when she was just 13, and her much older half brothers Gerald and George Duckworth sexually abused her between the ages of six and 22. Woolf documented the abuse she experienced in the house in an autobiographical piece titled ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’.

The two-bedroom apartment has a living area with a sun room attached (Savills)

Woolf described the family home in detail in the story. “The drawing room at Hyde Park Gatewasdivided by black folding doors picked out with thin lines of raspberry red. We were still much under the influence of Titian,” she opens the piece with. “Mounds of plush, Watts’ portraits, busts shrined in crimson velvet, enriched by the gloom of a room naturally dark and thinly shaded in summer by showers of Virginia Creeper.”

The abuse continued until she was 22 when, following the death of her father, Woolf threw herself out of a window of the family home in a suicide attempt.

Woolf’s siblings decided to sell the house after Sir Stephen’s death, and bought a house on on Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Woolf moved in there in 1905, thankfully without the Duckworth brothers.

The ground floor flat has its own private garden (Savills)

The writer and her sister are not the only famous former residents of Hyde Park Gate. Formed of two cul-de-sacs abutting Hyde Park, the London location has numerous celebrity connections.

Former prime minister Winston Churchill lived and died at Number 28 Hyde Park Gate, while food writer Nigella Lawson lived with her politician father Nigel Lawson at Number 24.

Part of Woolf’s Richmond townhouse, where she lived with her husband Leonard from 1915 to 1924 went on the market in 2022 for £3.5 million.