Charleston in East Sussex might be the best known of the Bloomsbury Group’s collective residences – that décor and those modernist murals are hard to forget – but it was at Sissinghurst Castle that two of the loose circle’s most important members left their greatest mark. Home to Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, Sissinghurst boasts a garden that few can claim to rival, and the couple totally renovated the house, too, giving it the rough form that it has today.
The history of Sissinghurst stretches back long before Nicolson and Sackville-West bought it in the 1930s, however. The National Trust – which now looks after the house – reports that it was once an Anglo-Saxon pig farm called “Saxenhurst”, and that later Tudor buildings on the site (including the iconic Elizabethan tower) were used to house 3,000 French prisoners of war during the Seven Years’ War, between 1756-1763. Conditions were supposedly very poor, but sailors referred to the house as le château, giving rise to Sissinghurst’s title of “Castle” when it is really anything but.
In the 1790s, the estate became a poor house for about 100 men, who received employment, food and housing; it later reverted to the ownership of the Cornwallis family in 1855, on whose land Sissinghurst was located, and became a prosperous working farm. It remained that way for 75 years, until Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson bought it in early 1930. It was still a farm, growing hops, vegetables and cereals, and the now-famous garden was yet to be laid out. Vita and Harold, of course, did so.
Over the next few years, the couple and their gardeners developed nearly a dozen distinct areas of the new garden, ranging from the Rose Garden to the White Garden, an orchard, nuttery and “lime walk” of pleached lime trees, and even a section inspired by their 1935 trip to the island of Delos in Greece, with appropriate ruined stone fragments and Mediterranean plants. The garden opened to the public in the late 1930s, and cost a shilling to enter, often left in a tobacco tin under the entrance arch.
Both Harold and Vita were deeply attached to the garden and house. “The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina,” Vita once wrote, “and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sundial veering slowly with the sun. Everything was hushed and drowsy and silent but for the coo of the white pigeons.” In 1962, following her death, Harold decided to leave Sissinghurst to the National Trust, who took up stewardship in 1967.
The garden is the most famous draw for Sissinghurst, and should not be missed. Regular exhibitions are held in the grounds of the estate. However, fans of the Bloomsbury Group – including readers of Vita’s lover, Virginia Woolf – will be as enamoured of the Long Library, a library built in 1935 to house almost 4,000 books (it was once a stables) and used as a drawing room for entertaining guests ranging from Woolf to Winston Churchill to Rex Whistler. Other ephemera including manuscripts, letters and notes from Vita’s life can be seen in Sissinghurst’s collection.
Sissinghurst Castle, Biddenden Road, near Cranbrook, Kent, TN17 2AB
