Bohemian & Libertine

The Sussex farmhouse where the Bloomsbury Group 'lived in squares and loved in triangles' — Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant and his lover David Garnett under one painted roof, a laboratory of open relationships and bisexual love.

The Gothic 'party palace' of 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' Lord Byron, backdrop to a rakish life of affairs; it was Lady Caroline Lamb, after their affair, who coined that immortal phrase. Note: rumours of a relationship with his half-sister Augusta are historically disputed and should be flagged as such.

Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry, glamorous political hostess, presided as the sorceress 'Circe' over her flirtatious 'Ark' society of bird- and beast-named grandees; she poured that world into Mount Stewart's fantastical gardens, whose carved Dodo Terrace creatures immortalise her glittering salon.

For two centuries London's great pleasure garden, where ten thousand a night promenaded by lamplight — and the unlit 'Dark Walks' at the garden's edge were the most notorious assignation spot in Georgian England. Pepys complained as early as the 1660s that one could not walk them without hearing what he ought not.

Chalk caverns dug a quarter-mile into the hill for Sir Francis Dashwood's infamous brotherhood, whose motto — 'Fais ce que tu voudras', do what thou wilt — presided over banquets, blasphemy and 'nuns' hired from London. The deepest chamber, the Inner Temple, sits below the parish church: sinners underground, saints above.

The riverside sham-gothic abbey where Dashwood's order first met, its door inscribed with Rabelais's 'Fais ce que tu voudras'. Contemporaries whispered of mock rites and masked ladies arriving by barge; the truth was scandalous enough that every account since has struggled to separate orgy from embellishment — this entry says so plainly.

The pub that named a district: Fitzrovia's all-comers salon where Dylan Thomas drank, Nina Hamnett — 'Queen of Bohemia' — held court on the subject of her lovers, and Quentin Crisp arrived nightly in full defiant maquillage. Louche, literary and gloriously unrespectable.

The drawing room where, one evening in 1907, Lytton Strachey pointed at a stain on Vanessa's dress and said a single unprintable word — and, as Woolf recorded, 'all barriers of reticence and reserve went down'. British conversation about sex was never quite the same; pair with Charleston for where the theory went to live.

Ottoline Morrell's Tudor manor was the great house-party of literary modernism: Bertrand Russell was her lover, Lawrence repaid her hospitality by putting her in 'Women in Love', and the peacock-stalked gardens hosted more entanglements than the guest book could decently record.

Clough Williams-Ellis's Italianate folly-village on a Welsh estuary — a place built purely for pleasure — where Noël Coward, taking rooms in 1941, wrote 'Blithe Spirit' in five days. The village's flamboyant unreality has drawn the theatrical, the artistic and the amorous ever since.

Vanbrugh's baroque masterpiece was home to the 'Gay Delavals' — Georgian England's most theatrical rakes, whose house parties featured mechanical beds that dropped guests through the floor mid-assignation, walls that slid away to expose bedrooms, and Sir Francis Delaval's celebrated seductions staged like productions.