Dartington College of Arts in 1961 as a consequence of the original Dartington Hall experiment in rural regeneration. Academic degrees were validated in partnership with the University of Plymouth in 1975. Dartington College of Arts became part of University College Falmouth on 6 April 2008 and, in 2010, relocated to Falmouth, Cornwall. Leonard Knight Elmhirst, the founder of the Dartington estate, was a member of the Bloomsbury group from the 1920s. The college and Hall became a popular arts location for such figures as Julian Bell, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Dartington has also received special attention from Ravi Shankar, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma
Virginia Woolf and his group of "Neo-Pagans", pursuing socialism, vegetarianism, exercising outdoors and alternative life styles, including social nudity. They were influenced by the ethos of Bedales, Fabianism and Shelley. The women wore sandals, socks, open neck shirts and head-scarves, as Virginia does here. Although she had some reservations, Woolf was involved with their activities for a while, fascinated by their bucolic innocence in contrast to the sceptical intellectualism of Bloomsbury, which earned her the nickname "The Goat" from her brother Adrian. While Woolf liked to make much of a weekend she spent with Brooke at the vicarage in Grantchester, including swimming