Although I have been to Somerset House in the past to see Grace Jones and Beverley Knight perform in the big courtyard - by the way, if you ever see a gig there, bring a plastic screw-top with you as they take them off any bottles of water you buy there - I had never visited it's main claim to fame these days which is the home of the Courtauld collection. Well not anymore! I am down with the Courtauld posse innit?

On Sunday afternoon, as London sizzled in the boiling sunshine, Owen and I stepped into the cool of the Somerset House portico and had a hugely enjoyable time! The main reason for me going was to see the BEYOND BLOOMSBURY exhibition which is currently on there. The small exhibition - only two rooms - celebrates the brief six year period of the Omega Workshops, set up in Fitzrovia by the artist and critic Roger Fry.

Fry set up the workshop to bring together the worlds of applied and decorative arts as well as giving regular work to his artist friends who all worked anonymously under the workshop's 'omega' trademark. As with all things ahead of it's time, the Omega didn't quite fulfill it's ambition.

A schism led by the artist Wyndham Lewis resulted in his defection with his Vorticist chums to set up a rival enterprise - and he drearily continued to snipe at Fry and the Bloomsbury Group for years. The Workshop would work to order so there was never a chance to build up a name known to everyone so most of their work was created for wealthy benefactors. It was also a quirk of fate that it's opening coincided with the build-up and arrival of WWI.

But it's legacy lives on and the exhibition boasts a wide range of it's creations, from ceramics to textiles, from clothing to carpets. A few of the pieces I had seen at the Tate's wide-ranging Bloomsbury exhibition in 1999 but I would happily have run riot there with a shopping trolley!There was Vanessa Bell's large screen of figures in a campsite, Duncan Grant's wonderful 'lily pad' design on a table and screen, the carpet that Bell and Grant designed for the Omega's stand for the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, a very nice women's tailored waistcoat, Grant's fantastical design of a curled-up Giraffe for a plate and some impossibly cute cat figurines designed by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, one of the most promising sculptors of his generation, killed on the Western Front aged only 23. There were also some delightful woodcuts and toy designs by Winifred Gill in a side exhibition.

After that we wandered down through the remaining rooms housing the permanent exhibition - and soon we found our own Courtauld catchphrase "...there's another famous one in here!" What I really liked was that, although there were punters walking around the relatively small gallery rooms, it didn't feel crowded so you could spend time in front of these master works without having to look after 20 heads as you do in other galleries. It also meant that areas of art history that don't appeal to one can be skimmed through again as opposed to other galleries where room after room after room can seem to be endless.

Cranach, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Seurat, Manet, Modigliani, Bell... wow!All this and a nice lunch in the basement cafe was a great way to get away from the Sunday herds. I think the Courtauld will get a re-visit! Some snaps I took - without flash of course!