Ivy Davison
1892 -1977
Journalist and Editor

Ivy Davison spent almost three decades as a Women’s Pioneer Housing tenant, during which she carved out a career as a highly influential journalist, reviewer, and editor on London’s literary scene. She was described by her friend Vita Sackville-West as ‘a young women of enterprise and independence who had shaken herself free of tradition to make her own money, her only source of income’. WPH was a key source of support for an ambitious, professional, and independent woman like Ivy, who would otherwise have struggled to find a home of her own in London.

Ivy moved into 28 Barkston Gardens in 1928, while she was working as an Assistant Editor for the Saturday Review. After a brief period as a letter writer for Virginia Woolf in the mid-1930s, she joined the Geographical Magazine, first as Assistant Editor in 1937 and then as Executive Editor during World War Two. She published a range of important up and coming writers, including Sylvia Townsend Warner, Laurie Lee, and L. P. Hartley, and counted women like Vera Brittain, Lady Rhondda, and Rose Macauley amongst her wide circle of friends.

Ivy resigned from the Geographical Magazine in 1945 due to ill health, but she continued contributing reviews up until the 1960s. Barkston Gardens remained her home until 1957, when she retired to Sussex to spend time painting and writing about the history of country houses. She died on 15th November 1977. Although her work as an editor kept her out of the spotlight, she made a huge contribution to Britain’s literary and magazine culture in the interwar years.