Streets of Bloomsbury
Streets of Bloomsbury
The historic manor of Blemundsbury, which became the Duke of Bedford’s estate, plus other streets north to Euston Road, is covered in seven walks. We start with Bloomsbury Square, the first part to be laid out in the late 17th century, and work our way gradually northwards in line with the district’s development. Much of Bloomsbury’s Georgian architectural grandeur survives [More...]
alongside Modernist and other blocks put up by the University of London. Once a preserve of the fashionable, Bloomsbury is now home to academia.
Many writers and scholars have chosen to reside in the area, close to the British Museum’s famous Reading Room. Bloomsbury’s reputation as a haunt of intellectuals also derives from the so-called Bloomsbury set, the early-20th-century group of authors and artists who ‘lived in squares … but loved in triangles’. The roll-call of the famous is long. Aside from Virginia Woolf and her friends the list includes Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle; poets such as W B Yeats; noted thespians, Sarah Siddons among them; and music-hall artistes Vesta Tilley and Little Tich.
2016