London Guide
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury gets its name from its medieval landowners, the Blemunds, who were probably given the estate – described in the Domesday Book as having vineyards and "wood for 100 pigs" – by William the Conqueror. Nothing was built here, though, until the 1660s, when the Earl of Southampton laid out Bloomsbury Square, which John Evelyn thought "a noble square or piazza – a little towne". Through marriage, the Russell family, the earls and later dukes of Bedford, acquired much of the area, and established the other formal, bourgeois squares which remain the main distinguishing feature of Bloomsbury. The Russells named the grid-plan streets after their various titles and estates, and kept the pubs and shops to a minimum to maintain the tone of the neighbourhood.
In the twentieth century, Bloomsbury acquired a reputation as the city's most learned quarter, dominated by the dual institutions of the British Museum and London University and home to many of London's chief book publishers, but perhaps best known for its literary inhabitants. In its northern fringes, the character of the area changes dramatically, becoming steadily seedier as you near the big main-line train stations of Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross, where cheap B&Bs and run-down council estates have given the area a reputation for prostitution and drug dealing. The whole feel of the place is beginning to change, however, with the arrival of Eurostar trains into St Pancras station and the redevelopment of the area around King's Cross.
The British Museumis clearly Bloomsbury's main draw – it has its own chapter, and could easily occupy you for an entire day or more – and, in comparison, the other sundry attractions of the area are pretty lightweight, though no less enjoyable for that. The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, at the edge of Holborn, may be the most popular, but the Cartoon Museum south of the BM and the Foundling Museum on the site of an old foundling hospital, have much more to offer, while the museum at the new British Library, near St Pancras station, is a definite must. The university museums, scattered about Bloomsbury, are of more specialist interest. Then, of course, there are Bloomsbury's leafy squares, which, though no longer the set pieces of Georgian architecture they once were, still provide some of the nicest picnic spots in central London.