BLOOMSBURY gets its name from its medieval landowners, the Blemunds, though nothing was built here until the 1660s. Through marriage, the Russell family (the earls and later dukes of Bedford) acquired much of the area, and established the many formal, bourgeois squares which are the main distinguishing feature of Bloomsbury today. 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 neighborhood.

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. Today, the British Museum is clearly the star attraction, but temple and the law courts there are other sights, such as the Dickens House Museum, that are high on many people's itineraries.

In its northern fringes, the character of the area changes dramatically, becoming steadily more seedy as you near the two big main-line train stations of Euston and King's Cross, where cheap B&Bs and run-down council estates provide fertile territory for prostitutes and drug dealers, and an unlikely location for the new British Library.

The Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group were essentially a bevy of upper middle-class friends, who lied in and around Bloomsbury. The Group reoled around Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian Stephen, who moved into 46 Gordon Square in 1904. Thoby's Thursday evening gatherings and Vanessa's Friday Club for painters attracted a whole host of Cambridge-educated snobs who subscribed to Oscar Wilde's theory that "aesthetics are higher than ethics". Their diet of "human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful things" was hardly revolutionary, but their behavior, particularly that of the two sisters (unmarried, unchaperoned, intellectual and artistic), succeeded in shocking London society, especially through their sexual practices (most of the group swung both ways).

All this, though interesting, would be forgotten were it not for their individual work. In 1922 Virginia declared, without too much exaggeration, "Everyone in Gordon Square has become famous": Lytton Strachey had beven the first to make his name with Eminent Victorians, a series of unprecedented frank biographies; Vanessa, now married to the art critic Clive Bell, had become involved in Roger Fry's prolific design firm, Omega Workshop; and the economist John Maynard Keynes had become an adviser to the Treasury (he later went on to become the leading economic theorist of his day).

The Group's most celebrated figure, Virginia, now married to Leonard Woolf and liing in Taistock Square, had become an established novelist; she and Leonard had also founded the Hogarth Press, which published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922. Whatever their limitations, the Bloomsbury Group were Britain's most influential intellectual coterie of the interwar years, and their appeal shows little sign of waning.

British Library / British Museum / Dickens’ house / University of London

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