History Of Bloomsbury

Famous for its beautiful garden squares, Bloomsbury was first developed in the late 18th century as a fashionable residential area. Much of the architecture from the period still survives, with Bedford Square the only complete Georgian square in London. The Victorian writer, Charles Dickens, lived at 48 Doughty Street between 1837 and 1839, where the Dickens museum is now located.

In the first half of the 20th century, Bloomsbury was the home of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals, known as the Bloomsbury Set. They included the authors Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Virginia Woolf lived at 52 Tavistock Square between 1924 and 1939, John Maynard Keynes lived at 46 Gordon Square between 1916 and 1946 (in a house previously occupied by Vanessa Bell) and Lytton Strachey lived at 51 Gordon Square between 1909 and 1924.

One of Bloomsbury’s most famous landmarks is the British Museum, which first opened to the public in 1759. The collection contains over seven million artefacts, the range and quality of which are of immense importance. They include the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian mummy collection, together with many related antiquities.

Bloomsbury is also the home of several London University colleges, including University College London, Birkbeck College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Great Ormond Street children’s hospital is 10 minutes away