Bloomsbury: Bricks, Brutalism and the British Museum

I sometimes have more than thirty attendees on my walks, but I will limit the numbers on this walk to thirty to make it manageable in a busy urban setting. If you're among the first few on the wait list, you should still get a place once folk start cancelling. 

With 2000 years of history (sextons found Roman remains digging graves in St George's Cemetery), five centuries of architectural innovation, around ten architectural styles, and a reputation for radical, intellectual, affluential and regal characters, Bloomsbury is a fascinating area in London's West End. The architectural diversity has jeopardised the area's essential character, with modern and brutalist designs being built not just on bombsites but where Georgian and Victorian buildings were wilfully demolished, but despite this, the district is still known for its numerous elegant Georgian garden squares, and the brutalist intrusions have improved with age or now seem democratic.

Bloomsbury timeline:

• C1-C4: Roman remains show settlement near Londinium.
• C12: Name 'Blemondisberi' appears, after William de Blemond was given land by William the Conqueror.
• C13: Estate passes to Carthusian monks.
• 1530s: Henry VIII grants the abbey and its land to the Earl of Southampton.
• 1660s: Bloomsbury begins urban development; Bloomsbury Square laid out.
• 1753-1759: British Museum founded and opens in Montagu House.
• 1775–1783: Bedford Square constructed by Thomas Leverton for the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford.
• 1800–1804: Russell Square designed by Humphry Repton; Tavistock, Gordon and Woburn Squares follow.
• 1823–1852: Current British Museum building constructed.
• 1828-1836: University College London and University of London established.
• Early C20: Bloomsbury Group meets in Gordon and Tavistock Squares.

The sights and route:

We'll meet outside our first sight, which is...

1. Russell Square Underground Station: Architect Leslie Green, built 1906. Distinctive oxblood-red terracotta façade, iconic of early Underground stations on the Piccadilly Line. 

We'll then go west along Bernard Street and south down Russell Square to...

2. Kimpton Fitzroy Hotel: Originally the Hotel Russell, by Charles Fitzroy Doll, built 1898. Lavish terracotta building in French Renaissance style. The four queens sculptures are noteworthy. It is said to have inspired the interiors aboard the Titanic.

We'll then walk around...

3. Russell Square Gardens: Landscaped by Humphry Repton for the Duke of Bedford in 1804. One of London’s largest squares, with fine plane trees and fountains, although some newer buildings (such as the UCL School of Education and the Imperial Hotel, which is being refurbished) have intruded.

We'll then walk south down Montague Street, west along Great Russell Street and south down Museum Street to the A40 and...

4. Church of St George, Bloomsbury: By Nicholas Hawksmoor, built 1716–31. Eccentric stepped tower or ziggurat topped with a statue of George I as a Roman emperor. Considered one of Hawksmoor’s finest Baroque works. Dramatic and wayward, elephantine at street level, and increasingly delicate as it ascends.

We'll then walk east along the A40 to...

5. Bloomsbury Square Gardens: London’s oldest surviving garden square, laid out in the 1660s. Once fronted Southampton House, a Jacobean mansion that gave Bloomsbury its aristocratic roots.

We'll then walk east to Southampton Row, up it a little way, then turn east along Cosmo Place to...

6. Great Ormond Street Hospital: Britain’s first dedicated children’s hospital, founded by Dr Charles West in 1852. J M Barrie donated the rights to Peter Pan to it in 1929, funding the hospital in perpetuity.

We'll then walk east along Great Ormand Street to...

7. Lamb’s Conduit Street: Named after William Lambe, who funded a conduit here in 1577 to bring fresh water to Holborn, so a rare Elizabethan survival in Bloomsbury’s urban memory. Today has lively independent shops and cafés.

And then to Millman Street for...

8. Rugby Tavern: A rare survival of a historic pub on Great James Street, dating to the C18. Named for Rugby School, which once owned the land here.

We'll walk north up Millman Street, and west along Guilford Street to the...

9. Site of the Foundling Hospital: Set up by Thomas Coram, a retired shipwright and sea captain was so moved by the plight of children abandoned starving in the streets that he campaigned for 17 years start a foundling hospital. Many of rank and nobility supported it, including Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth and Georg Frederic Handel. It was the first purpose-built children’s charity hospital in Britain (1739). We'll see the spot where the children of destitute mothers would be abandoned into the care of the hospital. The hospital was demolished in the 1920s, but some of its interiors survive. The Coram Foundation Playing Fields are unique in that adults using them must be accompanied by a child rather than vice-versa.

We'll go north across Brunswick Square to the...

10. Foundling Hospital Museum: The building dates from 1935-7 to house the collections and interiors from the demolished Foundling Hospital. It contains many works of art from patrons such as Gainsborough and Hogarth. Some of the most moving objects are the tokens - coins, buttons, jewellery and poems – left by mothers with their babies on admission, enabling the Foundling Hospital to match a mother with her child should she ever return to claim it. The overwhelming majority of the children weren't, and the tokens are in the care of the museum. The adjacent sculpture of Coram is by William Macmillan from 1963.

Going back on ourselves west to Hunter Street, we'll turn east down Handel Street to...

11. St George’s Gardens: Laid out as a burial ground for St George’s Bloomsbury and St George’s Hanover Square, and a rare survival in that it is unchanged. Atmospheric Georgian garden cemetery. Contains the grave of Anna Cromwell, granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell.

Going back down Handel street, westwards, we'll enter the...

12. Brunswick Centre: Designed by Patrick Hodgkinson from 1966 to 1971. Brutalist 'streets in the sky' development, now Grade II-listed. There's a Waitrose here in which you could get lunch.

Leaving the Brunswick Centre, we'll be on Marchmont Street, which we'll head north along to find...

13. 57 Marchmont Street: Childhood flat of comic actor and diarist Kenneth Williams, above his father’s barber shop. Marchmont Street retains much of its C19 shopfront character.

We'll then walk west down Coram Street and south down Herbrand Street to get to the...

14. Daimler Garage, Herbrand Street: Former Daimler Car Hire Garage, by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, built in 1931. Bold and suave Art Deco design with faience cladding.

We'll then go north back up Herbrand Street to Tavistock Place to see...

15. Mary Ward House: A lovely Arts and Crafts design from 1897 by Arnold Dunbar Smith and Cecil Claude Brewer. The Mary Ward foundation supports education, social reform, and community activities. Its architecture features handcrafted brickwork and masonry. Mary Ward worked to improve education and representation for the poor, but was a staunch opponent of giving women the right to vote, and in 1908 she became the founding President of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League.

Westwards around the corner is...

16. Tavistock Square: Part of Bloomsbury’s grid of Georgian terraces. Leads towards Tavistock Square, long associated with writers and reformers. The headquarters of the British medical Association is on the Square. We'll have lunch here in the gardens (or in the Pret opposite). The bronze bust of Virginia Woolf is a casting of Stephen Tomlin’s original 1931 sculpture from 2004. The statue of Mahatma Gandhi - depicting him in a meditative lotus position - is by Fredda Brilliant, unveiled in 1968

We'll then head further west to...

17. Gordon Square: Built in the 1820s by Thomas Cubitt as part of the Bedford Estate’s expansion. Its residents gave the Bloomsbury Group its name. Virginia Woolf lived at no. 46, Lytton Strachey, essayist and biographer, also lived in the square as did the economist John Maynard Keynes and the author E.M. Forster. Other intellectuals regularly visited.

And see at the corner of the square...

18. Church of Christ the King: Designed by Raphael Brandon in a Gothic-revival style, chiefly Early English. Now home to various Christian communities but under the Catholic Apostolic Church. Incomplete, lacking two bays on its liturgical west side (which prevented the construction of a façade), and the spire and full height of its tower are missing. We'll have time to explore.

We'll go up Gordon Street, then west along Gower Place, then south down Gower Street to...

19. University College London: By William Wilkins from 1826–30 who also designed the National Gallery. The neoclassical dome and portico (akin to his design for the National Gallery) were a symbol of progressive, secular education. It was the first English university to admit students regardless of religion, the first in the England to admit women, and the first to have an LGB society (thanks go to Steve Rowett for this information).

We'll then turn east along Torrington Place then south down Malet Street to...

20. Senate House: By Charles Holden (1937), soaring Art Deco limestone tower. Served as the Ministry of Information in WWII and famously inspired Orwell’s 'Ministry of Truth' in 1984. It became 'Stuyvesant Towers' in New York, the location for Bertie Wooster's New York apartment in the ITV Jeeves and Wooster. It is unlikely that Hitler personally wanted Senate House to be his headquarters in the event of Operation Sealion being successful, but being imposing and defensible it was identified by Nazi planners as a suitable headquarters for the German occupation government.

We'll continue down Malet Street to Montagu Place, then go west along it to...

21. Bedford Square: The most complete surviving Georgian square in London from 1770s. Uniform terraces, once fashionable residences, now mostly academic offices. 'Bedford Square' local lad Kenneth Williams enthused '...really is what Bloomsbury in its heyday was all about. Lovely rows of Georgian houses surrounding a garden. The garden itself providing an oasis against all the hubbub of urban life and aesthetically pleasing too.'

After going round that, we'll head south along Bloomsbury Street to Great Russell Street and the...

22. British Museum: By Sir Robert Smirke, 1823-1852. The Greek Revival design is monumental and famous, but rigid. The collections inside are vast, diverse and iconic, yet often criticized for colonial acquisitions and a lack of contextual interpretation. Ian Nairn wrote in Nairn's London,  'Smirke was under the impression that architecture could be created by wrapping and great number of ionic columns around a big E shaped mass. It is putting together a building from the outside, instead of designing it from a central idea, and it never comes alive for a moment’. You'll get most of the afternoon to browse the museum if you want.

(Picture credits: British Museum from the NE: Photo © Ham (cc-by-sa/3.0); Pediment, The British Museum: Photo © Philip Halling (cc-by-sa/2.0); Russell Square station, Bernard Street: Photo © Bryn Holmes (cc-by-sa/2.0); Bedford Square by Jeremysm (Public Domain); Hotel Russell, Russell Square, London WC1: Photo © Robin Sones (cc-by-sa/2.0); The cafe in Russell Square: Photo © Rod Allday (cc-by-sa/2.0); Former Daimler Garage, Bloomsbury: Photo  © Steve Cadman  (cc-by-sa/2.0); Mary Ward House, Tavistock Place, WC1: Photo © Mike Quinn (cc-by-sa/2.0); Senate House, Bloomsbury: Photo © Stephen McKay (cc-by-sa/2.0); Church of Christ the King, Gordon Square, London WC1: Photo © Jim Osley (cc-by-sa/2.0); Wilkins Building: Photo © Diliff (cc-by-sa/3.0); St George, Bloomsbury: Photo © John Salmon (cc-by-sa/2.0). Bloomsbury: The Brunswick, Marchmont Street, WC1: Photo © Nigel Cox (cc-by-sa/2.0); Images are copyrighted (apart from where indicated as Public Domain) and permitted for use under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0 or CC BY-SA3.0.)