Highlights

• BRITISH MUSEUM: One of the oldest museums in the world (1753) with over 8 million objects from all continents covering 2 million years of history. See the Rosetta Stone, mummies galore and fabulous Queen Elizabeth II Great Court. FREE.
• SQUARES AND GARDENS
• FOUNDLING MUSEUM: First home for abandoned children established by Thomas Coram 1739. Displays love tokens, like buttons and coins, left by parents with their child so that they could be identified if the parents ever came back for them.

• DICKENS MUSEUM: Great little museum where Dickens lived and wrote. Rooms over 5 floors as it may have been when he lived there.
• GRANT MUSEUM OF ZOOLOGY: Wierd and wonderful collection of skeletons, specimins and stuffed animals. FREE.

• PETRIE MUSEUM OF EGYPTIAN AND SUDANESE ARCHAEOLOGY: More than 80,000 Egyptian and Sudanese artifacts including the oldest dress in the world, mummies and treasures. FREE
• WATERSTONES, TORRINGTON PLACE: Five miles of new and second hand books in elaborate Franco Gothic listed building. Regular events in basement.
• GEORGIAN ARCHITECTURE
• LAMB’S CONDUIT: Now charming Victorian-style shopping. Street named for William Lambe who funded important water cistern here in 1564, from dam across tributary of River Fleet, also providing 170 buckets for poor women to sell the water.
• CORAM’S FIELDS: Brilliant Coram’s Fields Playground is open 9am to 7pm daily except Sundays, when it closes at 6pm. Under 16s only. Free.

Visitor Information

Bloomsbury can be easily reached from Russell Square, Hoborn, Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street tube stations.

Visit tBritish Museum early to avoid the crowds and to ensure entry, book (free) tickets online. There are snack rooms in the museum where you can eat your own snacks. For kids, the extensive selection of Egyptian mummies, family trails themed to cover different collections, activity packs with activities games and puzzles, hands on activity rooms where exhibits can be touched, craft workshops and storytelling sessions. Open from 10 am to 5pm Daily, and until 8.30pm on Fridays. Free.

Foundling Museum ha a garden picnic area, and you can sit upstairs and listen to musical recordings.

There are WCs in the museums, Waterstones bookshop, and the Brunswick Centre

History

ORIGINS AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT

• Began as rural area
• Transformed in 17th century by Russell family

18th and 19th CENTURIES

• Became a fashionable residential area
• Elegant squares like Russell Square and Bedford Square were laid out.
• Grand Georgian terraces constructed.

THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP

• A group of talented and influential British writers, intellectuals and artists with unconventional lifestyles and viewa, who met in Bloomsbury between about 1907 and 1930.
• Notable members: Virgina Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell…

NOTABLE INSTITUTIONS AND PEOPLE

• University College London, founded in 1829. Known as the “Godless College” as appointed lecturers regardless of their religious beliefs (unlike Oxford and Cambridge), and was the first British University to award degrees to women.
• RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)
• Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital
• British Library, originally part of British Museum, home to some of world’s most famous written works including Magna Crta and Beatles lyrics, now located nearby.
• Home to some trailblazing women, including Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, Britains first qualified female dentist, Lillian Lyndsay, writer Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell, and World War II secret agent Noor Inayat Khan.
• Artists’ Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded at 7 Gower Street in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others.

MODERN BLOOMSBURY

• Retains intellectual and cultural charm.
• Historic buildings including fine Georgian architecture and garden squares.

Connections

• From the front of the British Museum, walk straight down Museum Street and carry straight on to meet Drury Lane and Seven Dials, Covent Garden.
• You are also a stone’s throw away from Soho Square, Soho.
• Anyone with children could combine a visit to the museum with the special playground at Coram’s fields.
• Kings Cross St Pancras Station is a little further; this is the prettiest route.
• You are also easy striking distance from Lincoln’s Inn fields and the Temple.

Bloomsbury Walk

This is a lovely walk taking in many of the beautiful squares.

DIRECTIONS

1. From Goodge Street Tube, turn left on Tottenham Court Road, then right on Torrington Place. You are close to the Grant Museum of Zoology here. Cross Gower Street and you will see Waterstones on the right. You are close to the Petrie Museum of Egyptology.
2. Follow the road then turn left into Gordon Square with its pretty cafe. You are close to the Grant Zoological Museum.
3. Leave the square on the right, and turn left
4. Take the first right then cross the road to enter Tavistock Square
5. Walk straight down the park past the statue of Ghandhi, exit and turn left on Tavistock Place.
6. Take the second right down Marchmont Street.
7. The Brunswick Centre was built in the mid 1960s and is a Grade II-listed mixed residential and shopping development. Either turn left just before it through a little park, or if you would like to take a look, walk further and turn left into the centre, with its cafes and shops, then leave by walking straight through and out the back of Waitrose.
8. Carry straight on down Handel Street over the road and you will see the Entrance to St George’s Gardens at the end in front of you.
9. Walk throught the gardens and exit on Heathcote Street then take a right. You are quite close to the Dickens Museum.
10. Turn right again onto Mecklenburgh Square, and enter the snicket that will take you along the edge of Coram’s Fields
11. You will come out by the Foundling Museum. The Foundling Hospital was established in 1721 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram to take in children whose parents could not afford to keep them thus saving hundreds of lives. Coram used his artistic connections to raise money through concerts by Handel and exhibitions by William Hogarth.
12. Turn left and cross through the park on Brunswick Square, carry straight on to Guildford Street. You are close to the Brunei Museum.
13. Then take a right here, leading to Victorian shops and cafes on Lamb’s Conduit Street.
14. Explore, then take a left into Great Ormond Street
15. This will bring you past the famous children’s hospital to Queen Square.
16. Go straight on with the Queen’s Larder on your right onto Southampton Row.
17. Turn left into Russell Square park and wander across.
18. Exit into Montague Place past the back of the British Museum. You can enter the museum from this side. To continue, walk straight on and you will arrive at Bedford Square, which is the end of this walk.
19. To reach Tottenham Court Road tube station, turn left past the square, then first right. Take a left and you will see the tube station at the junction with Oxford Street.

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