When the Domesday Book recorded this patch of London in 1086, it described it as “wood for 100 pigs.” It has come some distance since then. Bloomsbury is now home to the British Museum, University College London, the Charles Dickens Museum, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s founding address on Gower Street, and more blue plaques per square metre than anywhere else in London.
The Bloomsbury Group, that loose constellation of writers and thinkers including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, gathered in these Georgian squares in the early 20th century and essentially invented modern literary London in the process. That intellectual DNA still runs through the place: secondhand bookshops on every other corner, students from a dozen universities spilling out onto the garden squares, Gay’s The Word on Marchmont Street quietly operating as one of the city’s most important cultural institutions since 1979.
In 1814, a vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery burst and sent a 15-foot wave of beer through the surrounding streets, killing eight people. It is known as the London Beer Flood. Bloomsbury contains multitudes.
London's literary and intellectual heartland
Buses: 1, 8, 19, 25, 38, 55, 98, 168, 242.
