Neighbourhoods

London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.

Bloomsbury

Georgian squares, the British Museum, and the university that grew up around it.

The British Museum's front from its forecourt: a long row of Ionic columns under a sculpted pediment, a flag at half mast, and people sitting on the steps and along the lawn under a blue sky. — The British Museum on Great Russell Street. Photo by Paasikivi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A Georgian doorway on Great James Street, columns either side of a black door under a carved pediment — A doorway on Great James Street.

The west side of Bedford Square: a dark-brick Georgian terrace with white window frames and railings, the square's trees in front — Bedford Square, the best-kept Georgian square in London. Photo by Jeremysm, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Great Court of the British Museum from above: the round Reading Room in the middle under a glass roof of triangular panes, curved staircases either side and people crossing the white floor. — The Great Court, under Foster's roof of 2000. Photo by Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The estate of one family. The Russells, Dukes of Bedford, married into this land in the seventeenth century and laid it out as squares: Bloomsbury Square from the 1660s, then Bedford Square, and then Russell Square, for which the fifth Duke pulled down his own house in 1800. What survives is the most complete piece of Georgian planning in London, brick terraces round gardens at a size a person can walk in an afternoon. What filled it was learning. The British Museum, open to the public since 1759, sits in the middle of it. The University of London spread around the museum, with Senate House at the centre, the tower Orwell had in mind when he wrote the Ministry of Truth. Great Ormond Street children's hospital and the National Hospital for Neurology are a few streets away, and so are the publishers, including the one that took Harry Potter after a dozen others had turned it down. It also gave its name to a set of people. The Bloomsbury Group met in these houses before the First World War, and between them Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and the Bells rearranged English writing, economics and painting; blue plaques mark the addresses, several of them within sight of one another. For a visitor it is the quietest of the central districts: gardens to sit in, one of the great museums, and secondhand bookshops on the streets between.