Qualla: Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Helge Høifødt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between roughly 1905 and 1939, in a series of rented houses around Gordon Square, a group of friends met to argue. They included a young woman named Virginia Stephen, who would later become Virginia Woolf; her sister Vanessa, who would become the painter Vanessa Bell; the economist John Maynard Keynes; the biographer Lytton Strachey; the novelist E. M. Forster. They lived nearby, often a few doors apart. They had complicated love affairs. They believed, as one of them put it, that the contemplation of states of mind was the most valuable thing in life. They were called the Bloomsbury Group, and the streets they walked between - Gordon Square, Tavistock Square, Brunswick Square, the British Museum, the green of Russell Square - are still walkable, almost exactly as they left them.

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Image: Helge Høifødt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bloomsbury: The Bedford Estate

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeremysm, Public domain. Bloomsbury was rural until the seventeenth century. The earliest record of the name, Blemondisberi in 1281, refers to a member of the Blemund family who held the manor, originally from Blemont in western France. Henry VIII took the land into the Crown's possession at the dissolut...

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Image: Jeremysm | Public domain

Bloomsbury: The British Museum

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J. Miers - User: (WT-shared) Jtesla16 at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. The British Museum first opened to the public in 1759 in Montagu House, an old aristocratic mansion that stood where the museum stands now. It is the oldest national public museum in the world. The original Smirke building - the long Greek Revival colonnade everyone photographs -...

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Image: J. Miers - User: (WT-shared) Jtesla16 at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bloomsbury: Universities

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ClemRutter, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bloomsbury became the academic quarter of London in the nineteenth century. University College London, founded in 1826 as the first English university to admit students regardless of religion - and the first to admit women on equal terms with men, in 1878 - occupies a long classi...

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Image: ClemRutter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bloomsbury: Gordon Square

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Craven, CC BY-SA 2.0. Number 46 Gordon Square is where the Bloomsbury Group really began. After the death of their father Leslie Stephen in 1904, the four Stephen siblings - Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian - moved out of the Victorian gloom of Hyde Park Gate to a tall white-painted house in this ...

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Image: Stephen Craven | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bloomsbury: Hawksmoor's Church

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tedd Santana, CC BY 2.0. St George's Bloomsbury, built by Nicholas Hawksmoor between 1716 and 1731, is one of the strangest churches in London. The Roman porch has six huge Corinthian columns. The steeple, by Hawksmoor's own admission, is modelled on the Tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, one of the Seve...

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Image: Tedd Santana | CC BY 2.0

Bloomsbury: Coram's Fields

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Trimming, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1739 a retired sea captain named Thomas Coram persuaded the king to charter a hospital for abandoned children in Bloomsbury. The Foundling Hospital, the country's first incorporated charity, took in babies left at its gates and raised them. Hogarth was a governor; Handel compo...

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Image: Peter Trimming | CC BY-SA 2.0