This London walking tour takes us around the fabulous squares of Bloomsbury with its fantastic tales.
Our walk starts with the incredible story of Oliver Cromwell’s body being kept in the cellar of The Red Lion pub in Holborn in 1661 and its possible secret burial. Then in Red Lion Square, we investigate the story that the square is haunted by three ghostly cloaked figures. There’s also Conway Hall and the house inhabited by members of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. We move on to Queen Square with the Italian Hospital, Mary Ward Centre, Queen Charlotte, The Queen’s Larder and the Devil’s Dyke. Our Bloomsbury walk passes the Horse Hospital into Russell Square, once the site of a Parliamentarian fortification during the English Civil War. Next we walk along Bedford Way to Gordon Square which is heavily associated with the Bloomsbury Set (Virginia Woolf etc.). The walk ends with a spooky story in Woburn Square.
Bloomsbury is of course best known for its literary associations. And rightly so. But its comedy heritage is less celebrated. In this video I set out with a very simple goal – to visit the site used as the exterior location for Bernard Black’s bookshop in the brilliant Channel 4 sitcom – Black Books. And quite by accident, nearly opposite 13 Leigh Street is another great comedy heritage location, The Norfolk Arms, a pub frequented by the mother of the fantastic Kenneth Williams (the Boot in Cromer Street was another of her regular drinking haunts). The Norfolk featured in Williams’ recollections of his early years living the area, having grown up in nearby Marchmont Street.
You also might want to watch this Bloomsbury walk from Red Lion Square to Woburn Place with all sorts of great stories and legends.
Leaving the Robert Elms Show at Broadcasting House I follow my nose through the streets of Fitzrovia. I notice the name change of Union Street to Riding House Street and the home of Olaudah Equiano whose autobiography describing his experiences of Slavery helped bring about its abolition.
I take in the new development of Pearson Square, which appears left-over from the Kings Cross redevelopment and designed to funnel the wind through its walkways.
The old apartment blocks remind me of the world of Patrick Hamilton in his novel The Midnight Bell, lonely boarding rooms for clerks and shop-girls, typists, and workers in the rag trade.
Soon my feet carry me into Charlotte Street and to the door of what in my experience is the most authentic Italian Cafe in London – people chatting in Italian, well-read copy of Gazetta Dello Sport folded up on the counter, bank of TVs with the latest Italian football news.
A quick look at the Persian and Bronze Age Britain galleries in the British Museum before strolling down Woburn Walk to Judd Books and the unavoidable purchases. At this point I’m on autopilot, well-worn tracks from my days living at the Angel, an afternoon amble, baby in the pram on the way to Coram’s Fields. The Bruswick Centre a glorious hunk of sculpted utopia rendered in concrete.
Sometimes in my desire to push the boundaries of London, to venture out beyond the city fringe into the provinces, it’s easy to overlook the multiple wonders of a mazy wander round the streets of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury.
I wanted to go OUT and shoot SOMETHING happening. I followed my instincts – the Central Line to Holborn then sucked north into the grid vortex of the Bloomsbury Squares. I’m sure there’s some sort of occult geometry underlying the lay-out of the garden squares of Bloomsbury (distinct from those arranged on the slopes of Pentonville and following the curve of the high ground across Barnsbury).
The ‘Cab Man’s Tea Huts’ fascinate me – but you know what, I’ve never actually been in one, how is that possible? The one at Russell Square was presented by Sir Squire Bancroft in 1901. Bancroft was a significant figure in Victorian theatre, instigating a new form of realist theatre “drawing-room comedy” or “cup and saucer drama”. He produced a play by the bizarre figure of Edward Bulwer-Lytton who I wrote about in This Other London – the man who had has wife locked up in an asylum for disagreeing with him, coined a number of cliches still used today and most bizarre of all, wrote a novel that was later the source of Nazi cult that believed in a subterranean secret source of energy and insisted the Luftwaffe develop a Flying Saucer in the last months of the war.
Those tea huts are strange places and who knows what other odd powers have been unleashed by the Bloomsbury grid – just look at the art deco detail on the gate posts of SOAS in the video and the brutalist brilliance of the Institute of Education.
A sultry Sunday early evening stroll round Bloomsbury was just what my hangover required. One of my literary role-models, Thomas Burke spent a lot of time walking these streets and I fancy, often feeling slightly jaded from a few the night before. In his 1939 book, Living in Bloomsbury he writes about how the reputation and nature of the area had changed, “as one district erases its shabby past, and improves and promotes itself, another forgets its decent past, and deteriotes and wanes…. Bloomsbury is a notable example of the whirlygig of favour.”
Burke outlines Bloomsbury’s arc from a smart neighbourhood for professionals and bankers in the 1820’s – 1860’s to the dwelling place for ‘hard-up clerks’ by the 1880’s, then starting to become re-gentrified during the interwar years of the 20th Century when he lived there. He lists the 19th Century books on London life that he accumulated during this time, books for people who are “seeking illumination on the realities of the period”. The intriguing collection includes, The Wilds of London and The Seven Curses of London by James Greenwood; Ritchie’s Night Side of London, Occult London, Mark Lemon’s Up and Down the London Streets, and James Grant’s The Great Metropolis.
From Sicilian Avenue I make my way for a mooch in Book Warehouse on Southampton Row and then on to the Brunswick Centre after stopping to admire the font of the Underground sign above the entrance to Russell Square tube station.
I photograph the doorway of an apartment block in Marchmont Street that I imagine is where those ‘hard-up clerks’ mentioned by Burke might have lived. The prostitute from Patrick Hamilton’s The Midnight Bell also lived round here somewhere. There’s always life in Marchmont Street, in the cafes, the launderette with the cranes looming above, the pub, Judd Street Books (which I just missed).
Moving round to Judd Street munching on a Topic bar you have to stop and admire Clare Court, a fine 1920’s brown brick block of flats, a fitting tribute to the 18th Century brick fields upon which it stands.
The neighbouring Lucas-Cromer estate was developed for housing with the first six houses rising from the cow pastures in 1801. By 1815, Lucas the tin-plate worker, had built another 99. Cromer Street today is dominated by a mixture of social housing blocks – the backs of the estate that lines Harrison Street and older flats with locally-listed shop fronts below. It has a European feel in the sunset, reminds me of the outskirts of cities in Emilia Romagna – Modena, Parma, Bologna.
The view north from Swinton Street is a panorama of changing London – the backs of early 20th Century social housing and the gleaming new glass towers of the Kings Cross development. I’m closing in on sacred ground – the Pen Ton mound, springs gurgling beneath the pavement, rising on the high ground around the top of Pentonville Road. The only reasonable thing to do now is to follow the water to a table near the banks of The New River outside the Marquess Tavern in Canonbury, a grand Victorian pile where George Orwell used to drink.
Back on 7th September saw a wonderful event at Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury with a screening + Q&A of my film, Walking the visionary London of Emanuel Swedenborg. Back on a freezing January morning, with Iain Sinclair and Stephen McNeilly we retraced the footsteps of the hugely influential 18th Century scientist, philosopher, mystic and theologian. London played a huge role in the Swedenborg story, with Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury continuing his legacy.
Our walk started in Warner Street, Clerkenwell where Swedenborg had his most famous vision in a Chop House. We then walked on along the course of the River Fleet to Bakers Yard / Cold Bath Square where Swedenborg died in 1772. From here we continued along Saffron Hill and Hatton Garden to Fetter Lane, the site of the Moravian Chapel that Swedenborg attended. Our Swedenborg walk took us along Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill to Paternoster Square linking together a series of locations associated with Swedenborg’s publishing and writing career. We then headed out to East London, passing along Leman Street, Cable Street, past Wilton’s Music Hall to Swedenborg Gardens where Swedenborg was buried in the Swedish Church, and the whole story of Swedenborg’s head, which deserves a book in its own right.
Watching the icy clouds of breath in the film offered some faint relief from the sweltering temperatures in the hall. The discussion was illuminating as ever with Iain Sinclair and Stephen McNeilly. The bust of Swedenborg ever present looming over our shoulders, and I was tickled to discover that it was modelled on the wrong mummified head.
This is the time of year when the veil between this world and the otheworld is more porous allowing spirits and other entities to walk abroad amongst us. So I stalked the streets around Holborn and Covent Garden seeing what I could detect.
I passed by the Kingsway Tram Tunnel then strolled along Sicilian Avenue to Swedenborg House. Emmanuel Swedenborg believed he’d been granted the gift of being able to visit heaven and hell at will and commune with this he found there. The society created in his honour is still active in Bloomsbury (I’ve frequented its marvellous hall myself on occasion). Drifting past the Princess Louise I wander down Great Queen Street to Freemasons’ Hall – which seemed apt and if nothing else its grand art deco architecture is worthy of the theme. This Halloween walk then visits one of the most haunted theatres in London (or so they say), Theatre Royal Dury Lane and having done a shift or two in the bar there in a former life I can tell you that the staff are keen to vacate the building after the show and the old timers there all had a tale to tell of their ghostly encounters. The spooky trail ends with two locations from Ben Aaronovitch’s marvellous Rivers of London book – The Royal Opera House where the book reaches its climax, and St. Paul’s Actors Church on Covent Garden Piazza where Peter Grant spots his first ghost at the beginning of the story.
