History
Bloomsbury is a historic area of central London, bordered by Euston Road in the north, Bloomsbury Way and Theobalds Road in the south, Gray's Inn Road to the east and Gower Street to the west. The area is first mentioned in the Domesday Book survey of 1086, where it is described as having vineyards and 'wood for 100 pigs'. The name Bloomsbury is not recorded until 1201, with the acquisition of the land by William de Blemond. Blemond's manor, or possibly manor house, duly acquired the suffix 'bury'.
The manor was acquired by the crown in the late 14th Century and donated to the Carthusian order, in whose hands it remained until Henry VIII's seizure of the monasteries, when it was granted to the Lord Chancellor and Earl of Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley. By the late 17th Century, the Wriothesleys had married into the Russell family, the Dukes of Bedford, who were to create the fashionable residential squares that still characterise Bloomsbury today. Bedford Square itself was laid out in the 1770s and remains one of London's best preserved set pieces of Georgian architecture.
Nearby is the British Museum, which received the royal assent in 1753 and first opened to the public in 1759 in a 17th Century mansion, Montagu House. Today's building, on the same site, was completed in the mid-19th Century, together with the round Reading Room in its central courtyard, where readers have included Karl Marx, Lenin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This space is now occupied by the Great Court, the largest covered public square in Europe, and the British Library has a new home at St Pancras, on the northern perimeter of Bloomsbury.
By Victorian times Bloomsbury was losing its residential exclusivity, as more and more museums, hospitals and academic institutions grew up in the area. The University of London was granted its first charter in 1836 and still occupies Senate House, just a short walk from Bedford Square. University College London in Gower Street is home to the Petrie Museum and the Grant Museum of Zoology, while among the many other museums in the area are the Foundling Museum, near Brunswick Square, which commemorates the former Foundling Hospital for abandoned children, and the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street.
Finally, Bloomsbury will always be associated with those remarkable writers, philosophers and artists who met frequently in the area during the early part of the 20th Century. The 'Bloomsbury Group' included the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the painters Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant, the art critic Roger Fry and the economist John Maynard Keynes, with occasional contributions from Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and T.S.Eliot. They added greatly to the intellectual character of Bloomsbury and their influence continues to this day.