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Bloomsbury and Legal London
The character of an area of London can change visibly from one street to the next. Nowhere is this so clear as in the contrast between fun-loving Soho and the hub of intellectual London, Bloomsbury, a mere 100 yards to the northeast, or between arty Covent Garden and, on the other side of Kingsway, sober Holborn. The first district is best known for the famous flowering of literary-arty bohemia, personified by the clique known as the Bloomsbury Group during the first three decades of the 20th century, and for the British Museum and University of London, which dominate it now. The second sounds as exciting as, say, a center for accountants, but don't be put off: filled with magnificently ancient buildings, it's more interesting and beautiful than you might suppose.
Fundamental to the region's spirit of open expression and scholarly debate is the legacy of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite corps of artists and writers who lived in this neighborhood during the first part of the 20th century. Gordon Square was at one point home to Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes (both at No. 46), and Lytton Strachey (at No. 51). Much like the Beat poets of San Francisco or the jazz artists of the Harlem Renaissance, they defined their neighborhood as well as an entire era. But perhaps the best-known square in Bloomsbury is the large, centrally located Russell Square, with gardens laid out by Humphry Repton, a prominent English landscape designer. Scattered around the University of London campus are Woburn Square, Torrington Square, Tavistock Square, and Gordon Square. The unforgettable British Library with its vast treasures is a few blocks north, across busy Euston Road.
The area from Somerset House on the Strand, all the way up Kingsway to the Euston Road, is known as London's Museum Mile for the myriad historic houses and museums that dot the area. Charles Dickens Museum, where the author wrote Oliver Twist, is one of the most-visited sites in the area. Artists' studios and design shops share space with tenants near the bright and modern British Museum. And guaranteed to raise a smile from the most blasé and footsore tourist is Sir John Soane's Museum, which hardly deserves the burden of its dry name.
Bloomsbury also happens to be where London's legal profession was born. In fact, the buildings associated with legal London were some of the few structures spared during the Great Fire of 1666, and so the serpentine alleys, cobbled courts, and historic halls frequented by the city's still-bewigged barristers ooze centuries of history. The massive Gothic-style Royal Courts of Justice ramble all the way to the Strand, and the Inns of Court —Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, Middle Temple, and Inner Temple —are where most British trial lawyers have offices to this day. In the 14th century the inns were lodging houses where the barristers lived so that people would know how to easily find them (hence, the label "inn"). Also here are Temple Church, the 500-year-old Prince Henry's Room, and the Staple Inn, one of London's oldest surviving half-timber buildings.
