Real Bloomsbury

REAL BLOOMSBURY

In this very personal but thoroughly researched journey through today’s Bloomsbury, I find past and present existing on easy terms in a unique area of Central London. Backpackers and tourists jostle with the literary ghosts of early twentieth century Bloomsbury and an actor in the Carry On films turns out to have lived next door to where one of the 20th century’s most famous works of literary criticism got written – before becoming the premises of a Bengali grocer. Blocks of council flats named after a medieval manor, the mummified body of a nineteenth century philosopher sitting in a University corridor, the clatter of the old British Museum Round Reading Room and the architect of the new British Library glimpsed incognito wandering around his creation, crocodiles of young European teenagers on school trips closing in on the British Museum, pubs, museums, galleries, squares and Georgian terraces, buried medieval conduits, legends and histories of an area once open fields and duck ponds, frequented by eighteenth and nineteenth century revellers, all build up to a picture of the living Bloomsbury by a part-time local resident and urban stroller who has covered every inch of his patch on foot.

The book even mentions Virginia Woolf.

‘His amiably informative and well illustrated book is the ideal companion to any tour’ – The Independent