Bimble like you’re Virginia Woolf
by Sarina Chandaria
Begin at Holborn Station and make your way to The Bloomsbury Hotel, a neo-Georgian building whose façade is said to be modelled on Queen Victoria’s Dollhouse. The hotel celebrates London’s literary quarter with portraits of various members of the Bloomsbury Set like Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell and biographer Lytton Strachey. To energise you for the walk ahead, settle in for brunch at the hotel’s aptly named restaurant, The Dalloway Terrace or, if you’re staying the night, make sure to try a drink at The Bloomsbury Club whose ever-changing cocktail menu is designed to reflect some aspect of the Bloomsbury Group. Currently this is drinks inspired by mysticism, astrology and the occult which bled into the lives and works of many members of the Group.
After brunch, pop across the street to L. Cornelissen & Son, the historic art material manufacturer whose famous customers include the artists Aubrey Beardsley and Francis Bacon. The store is truly magical, filled with jewel-like jars of pigment and innumerable kinds of paint brush. Even if you’re not an artist, being in this place is like walking through history.
Once you’ve stocked up on pigments and paint brushes, make your way to Bloomsbury Street and walk past the grand British Museum and Bedford Square Garden until you reach Malet Street Gardens, a small green space with odd stumpy railings melted down from their former glory as part of the war effort in the 1940s. Just beyond, you should see the Senate House, rumoured to be the inspiration for Orwell’s ominous and omnipotent Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984.
Wander to Gordon Square, Virginia Woolf’s very first Bloomsbury address and where her adult life truly began. How you get there is up to you, put yourself in Woolf’s shoes and haunt the streets of London — observe people and imagine their lives, all things Woolf encourages in her essays from the 1930s. Perhaps you’ll cut through Russell Square, or meander through an odd collection of side streets. Gordon Square was the birthplace of the now famous Bloomsbury Group, where Woolf held weekly Thursday meetings with artists and intellectuals. Occasional visitors to the meetings included E.M Forster whom Woolf apparently adored and used to watch crossing Gordon Square sequestered behind a bush.
Eventually, you should make your way to Tavistock Square where Virginia Woolf lived at №52, between 1924 and 1939, writing some of her best-known novels including Mrs Dalloway. The regular meetings of the Bloomsbury group became freer and more experimental here compared to the early days at Gordon Square, with Dorothy Parker famously saying that they “lived in squares and loved in triangles”. After you’ve explored the Square and perhaps having found the bust of Woolf, go down Tavistock Place.
Woolf, in an essay entitled Old Bloomsbury, once described a Thursday meeting as “It was late at night; the room was full of smoke; buns, coffee and whisky were strewn about; we were not wearing white satin or seed-pearls; we were not dressed at all.” So, depending on the hour, channel your inner Bloomsbury Set spirit with a coffee at the cosy basement café Bloomsbury Coffee House or venture a little bit further for something stronger at The New Bloomsbury Set.
Bloomsbury, in the 20th century, had a bohemian sensibility — an edginess that drew in creative spirits from across the country. It would seem Bloomsbury has gentrified and grown up a bit since then, but I would argue it still retains its academic and artistic spirit. Nothing exemplifies that more for me than some of my favourite Bloomsbury bookstores. Gay’s the Word, the oldest LGTBQ+ bookshop in the UK, has been a bastion of queer culture in London for over 40 years and Skoob Books is a sanctuary for second-hand academic books. Skoob Books is a glorious, haphazard jumble of organised chaos that makes finding a book (that you weren’t even really looking for in the first place) an adventure. Finally, browse the shelves of grey-jacketed books at Persephone Books, who only print works by neglected 20th century authors.
If you made it to Persephone Books, continue exploring Lambs Conduit Street to find yet more haunts of intellectual icons past like The Lamb pub, a favourite of John Maynard Keynes and the turn off to Rugby Street where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent their first night together in 1956. You’ll also hopefully see La Fromagerie, a cheese and wine store that doubles as a restaurant serving French and Italian classics including an unbeatable fondue savoyarde. A rather good place to pick up a snack to enjoy outside in one of the many green oases of Bloomsbury.
You can find my Bimble of these places, with extra details here: https://bimble.com/lists/6742472633876480
