Bloomsbury and King’s Cross: the back story

About Bloomsbury and King’s Cross: the back story

By the ULTIMATE London Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Bloomsbury is London’s intellectual quarter, a grid of Georgian squares around the British Museum and the University of London. To the north, King’s Cross has been reborn around its stations and canal.

Georgian squares

Bloomsbury was laid out from the 17th to the 19th century by the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford, around garden squares such as Bedford, Russell and Gordon Squares, many still lined with terraced houses.

The museum and the university

The British Museum moved here in the 18th century, and the University of London followed, with Senate House rising in the 1930s. Libraries, bookshops and museums such as the Foundling Museum and the Charles Dickens Museum fill the streets.

In Bloomsbury, the blue plaques come thick and fast.

The Bloomsbury Group

In the early 20th century, writers and artists such as Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and John Maynard Keynes lived around Gordon Square and gave their name to the Bloomsbury Group.

King’s Cross reborn

North of Euston Road, the railway lands behind King’s Cross and St Pancras have become a new quarter of offices, homes, shops and public squares, with Coal Drops Yard and Granary Square beside the Regent’s Canal.

Our advice: spend a morning at the British Museum, lunch on Lamb’s Conduit Street, and walk north through the squares to King’s Cross for the canal and Coal Drops Yard.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Bloomsbury and King’s Cross: the back story before you go.