With so many open spaces, so many relatively car-free enclaves and so many intriguing attractions this is a place to savour.
HousingThe western half of WC1 is Bloomsbury. Its grid pattern shows the planned development of the district but above ground academia has taken over vast tracts of territory. There are many inter-war mansion blocks to be found here, their numbers swelled in recent times by office-to-home conversions. Some are council-owned, a legacy of Camden Council's foresight in buying up property in these parts in the immediate post-war world.
Bloomsbury also has large concentrations of accommodation over commercial premises, many of them garages, a hangover from the many mews once so popular here. Shops serving the university buildings also have many flats above them. The few complete houses in the district are to be found to the south of the British Museum and constitute much of the remaining Georgiana in these parts.
The centre of WC1 devolves onto the Sixties' Brunswick Centre. Designed by architect Patrick Hodgkinson, it supplies low-rise high-density housing, shops, offices/studios, a cinema and car parking inside a cavernous concrete and glass structure. There are two residential blocks above the public areas and contain vast circulation spaces, endless corridors, staircases and dark corners.
The facade is not the architect's fault; Hodgkinson had originally wanted the place painted cream to empathise with the surrounding Georgian terraces. Now Grade II listed it contains four hundred flats, both council and private. The place may look down-at-heel but it is a popular and sociable place to live, with its flats boasting enormous windows.
Again, this is a place for flats, many of them over shops and some converted from other uses. More complete houses have survived here, although they tend to be very small (unlike their price tags). There are plenty of hotels and boarding houses in this district - we are close to the vast train termini on Euston Road - and the great Regency crescent of Cartwright Gardens has long since succumbed to a student population.
Moving east we come to St. Pancras. To gain a foothold in WC1 this might prove to be the most promising place to look. Modern post-war blocks, some council and some private, have brilliantly-painted communal areas and individual approaches to gardening. These are centred on Regent Square.
Elsewhere in St. Pancras there are better chances of coming across complete houses than in Bloomsbury. Most of the 19th century stock in front of King's Cross station function as boarding houses but further south, around Mecklenburgh Square and Gray's Inn Road, some fine period properties, both complete and converted, can be found.
The south of WC1 is dominated by paediatric facilities to the north and the legal fraternity at Gray's Inn, one of the Inns of Court, to the south. With the exception of Theobalds Road traffic leaves this part of London largely alone, and it feels appropriate that much of the high street here, Lamb's Conduit Street, is pedestrianised.
Great swathes of Georgiana survive hereabouts, with the Great Ormond Street Hospital responsible for dragging much of it back to respectability. The housing stock here is varied. Some of the 18th/19th century terraces have been converted to accommodation for medical staff and some to offices, but many complete homes and multi-occupancies in various conditions can be found here.
Blocks of flats have been inserted into the area from the Thirties to the Seventies and some very recent and small-scale mews' developments have also added to the housing stock. Their numbers decrease as we close in on the frantically busy area of Holborn.
For gardens and squares no other central postcode comes close. There is a wide variety. Gordon Square and the refurbished old burial ground of St George's Gardens are pleasingly rustic, full of twisting paths and varying foliage. Red Lion Square and Tavistock Square pay homage to social history, with representations of Fenner Brockway and Bertrand Russell at the former and memorials to Gandhi and the victims of Hiroshima at the latter.
Bedford Square is a perfect Georgian enclave but is only open to the residents. Isolated by fierce traffic, the vast Russell Square and its three fountains is always busy and close by, although the lavender-sellers of Vaughan Williams' London Symphony have long gone, Bloomsbury Square is a constant hit with London's office workers. Cartwright Gardens always seems to have its ration of relaxed students while St Andrews Gardens, somewhat off the beaten track, is sadly under-used.
The ravages of time have run their way through Brunswick Square, with its split personalities of concrete, sports ground and traffic on two sides. Mecklenburgh Square has a slice of New Zealand with its Kiwi borders, appreciated by the range of Commonwealth staff at the university. Queen Square is a little gem, surrounded by medical buildings on three sides but pretty enough to rise above it all. Gray's Inn Gardens remain the preserve of the judicially inclined, although it is perfectly legal for all and sundry to pay a visit.
Around these oases lie some of the capital's greatest and most venerable institutions. The law, in the guise of the chambers of Gray's Inn, dominate the south-east quarter. The centre and east of the postcode have some notable medical establishments, not least in the paediatric field, with Coram Family and Great Ormond Street Hospital.
The old Coram Foundling Hospital, now rebranded as Coram Family, deals with every aspect of child care. Since 1741 it has been trying to give help and a voice to children from vulnerable or orphaned families. Coram Fields still warns adults not to enter unless accompanied by a child and its livestock have an incongruous presence, with sheep regularly inspecting the ceaseless flow of traffic outside.
Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital has a global profile, offering "the widest range of paediatric specialties in the country, including 21 medical, 11 surgical and eight diagnostic specialties". The British Medical Association and the Wellcome Foundation also have their headquarters in WC1.
The western quarter of WC1 revolves around the University of London. Biggest fish here is the multifaculty University College of London, but other presences here include the School of Oriental and African Studies, RADA, the School of Art, University Hospital, the School of Tropical Medicine and the Art Deco wonder that is Senate House, one of Britain's top academic libraries. To walk down Gower Street is to be in the perpetual shadow of academia.
The Mary Ward College is close to these but its brief is adult education, encompassing everything from Art to Zen and pitching its courses in part-time, weekend and evening classes to allow access for all. For those more worried about their health the national centre for Alexander Technique is on Southampton Row.
To the south of all these is, after Blackpool Pleasure Beach, the most visited site in the land: the British Museum, "illuminating world cultures" and drawing, with all justification, visitors from every corner of the planet. Its portfolio is all-embracing, with education, touring exhibitions, films, family events and even dinner evenings, allowing you to enjoy that special dining treat with curators and private visits to galleries thrown in. Since 1957 the TUC have been near neighbours.
A couple of the West End's lesser-known theatres can be found in WC1, with the Bloomsbury Theatre now controlled by University College and willing to host everything of an artistic nature: ballet, comedy, revue, classical and modern drama, film and children's activities. Further south is the Cochrane Theatre, built in 1963 for the design students of the School of Art, but sadly more often dark than not.
Given the educatory nature of the district it is no surprise to find this area a mecca for bookworms. Opposite the British Museum are many second-hand bookshops, with Skoob Books close by on Sicilian Avenue. The original Dillons is still on Gower Street, and more specialist outlets include the PC Bookshop on Sicilian Avenue and the Maghreb Bookshop for all things North African. The gigantic St Pancras library is close to the latter.
For retail in general WC1 is made for browsing. No one district dominates and some wonderful specialist shops can be chanced upon, but the more intriguing shopping roads of Lamb's Conduit Street, Great Russell Street and Sicilian Avenue are worth exploring away from the more obvious Theobalds Road, New Oxford Street, High Holborn, Tottenham Court Road, Southampton Row and Gray's Inn Road.
There are many shops in the concrete Brunswick Centre, also home to the splendid Renoir Cinema and the Cartoon Art Gallery. Other galleries in WC1 include the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art. There is also Charles Dickens' last surviving London home, on Doughty Street, duly open to the public. 'Nicholas Nickleby' and 'Oliver Twist' were written here.
With such a disparate commercial area those hunting for restaurants and good pubs will require some inside knowledge before crossing the border into WC1. The district does boast Britain's only Okonomi-Yaki restaurant, which for the primitive among us is a Japanese cross between a pancake and a pizza. It's on Museum Street and the title means 'as you like it pancake'.
For pub hounds this area is one of pilgrimage. Some of London's most distinguished watering holes can be found in WC1 - Museum Tavern, Cittie of Yorke, Princess Louise, The Lamb, The Carpenters, The Bloomsbury, Yorkshire Grey and hardworking music pub The Water Rats. And many more.
TransportEuston Road, of course, contains the great railway termini of Euston, King's Cross and St. Pancras. To the east, in Clerkenwell, is the great commuters' station of Farringdon.
Most tube stations are on these adjoining main drags. Tottenham Court Road has Warren Street, Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road stations on the Northern Line. The latter also features the Central Line and this also stops on the south side of WC1 at Holborn and Chancery Lane.
Holborn also conducts the Piccadilly Line through WC1, the only tube line to do so, and central WC1 has its only tube station at Russell Square. The line goes on to King's Cross/St. Pancras, and this in turn provides junctions with the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City Lines. These also stop at Euston Square station (the oldest underground station in the world), not to be confused with Euston station itself.
The district is riddled with bus traffic and there is a small bus depot in front of Euston railway station.
Steve Roberts
HistoryEdward III took the area into royal ownership and ceded the district to the Carthusian monks of nearby Charterhouse. With the Reformation a century later Henry VIII granted Bloomsbury to his great favourite, the Lord Chancellor, Earl of Southampton. It was this family who would kick-start Bloomsbury.
It was the 4th Earl of Southampton who imported a strange Italian novelty: the square, complete with shops nearby and servants' houses. A partial version had appeared at Covent Garden a few years earlier, but the first London square to be named as such was Southampton Square - renamed Bloomsbury in the early 1800s - built in the late 1650s and such a wonder that foreign visitors were regularly transported to see what diarist John Evelyn called in 1665 "a little towne". Great Russell Street was built to link the square to Tottenham Court Road.
Following the Earl's lead other noble families pitched their tents in the district, with the manor houses of Montague House and Thanet House appearing first. The Bedford family and Nicholas Barbon became the main protagonists for development, and when Barbon attempted to lay out a 17-acre paddock to create Red Lion Square he met with opposition from the nearby lawyers of Gray's Inn. Incensed that they would lose their rural views a hundred of them turned up to beat up the workmen. Led in a counterattack by Barbon the workmen won the day and the lawyers tasted a rare defeat.
It was such rural views which kept Bloomsbury popular throughout the 18th century; but when the 5th Duke of Bedford showed no interest in living in London he demolished the manor house just north of Southampton Square and the entire area was up for building.
James Burton and Thomas Cubbitt set about creating a vision of squares and short roads, popular with both the artistic and legal fraternities. Locked gates controlled strictly the access to and from the squares and these stayed in place until 1893.
A more altruistic development had come with Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital. After a lifetime travelling the world Coram returned to his home country but on his first visit to London he was profoundly shocked to see children "left to die on dunghills".
By 1741 the great scheme was under way, but the place was overwhelmed by interest from all over Britain; a third of the children died within the first year. It was thanks to deep and involved help from two great artistic patrons, Handel and Hogarth, to see the hospital survive its early tribulations.
Bloomsbury's reputation dipped somewhat as it became the depository for the great number of institutions we still see today, notably the University from 1829 onward; this had begun as early as 1755 with the British Museum, originally only open to ten people at any one time, to those who had specifically written in to apply for the privilege and who had received printed admission cards in return. By 1866 one resident noted "a very unfashionable area, though very respectable".
To the south the notorious rookery of St. Giles, a hotbed of crime, was cleared away in 1847 with the creation of New Oxford Street. A further lease of life came with the Bloomsbury Set of 1904, a motley bunch of anti-Victorian artists, writers and aesthetes based around the Stephen family home in Gordon Square.
A more disturbing note came with a stroll through the area in September 1933 by Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard. While waiting for the traffic lights to change at Southampton Row/Vernon Place, on his way from the Strand Palace Hotel to a conference at the Russell Hotel, Szilard realised the concept of a nuclear chain reaction without which atomic weapons could not have existed. Nearly twelve years later he was writing to President Truman hoping to stop their deployment.
Steve Roberts.
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