Why London's famed Bloomsbury neighborhood is the perfect home base for the literary traveler. ♦
If I were to walk the same distance from my flat in the opposite direction I’d hit the British Library, whose holdings (by their estimate) include around 14 million books; treasures including pamphlets, monographs, broadsides, and ephemera from antiquity to the present day; first and rare editions of books, periodicals, and historical documents; and permanent and rotating exhibitions on the arts, history, and culture. There are also events and lecture series by renowned authors discussing their own and others’ work, really too many cool things to comprehend, much less try to name. It’s three-tenths of a mile thataway.
My first week here, I headed to a nearby bookstore I wanted to check out, but I got sidetracked for a good hour-and-a-half by four other bookstores I stumbled across along the way.
I’m in Bloomsbury, the London neighborhood that's almost synonymous with England’s literary history, and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the bookishness that surrounds me. I don’t need to seek it out, nor do I need a map to find it; instead I could simply leave my flat, walk in any direction, and within five minutes I’d come across a bookstore I didn’t realize was there, or a blue marker indicating a place where a famous author once held residence, or a plaque commemorating where a famous book was written or published.
This is in fact what I did a few days back: I grabbed a water and an umbrella (which I later needed) and then I walked: that’s how I found Tavistock Square, where not only Woolf lived, and where she currently has her own statue and small tavern/restaurant, but where Dickens once lived, too, in a building now owned by the British Medical Association. It’s how I found the offices of publisher Faber & Faber, where T.S. Eliot once worked as an editor … a nameplate on the building hardly draws attention to itself, and if I hadn’t been reading every plaque I went by I might’ve missed it.
Then there were the bookstores: Collinge & Clarke, specializing in rare and collectable titles, especially those dealing with the history of printing and design; Judd Street Books, a secondhand shop with several tables outside to catch a passerby’s attention; Gay’s the Word, an LGBTQ+ bookshop doing brisk business during Pride Month; Skoob Books, a used bookstore with a terrific selection across genres; The London Review Bookshop, where I bought a couple of gift books for others instead of buying more for myself like usual.
While checking out, I told the bookseller what I was doing—“I’m spending the day looking for small literary sites around the neighborhood”—and I asked if he had any suggestions.
He mentioned that T.S. Eliot used to work in an office around the corner, and I told him I’d just passed it. Then he tried to explain where I’d find the restaurant where Eliot and his wife had their first date. There was the hotel room on Russell Square where Oscar Wilde stayed his last night in England before leaving the country under cloud of scandal. He told me a few more places to look for, and by then I knew that I would need another day to actually follow through on any of these.
He tried to explain where I’d find a closeby place related to Tennyson and said I couldn’t miss it because it was right by a Taco Bell. But even if I wasn’t absorbing what he was saying, I was charmed by how excited he got to answer the question.
“Pretty much point your camera down any street,” he said, “and you’ll find literary history.”
In the States it often feels like we have to make an appointment with literature; depending on where you live, one might not have a bookstore within a 40-minute drive. Our creative arts and libraries are underfunded, even met with hostility or suspicion, and our literary history is sometimes presented with a kind of sideshow curiosity, like when you enter a quaint historic hotel in some sleepy town full of antique shops and see a plaque on the wall reading, James Fenimore Cooper slept here once in 1842, on his way someplace else, and did not care for it.
I’m here in London as a teacher, as part of Miami University of Ohio’s Literary London program, and I’m here, too, as an eager literary tourist, excited to engage with literary history, culture, and the arts. But I’m in Bloomsbury almost by accident—it’s where there was a nice flat available, and the university was able to secure it for me, so that’s where I landed. I’m realizing now just how lucky that was. I’d love to be able to tell other travelers where they should visit in the neighborhood, though I hardly feel qualified to do so; every day still feels like an act of discovery for me. But maybe that’s the best advice I could give … to engage in discovery. Put on a backpack and take a water with you. Set off walking in whatever direction you like. Head down any street and you’ll find literary history.
