London History, Up Close
Blogs inspired by Cobble's audio walks
The Odious Swamp: Mary Shelley’s Life in London After Percy
The author's London life after her husband's death saw Frankenstein credited, his heart held in a writing case, and thirty years of writing from grief.
In July 1822, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the Italian coast. He was twenty-nine. His wife Mary – author of Frankenstein, daughter of two of the most radical thinkers of the age – was twenty-four, a widow with one surviving child, and her dead husband’s heart wrapped in silk in her writing case. She brought all three back to England. She would live for another twenty-nine years – exactly as long as Percy had lived altogether – writing, grieving, and...
moreSwahili, Sanskrit, and the KGB: Academics and Adventurers at SOAS
The School of Oriental and African Studies has had Soviet intelligence officers, Cold War codebreakers, and Paul Robeson studying Swahili.
The School of Oriental and African Studies has always had a reputation for producing remarkable people. Some explored territories no European had mapped; some taught the world’s languages to codebreakers working in secret; some turned out to be Soviet intelligence officers living under borrowed names. The reputation for harbouring SOAS spies and adventurers was not entirely unearned, and the staff were, if anything, even more interesting than the students. Lao She and the Immigrant...
moreThe Most Popular Writer You’ve Never Heard Of: G.W.M. Reynolds
G.W.M. Reynolds outsold Dickens, wrote the Mysteries of London, and marched with the Chartists. And almost nobody remembers him.
George William MacArthur Reynolds was, by most measures, the most widely read author in Victorian England. He outsold Dickens. His newspaper reached 350,000 readers a week. His novel sold a million copies in ten years. He is almost entirely forgotten. This erasure is partly because Dickens called him a pander to the lowest passions of the lowest natures. As well as this, it’s down to Reynolds spending his career agreeing with Karl Marx about the ruling classes, which tends to affect...
moreAs Honeymoons Go, It Had Room for Improvement: Sarah Forbes Bonetta at Burton Crescent
A Yoruba princess, who was also Queen Victoria's goddaughter, honeymooned in Bloomsbury. But the house caught fire. Twice.
Sarah Forbes Bonetta was born Omoba Aina in a Yoruba village in what is now Nigeria, captured as a child after a raid that killed both her parents, gifted to a British naval officer along with a keg of rum and ten heads of cowries, presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, sent to Sierra Leone, returned to England, introduced into Victorian society, married at St Nicholas’ Church in Brighton, and arrived in Burton Crescent – now Cartwright Gardens – for her honeymoon. One...
moreThe Man Who Built Aligarh: Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Seventeen Months in Bloomsbury
In 1869, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan spent seventeen months at 21 Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury. He left with a plan that would reshape Muslim education in India for generations.
Mecklenburgh Square lies on the eastern edge of Bloomsbury, quieter than its more famous neighbours, its garden enclosed by late Georgian terraces. A plaque on the facade of number 21 marks the residence of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan from 1869 to 1870. Khan arrived in London in May 1869, stayed for seventeen months, and returned to India with a plan that would reshape Muslim education on the subcontinent for generations. He was also, at various points in his life, condemned as a traitor to his...
moreThe Mummy’s Curse: Death, Disaster, and the British Museum’s Most Dangerous Exhibit
In the Egyptian Room at the British Museum sits a mummy case that has been blamed for lost limbs, multiple deaths, and - if one senior curator is to be believed - the First World War.
An illustration of the British Museum. Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury runs west to east past the vast neoclassical facade of the British Museum – 44 Greek-temple columns, a triangular pediment, those enormous steps leading up to the main entrance. Walk through the gates, cross the forecourt, and pass Westmacott’s carved allegory of human progress overhead as you enter one of the great repositories of human history. Tourists move in clusters. School groups trail behind their...
moreSixty Thousand Books on Two Ships: The Warburg Institute’s Escape from Nazi Germany to Bloomsbury
In 1933, an entire research institute crossed the North Sea, from Nazi Germany to London. This is the story of how Bloomsbury's Warburg Institute came to be.
The Warburg Institute on Woburn Square in Bloomsbury In December 1933, two small steamships called the Hermia and the Jessica sailed from Hamburg to London carrying an unusual cargo. 60,000 books, 10,000 photographs, most of the furniture, and the entire staff of a research institute devoted to the study of images, memory, and the survival of the ancient world in modern life. The Nazis had come to power that year. Aby Warburg, the institute’s late founder, was Jewish and so were...
more‘Uncollegiate-looking’: UCL’s Radical Secularism and the Wilkins Building
William Wilkins designed UCL's Gower Street portico in 1827 with no cross and no chapel, and sparked a debate about architecture and radical education that still resonates.
UCL’s Wilkins building At the north end of Gower Street in Bloomsbury, you’ll find University College London’s iconic neoclassical portico. With its ten Corinthian columns supporting an elegant dome, its been a local landmark since it first rose above the surrounding streets in the late 1820s. The building has a conventionality to it now – it smacks of university or institution – but in its early days its neoclassical style actually communicated something pretty...
moreLove, Friendship, and The London School of Medicine for Women
Sophia Jex-Blake opened Britain's first medical school for women in Bloomsbury in 1874. The remarkable women who built it lived extraordinary lives together.
The London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women The building that stands on the corner of Hunter Street and Handel Street, just off Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury, carries a stone inscription above its door: “London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women.” It was built between 1897 and 1900 by J.M. Brydon, on the site of earlier, more modest premises. That earlier building, a spacious, old-fashioned house with long rooms on the ground floor and a walled...
more‘Our London was a Wilderness’: How UCL Shaped Bloomsbury and Gordon Square
From a boggy building site to one of London's most celebrated neighbourhoods, UCL transformed Bloomsbury over two centuries.
Gordon Square, the heart of Bloomsbury and UCL. Gordon Square, at the heart of Bloomsbury, is built around gardens. The grassy enclosure’s benches, flowers and old trees make for a charming spot for students and passersby to enjoy London’s rare sunny days. Ringed by elegant Georgian houses, a church, and many of University College London’s buildings, it’s a tightly enclosed oasis. Yet it’s hard to imagine that this neighbourhood was barely built when UCL opened its doors...
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