London History, Up Close
Blogs inspired by Cobble's audio walks
‘How Was It That I Felt As If I Had Come Home?’: Indian students at UCL
From Rabindranath Tagore to Madan Lal Dhingra, UCL's Bloomsbury campus shaped some of India's most notable figures whilst they were students.
Statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury Tavistock Square sits at the heart of Bloomsbury, enclosed by tall London brick terraces. In the middle of its central gardens, a bronze figure looks down from a stone plinth. It’s the nonviolent anti-colonialist Mahatma Gandhi. The ‘father of modern India’ was perhaps the most celebrated Indian student ever to attend the nearby University College London. When founded in 1826, UCL became the first English university...
moreUCL or ‘Cockney College’: Just How Radical was London’s First University?
University College London was founded to educate the 'middling rich, but found itself ridiculed by the establishment even before opening.
UCL’s main building. On Gower Street in Bloomsbury, University College London’s iconic façade overlooks the perpetual motion of student life, with lectures beginning, seminars ending, and ideas forming. UCL’s student body is one of the most diverse in the country. In a way that matters, it always has been. In 1828, England’s third university arrived in Bloomsbury with no royal blessing, no religious test, and no shortage of enemies. For centuries, the only...
moreW.B. Yeats, ‘George’, and the Unknown Writer in Bloomsbury: When a Nobel Prize Was Written by Spirits
The Irish poet's work was influenced by his wife's automatic writing sessions, during which she communicated with spirits from their Bloomsbury home.
There’s a certain kind of writer who believes their best work comes from somewhere else. The muse, the subconscious, divine inspiration. W.B. Yeats took this literally. For nearly 25 years, he lived on Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, and during that time he became convinced that some of his finest poetry was being dictated by the spirit world. Whether you believe in spirits or not, the results are hard to argue with. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. And a significant...
moreDorothy Richardson on Woburn Walk: The Woman Who Invented Stream of Consciousness Before Virginia Woolf
A lesser-known author pioneered one of modernist literature's key elements whilst living on Woburn Walk. But other writers - including one Bloomsbury counterpart in particular - have banked the credit.
On the picturesque Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, there’s a blue plaque above the doors of numbers 6A and 8 commemorating Dorothy Richardson. Most people walking past have never heard of her. Those who have tend to think of her as a footnote in modernist literary history, someone who did something vaguely experimental before Virginia Woolf and James Joyce made it famous. This is profoundly unfair. Dorothy Richardson invented stream-of-consciousness narrative in English literature. She...
moreBloomsbury’s Suffragette Street: Lady Constance Lytton and the Community of Duke’s Road
Lytton, who went under cover to show the women's suffrage debate was about class as well as gender, lived in Bloomsbury amongst sisters in the struggle.
Standing on Duke’s Road in Bloomsbury today, you’ll see St Pancras New Church and its caryatids on one side, and a pale-blue Premier Inn on the other. With apologies to the building’s architect and those running the day-to-day hotel operations, the Premier Inn appears functional and unremarkable. Nothing about it suggests that this site was once a terrace of modest flats where some of Britain’s most radical women planned their campaigns for the vote. Between 1910 and 1912,...
moreThe Bloomsbury Barrister Who Defended the Indefensible: Charles Phillips and the Ethics of Advocacy
Gordon Square was home to Charles Phillips, a firebrand barrister and anti-death penalty campaigner, who was defined by a controversial case and notorious execution.
Gordon Square sits at the heart of Bloomsbury, one of those elegant Georgian enclaves where the houses seem to breathe history. Number 39, with its pale brick façade and black number plate beneath the balcony, looks out over the central gardens. Its quiet, dignified, and, amidst many other beautiful Cubitt-style Bloomsbury dwellings, unremarkable at first glance. But Charles Phillips lived here from 1847 until his death in 1859, and by the time he arrived, he was already famous. Phillips...
moreSenate House and the Ministry of Truth: How Bloomsbury Inspired Orwell’s 1984
In George Orwell's defining novel, this towering university building - home to the Ministry of Information in World War 2 - was transformed into a centre of autocracy.
On Malet Street in Bloomsbury, the Art Deco tower of Senate House dominates this part of London. It rises high into the air, nineteen floors of Portland stone that seem to dwarf everything around it. The building looks like it belongs in a different city, something from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or a fascist architect’s fever dream. George Orwell knew this building well. During World War II, it housed the Ministry of Information, where his wife Eileen worked and where the...
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