London History, Up Close

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...

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...

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...

The steps of St Paul’s Cathedral spill down from a portico of paired columns onto St Paul’s Churchyard, the pedestrianised square that wraps around the building’s south side. Christopher Wren’s stunning dome looms above – the one that survived the Blitz, which you can see from half of London on a clear day. Tourists gather here in clusters. Office workers cut through on their lunch breaks. On most days, this part of the City of London is busy but...

25 Noel Road, where Joe Orton lived, wrote and died. Walk along Noel Road in Islington, where the street runs parallel to the Regent’s Canal, and you’ll find number 25. It’s a Georgian terrace that looks much like any other on the street. Look up to the second floor and you’ll spot a pale green plaque from the London Borough of Islington, bearing the name Joe Orton. It is placed high on the building, easily missed, perhaps fitting for a man whose life outpaced his...

24 Chapel Street in Belgravia, where Joe Orton and Beatles icon Paul McCartney met in 1967. Number 24 Chapel Street sits on a quiet Belgravia corner, all elegant white stucco and understated wealth. The sort of address where nothing scandalous could possibly happen. Except on the evening of 24 January 1967, when Britain’s most transgressive playwright sat down to dinner with the world’s biggest pop stars. Joe Orton arrived at Brian Epstein‘s house just before...

On Essex Road in Islington stands a grand Victorian building that looks slightly out of place amongst its neighbours. Red bricks with sturdy stone pillars flanking wooden doors, and a stone crest above. This is Islington South Library, and in the early 1960s it became the unlikely battleground for one of British literature’s most audacious pranks. Between 1959 and 1962, playwright Joe Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell waged a campaign of cultural sabotage against...

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...

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds over 850 photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron in its collections. This is remarkable for several reasons, but perhaps the most striking is that Cameron didn’t touch a camera until she was 48 years old. She had less than two decades to create a body of work that established her as one of the most influential photographers in history. She did it by ignoring almost everything professional photographers told her. Cameron worked in a converted henhouse,...

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...