A Weekend of Walking in Bloomsbury

The annual Bloomsbury Festival is on while I'm here. It was started in 2006, I think as a five-day festival, which has now expanded to ten days. I've been aware of it when I've previously been in London in October, but I've never managed to do any of the events until now. I'm still very covid-wary and prefer outdoor events, so I poured through the schedule for activities and events that would fit that bill. Happily, among the many walks on offer, I found three that looked interesting and booked them way back in July. This turned out to be a good thing, as a couple of the walks I did were sold out. At only a fiver per walk, there's no way to go wrong. 

First up was a walk about the late-18th century feminist writer (and mother of Mary Shelley) Mary Wollstonecraft. Once again, I need to plead ignorance and admit that I've never read any of her fiction or nonfiction, the most notable work being A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). I really should do, as she was a huge proponent of the education of women -- as a graduate of the largest women's college in the US (Smith College) and having worked at the oldest women's college (Mount Holyoke College, founded in 1837) it is rather pathetic that I have this huge hole in my reading. OK, while I'm fessing up, I've never read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein either. 

The Wollstonecraft walk was a long one, starting in Store Street, where she had once lived (house no longer there and exact location uncertain), through an archway leading under Senate House, into Russell Square, past a blue plaque for Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley in Marchmont Street, through Somers Town where a faded mural portrays Wollstonecraft, her husband William Godwin and their child when they lived in the area, which was semi-rural and only beginning to be developed at the time. The walk ended in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, where she was originally buried (she was subsequently re-interred in Bournemouth in 1851). 

After the walk concluded, I decided to walk northward in search of a bus stop. Never finding the right one, I ended up walking all the way through Camden Town and back to Belsize Park. Since I had started the day with a walk to the Parliament Hill Farmers' Market (I had taken the bus back and dropped my purchases at the flat before getting the tube to Goodge Street for the walk), it made for a very long day. But it wasn't over yet. My AirBnB hosts invited me to go out pub hopping in the neighbourhood. We started at the Haverstock Hill Tavern, but their beer garden was a bit noisy with music coming through the speakers and the football on the telly, so we moved to the Richard Steele, which was nearly empty and like a morgue (the walls and ceiling are painted black). It was lovely to get to know Chris and Renata a bit.

 

On Sunday, I threw a load of laundry in the washer in the flat before heading out to catch the tube back to Bloomsbury for two more walks. The first was a walk titled Bloomsbury's Best Open Spaces, led by Chris Foster, a retired Bobby who walked a beat in Bloomsbury. He didn't exactly stick to open spaces or to the festival's theme of "breathe", but took us around to some interesting spots while telling us amusing anecdotes along the way. Chris is a certified Camden guide and has done both in-person and online walks. During lockdown I did a couple of his Zoom walks and found them thoroughly enjoyable. I reckoned his in-person walks would be likewise and I was not disappointed.  

The second walk on Sunday was Rus in Urbe (the countryside in the city), led by Richard Cohen, another certified Camden guide. He took us through four squares in Bloomsbury -- Russell, Queen, Red Lion and Bloomsbury squares -- and Lincoln Inn's Fields in Holborn. This walk was full of historical information, with less of the personal or anecdotal stuff that Chris had infused in his walk. Richard did diverge from the historic to point out the home of the actor Rupert Everett in Great Ormond Street, telling us that he (Richard) had met Everett when leafleting for the Labour Party in the last general election. Everett said he'd be voting Labour. Richard added that he was confident Sir Keir Starmer would soon be PM. 

Throughout all the walks, we passed Georgian terraces and bow-fronted shops, beautiful foliage including the magnificent Brunswick Plane tree, world-renowned medical institutions, and more plaques than you could count, a testament to the writers, painters, politicians and other people of note who lived in Bloomsbury. 

On the Sunday walks, I overcame my natural shyness and reluctance to open my American mouth. One the first walk, as we were waiting for it to start, I chatted with a lovely woman named Lesley Thompson, who it turns out is herself a walking tour guide. Lesley recognized me (it's the magenta hair!) from the talk on Victorian London bricks on Friday. I hope I can work in one of Lesley's guided walks while I'm here. After the second walk was over, I found myself at the bus stop with a couple who had also been on the Wollstonecraft walk the day before. We got on the same bus heading north, and chatted along the way. They told me about the brilliant website The Menu, a weekly compendium of guided walks. I hadn't heard of it, but I've now signed up to get the weekly list in my email inbox. They also recommended that I check out the Gatehouse Theatre in Highgate, which I will do. It feels great to be meeting Londoners with common interests to mine and I hope they don't perceive me as a stupid American tourist. 

Weekend stats:

Saturday, October 15th

£9.30 farmers' market purchases

£5 guided walk

£1.50 pastel de nata

24,664 steps

10.16 miles

Sunday, October 16th

£10 guided walks

£2.80 pumpkin cake

£13.60 wine, kefir, bananas

18,519 steps

7.55 miles