Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
South of the British Museum
Over the years, there have been moves to demolish the small grid of Georgian streets to
the south of the British Museum to give the BM (as it's known) a more triumphal
approach. Thankfully, none have come to fruition and
Museum Street
and
Bury Place
remain a pleasure to explore, thriving on a mixture of antiquarian and secondhand
print and book shops, and cafés and sandwich shops which feed the museum hordes.
It's worth looking in at
Jarndyce
, the booksellers at 46 Great Russell St, whose left
window is renowned for its display of bizarre antiquarian books, with titles such as
Correctly English in Hundred Days
and
The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry
.
Cartoon Museum
35 Little Russell St • Tues-Sat 10.30am-5.30pm, Sun noon-5.30pm • £5.50 •
T
020 7580 8155,
W
cartoonmuseum.org •
!
Tottenham
Court Road
As well as putting on excellent temporary exhibitions, the
Cartoon Museum
also has
a permanent display of over two hundred works spanning two centuries, beginning
with Hogarth's moralistic engravings and the caricatures of Gillray, Rowlandson and
Cruickshank. The emphasis is very much on British cartoons from the likes of
Punch
,
one of the earliest and longest-lasting satirical magazines, to
Private Eye
, which helped
launch the careers of, among others, Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe. The comic
strips range from Ally Sloper, Britain's first regular comic-strip character who appeared
in 1884, through D.C. Thompson (publisher of
Beano
), to
Viz
, the country's best-
selling comic ever, which at its peak sold over a million copies each edition.
7
Church of St George's Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury Way • Daily 1-4pm •
T
020 7242 1979,
W
stgeorgesbloomsbury.org.uk •
!
Tottenham Court Road or Holborn
A couple of blocks south of the BM is Hawksmoor's
Church of St George's Bloomsbury
,
built in 1730 to serve Bloomsbury's respectable new residents. Its main point of interest
is the unusual steeple - Horace Walpole called it “a masterpiece of absurdity” - a
stepped pyramid based on Pliny's description of the tomb of Mausolus at Halikarnassos
(fragments of which now reside in the BM), with lions and unicorns clinging
precariously to the base. The tower is topped by a statue of the unpopular German-
speaking monarch, George I, dressed in a Roman toga. The interior is tall, wide and
gleaming white, with a large clerestory, its best features the flaming pentecostal tongues
on the keystones and the unusual semicircular apse, complete with a scallop-shell
recess. There's an interesting multimedia exhibition on Hawksmoor and Bloomsbury in
the crypt (phone ahead to check it's open).
Bloomsbury Square
Laid out in 1665,
Bloomsbury Square
was the first of the city's open spaces to be
o
cially called a “square”. John Evelyn thought it “a noble square or piazza - a little
towne”, but sadly little remains of its original or later Georgian appearance. At the
south end of the square you'll find
Sicilian Avenue
, a beautifully preserved architectural
set piece from 1910. This unusually continental promenade leads diagonally onto
Southampton Row and is separated from the main roads by slender Ionic screens. On
Southampton Row itself, you can see the only
tram lines
left uncovered in central
London from what was, between World Wars I and II, the world's largest tram system:
to catch a glimpse, you must dodge the tra
c and peek through the wrought-iron
railings to the tracks as they descend into the former Kingsway tram subway.
Bedford Square
The most handsome of the Bloomsbury squares is
Bedford Square
, to the west of the
BM. Some of Bloomsbury's best-known publishing houses had their of
ces here until
