Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Architectural Association
36 Bedford Square • Term time Mon-Fri 10am-7pm, Sat 11am-5pm •
T
020 7887 4000,
W
aaschool.ac.uk •
!
Tottenham Court Road
The best way to get a look inside one of Bedford Square's Georgian mansions is to head
for the
Architectural Association
, which occupies eight houses on the west side of the
square. The public can visit the AA's occasional exhibitions, its basement bookshop and
the studenty café-bar on the first floor, with a roof terrace open in fine weather.
Building Centre
26 Store St • Mon-Fri 9.30am-6pm, Sat 10am-5pm • Free •
T
020 7692 4000,
W
buildingcentre.co.uk •
!
Goodge Street
If you've got even a passing interest in London's architecture and planning, it's a good
idea to pop into the
Building Centre
, which has a café and a bookshop and which stages
topical exhibitions on the future of London's built environment. Its centrepiece is a vast
1:1500 model of London, including the latest City skyscrapers and the Olympic Park.
Russell Square
The largest Bloomsbury square - indeed one of the largest in London - is
Russell
Square
, to the northeast of the BM. Apart from its monumental scale, little remains of
the Georgian scheme, though the gardens, with their gargantuan plane trees, are good
for a picnic, and there's a café in the northeastern corner. The Bloomsbury figure most
closely associated with the square is T.S. Eliot, who worked at no. 24, then the o
ces
of Faber & Faber, from 1925 until his death in 1965. The only architectural curiosity is
the
Russell Hotel
, on the eastern side; twice as high as everything around it, it's a
no-holds-barred Victorian terracotta fancy, concocted in a bewildering mixture of styles
in 1898 by Fitzroy Doll.
7
Gordon Square
Gordon Square
is owned by the University of London, which surrounds it on three
sides, and open to the public. With its winding paths and summer profusion of roses,
it remains one of Bloomsbury's quietest sanctuaries and is predictably popular with
students. Between the wars, it was at the centre of the Bloomsbury Group (see p.122):
on the east side, where the Georgian houses stand intact, plaques mark the residences
of writer Lytton Strachey (no. 51) and economist John Maynard Keynes (no. 46), while
another (no. 50) commemorates the group as a whole.
Church of Christ the King
Gordon Square • Mon-Fri 8am-4pm • Free •
T
020 7388 3588,
W
fifparish.com •
!
Euston Square or Goodge Street
Looking like a miniature cathedral, in the southwest corner of the square, stands the
strangely towerless
Church of Christ the King
, built in neo-Gothic style in the 1850s.
The five-bay nave is cathedralesque - the nave of Westminster Abbey is only 13ft taller
- with a hammerbeam roof, full triforium and clerestory; the unbuilt spire was to have
been nearly 150ft high. It was built for (and still belongs to) the Catholic Apostolic
Church, a prayer sect within the Anglican Church who were utterly convinced that the
Second Coming was imminent (and who were renowned for elaborate rituals, for
speaking in tongues and for miraculous healing). It's currently the home of Forward in
Faith, the conservative wing of the Church of England.
Tavistock Square
One block east of Gordon Square is
Tavistock Square
, laid out by Thomas Cubitt in the
early nineteenth century. Though the west side of the square survives intact, the house
on the south side at no. 52, where the Woolfs lived from 1924 until shortly before
Virginia's suicide in 1941, and from which they ran the Hogarth Press, is no longer
