Dickens, Darwin and the Bloomsbury Group in one square mile.
8 stopsabout 3.0 kmabout 38 min walking
Bloomsbury has the densest concentration of blue plaques in London, and they are almost all people who wrote, argued or discovered something. This walk starts at the Doughty Street house where Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, crosses to the Gower Street terrace where the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded, runs through the Georgian squares the Bloomsbury Group made their own, and ends where Virginia Woolf was living when those Thursday evenings began. Charles Darwin's site, where he wrote up the Beagle voyage, is on the way.
Start at Russell Square or Chancery Lane; finish at Warren Street.
Dickens lived here from 1837 to 1839 and wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby in the house. It is the only one of his London homes still standing, and is now the Charles Dickens Museum.
The leader of the constitutional suffrage campaign lived and died in this house — she led the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies for twenty years before the vote was won.
Strachey's Eminent Victorians made him famous and made Victorian biography impossible to write straight again. Gordon Square was the Bloomsbury Group's centre of gravity.
1809–1882 · Biological Sciences Building, University College, (site of 110) Gower Street, Camden, WC1
Darwin lived on this site from 1838 to 1842, the years he worked up the Beagle notebooks and first sketched natural selection. The house is gone; UCL's Biological Sciences building stands here.
Woolf lived here as Virginia Stephen from 1907 to 1911, before her marriage and before her first novel — the Thursday evenings in this house are where the Bloomsbury Group began.