Bloomsbury, Russell Square and Holborn Tourist Information from Online Discounted Hotels Bloomsbury gets its name from its medieval landowners, the Blemunds, who were probably given the estate described in the Domesday Book as having vineyards and “wood for 100 pigs” by William the Conqueror. Nothing was built here, though, until the 1660s, when the Earl of Southampton laid out Bloomsbury Square, which John Evelyn thought “a noble square or piazza — a little towne”. Through marriage, the Russell family, the earls and later dukes of Bedford, acquired much of the area,
and established the other formal, bourgeois squares which remain the main distinguishing feature of Bloomsbury. The Russells named the grid-plan streets after their various titles and estates, and kept the pubs and shops to a minimum to maintain the tone of the neighbourhood.
In the twentieth century Bloomsbury acquired a reputation as the city’s most learned quarter, dominated by the dual institutions of the British Museum and London University and home to many of London’s chief book publishers but perhaps best known for its literary inhabitants. In its northern fringes, the character of the area changes dramatically, becoming steadily seedier as near the big main-line train stations of Euston, St Pancras and King’s where cheap B&Bs and run-down council estates have given the area a reputation for prostitution and drug dealing. The area looks set to change soon in 2007 however, in line with the introduction of the Eurostar trains directly into St Pancras Station.
The British Museum is clearly Bloomsbury’s main draw and could easily occupy you for an entire day or more — and in comparison, the other sundry attractions of the area are pretty lightweight, but no less enjoyable for that.
The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, at the edge of Holborn, may be the most popular, but the Foundling Museum north, on the site of an old foundling hospital, has much more to offer, and the museum of the new British Library, near St Pancras station, is a definite must. The university museums, scattered about Bloomsbury, are of more St interest. Then, of course, there are Bloomsbury’s leafy squares, which, no longer the set pieces of Georgian architecture they once were, are still some of the nicest picnic spots in central London. For Hotels in Bloomsbury at discounted Rates from Online Discounted Hotels
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Bounded by Kingsway to the west, the City to the east, the Strand to the south and Theobald’s Road to the north, Holborn (pronounced “Ho-bun”) is a fascinating area to explore. Strategically placed between the royal and political centre of Westminster and the mercantile and financial might of the City, this wedge of land became the hub of the English legal system in the early thirteenth century. Hostels, known as Inns of Court, were established where lawyers could eat, sleep and study English Common Law (which was not taught at the universities at the time).
Even today, every aspiring English barrister must study (and eat a required number of dinners) at one of the four Inns - Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn - in order to qualify and be called to the Bar. It’s an old-fashioned system of patronage (you need contacts to get accepted at one of the Inns) and one that has done much to keep the judiciary overwhelmingly Oxbridge-educated to this day.
Hidden away from the general hub of London, the Inns are nevertheless open to the public and make for an interesting stroll, their archaic, cobbled precincts exuding the rarefied atmosphere of an Oxbridge college, and sheltering one of the city’s oldest churches, the twelfth-century Temple Church. Close the Inns, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one of the most memorable and enjoyable London’s small museums, the Sir John Soane’s Museum, is packed with architectural illusions and an eclectic array of curios, while, opposite, the Hunterian Museum houses freakish medical Curiosities. for fantastic hotel deals in Holborn London at great discounted rates see this page from Online Discounted Hotels.
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