Free audio walk in London
Bloomsburry
- 63 min
- 3.2 km
- 12 stops
- Free
Starts at 32 Russell Square
About this walk
Bloomsburry
The stops
Walk them in order; each story plays when you reach its pin.
- 1Stop 1
Russell Square
The green heart of a neighbourhood that was never allowed to grow naturally: one family of dukes drew it all on paper.
- 2Stop 2
The British Museum
The world's first national public museum began as one doctor's private hoard, and Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital inside it, in seat G seven.
- 3Stop 3
St George's Bloomsbury
The most ridiculous steeple in London: a stepped pyramid with King George the First on top, dressed as a Roman emperor.
- 4Stop 4
London Review Bookshop
The bookshop at the heart of literary Bloomsbury, where writers famously lived in squares, moved in circles, and loved in triangles.
- 5Stop 5
Bloomsbury Square
One of London's oldest squares, laid out in the sixteen sixties as an exclusive address, and now simply a park that belongs to everyone.
- 6Stop 6
Sicilian Avenue
A theatrical Italian colonnade dropped into Bloomsbury in nineteen ten, with about as much connection to Sicily as a tearoom has to China.
- 7Stop 7
Red Lion Square
A quiet garden square where, according to a stubborn old legend, the body of Oliver Cromwell was secretly buried.
- 8Stop 8
The Dolphin Tavern
Inside this little pub it is forever twenty to eleven: the clock stopped when a Zeppelin bomb destroyed the building in nineteen fifteen.
- 9Stop 9
The Lamb
A three-hundred-year-old pub with frosted glass snob screens above the bar, built so the upper classes never had to see the barman.
- 10Stop 10
The Foundling Museum
England's first home for abandoned children, where mothers left a coin or a button as the only proof their child was theirs.
- 11Stop 11
Gay's the Word
The country's oldest LGBTQ bookshop, raided by customs in nineteen eighty-four and immortalised in the film Pride.
- 12Stop 12
St George's Gardens
A peaceful garden full of old tombs, where England's first conviction for bodysnatching took place, and the thief was the gravedigger.
Ready when you are
Walk Bloomsburry with ROODS.
12 stops through London, about 63 minutes. Open ROODS in your browser, walk to the first pin and the story plays.
- Stories on a map, with narrated audio
- Walk at your own pace, stop where you like
- Runs in your browser. An app is optional.
