London - Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia Travel Guides | London | Sub Regions | London - Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia

Bloomsbury is the academic heart of London, the home of the acronym, full of august institutions better known as SOAS, UCL, RADA and ULU than by their full names, most of them part of the sprawling University of London. North of High Holborn, south of the Euston Road and west of Judd Street, its long straight streets of Georgian and Victorian brick can be gloomy in winter, but in bright sunshine the area’s severe little squares with their flower- and tree-filled gardens are a delight. Then again it’s no coincidence that this is also the place to find three of the city’s most rewarding museums, each defying expectations in their different ways. The revitalized and monumental British Museum obviously, but also the serene and quiet beauty of the Chinese ceramics in the Percival David Foundation and the intriguing collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts in the Petrie Museum. The student population ensures that the area is packed with reasonable places to eat and sleep, surrounded by lively pubs and excellent bookshops. To the west, on the other side of Tottenham Court Road, that ugly northbound arm of Oxford Street, Fitzrovia is the name that has been given to the blocks south of Fitzroy Square from here to Portland Place. Something like an upmarket version of Soho, on Charlotte Street and Goodge Street it even achieves some of its southern neighbour’s media buzz.

Sights

T 020-7323 8000; information T 020-7323 8299; disabled information T 020-7636 7384; minicom T 020-7323 8920; Reading Room T 020-7323 8162; http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk. Museum 1000-1730 Sat-Wed, 1000-2030 Thu, Fri (late view of main floor galleries, Egypt and Ancient Near East galleries and special exhibitions only). Great Court and Reading Room 0900-2300 Thu-Sat, 0900-1800 Sun-Wed. Free (donations appreciated); prices of temporary exhibitions vary. Guided tours: Highlights tour (90 mins) £8, £5 concessions 1030, 1300, 1500 daily. Free tours: Spotlight (1315, 20 mins) and EyeOpener Gallery tours daily (1100-1530 on the hour and half hour). M Russell Sq or Tottenham Court Rd.

Most people visit Bloomsbury for the British Museum. With its new slogan ‘illuminating world cultures’, it now comes closer to that ideal in spectacular style. Architect Norman Foster’s redevelopment of the central Great Court replaced the roof with a latticework glass canopy, turning the museum’s long-hidden central quadrangle into the largest covered square in Europe.

From beneath the front portico on Great Russell Street little seems different. Through the tall front doors, though, visitors pass straight into a vast creamy space to be confronted by the Reading Room, freshly clad in white stone like a huge post box in the middle of the indoor square. The overall impression of light and space the new design creates is generous and magnificent.

Great Court On entering the Great Court from the south, the information desk is on the left and the box office for special exhibitions and audio guides on the right, the places to pick up floorplans and get your bearings. Within the square itself there are two cafés, two shops and, up the wide staircases round the outside of the reading room, a temporary exhibition area and a restaurant. Twelve sculptures are set around the place at ground level making up the Great Court Concourse Gallery, introducing the museum’s collections.

Reading Room Straight ahead as you enter is the little door into the Reading Room. Designed by Robert Smirke in 1823, the Round Reading Room was first opened in 1857 and its original colour scheme of light blue, cream and gold leaf has now been restored. A host of famous thinkers, writers, politicians and idlers have studied, mused or snoozed beneath the lofty dome at one of the 35 long tables fanning out from the central enquiry desk.

Around the museum A first visit to the British Museum galleries is likely to both inspire and bewilder. That said, the new developments mean that the arrangement of millions of objects of every shape, size, and age laid out for inspection in over 90 rooms now seems much more straightforward. The sheer range and variety of exhibits on display often provokes the observation that there’s not much that’s British in this museum at all.

The main part of the museum is on the ground floor in the west wing, through the left-hand wall of the Great Court after entering from the main southern entrance. The galleries stretching the length of this wing are devoted to Ancient Egyptian sculpture, the Ancient Near East (including art from the palaces of Nimrud and Nineveh and Assyrian sculpture), and Ancient Greece (including the sculptures from the Parthenon, the Nereid Monument and the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos). These collections also spill downstairs onto the lower floors of this wing.

On the right-hand side of the Great Court is the east wing, once the wonderful old King’s Library, the largest purely neo- classical room in London, now dedicated to an exhibition on the theme of Enlightenment in the 18th century, the era of the museum’s founding.

Straight ahead past the Reading Room leads into the north wing and the Wellcome Trust gallery displaying parts of the ethnographic collection on the theme of ‘living and dying’, and rooms devoted to artefacts from China, Southeast Asia, India and the Americas, with the African collection housed on the lower floors.

On the upper floors, above the galleries in the west wing – best reached up the south stairs on the left just before entering the Great Court from the front entrance – are more objects from Ancient Greece and also from the Roman Empire. Straight ahead at the top of these stairs leads into the rooms in the east wing devoted to Europe from the Middle Ages to modern times. Beyond these, on the upper floors of the east wing, can be found Roman Britain, Prehistory, and more monuments and treasures from the Ancient Near East which continue round into the north wing, also home to the museum’s extraordinary collection of early Egyptian funerary objects – including mummies – as well as the Korean and Japanese collections.

It would be quite impossible to see everything in one day: apart from the guided and audio tours, it’s well worth finding out from the information desk when and where the free 50-minute ‘EyeOpener’ Gallery Talks are taking place (the first usually at about 1100 and the last at about 1500). Every day many of the museum’s main areas are covered, with enthusiastic and well-informed volunteers describing the contents of a particular room in fascinating detail.

Malet Pl, off Torrington St, T 020-7679 2000 (ext 2884), http://www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk. Tue-Fri 1300-1700, Sat 1000-1300. Free (donations appreciated). M Goodge St or Euston Sq.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology is a hidden gem, bound to delight anyone whose appetite for all things Ancient Egyptian has been whetted by the British Museum. Donated by Sir Flinders Petrie to University College London (UCL) in 1933, this old-fashioned academic museum is a glass-cased treasure trove of amulets, beads, ornaments, instruments and decorative art, including the oldest undergarment in the world, dating from 2800 BC.

53 Gordon Sq, T 020-7387 3909, http://www.pdfmuseum.org.uk. Mon-Fri 1030-1700. Free (donations appreciated); under-14s must be accompanied by an adult. M Euston Sq or Russell Sq.

A series of quiet rooms display a large collection of exquisite Chinese ceramics from the 10th-18th centuries, Ming, Qing, Song and Tang vases, dishes, pots, incense burners and water droppers, many of them previously owned by Chinese emperors. The cumulative effect of such an absorbing wealth of fine detail is memorable.

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