Evil Giraffe (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thousandmilesblog) wrote2010-06-26 02:57 pm
thousandmilesblog) wrote2010-06-26 02:57 pm
Entry tags:
Walk Post 036 - The Women of Bloomsbury
Date of Walk: 11/06/10
Walk organized by: Self, with a little help from Herstoria Magazine
Start time: 14:30
Start location: Portland Place, London
Walk length: 8.557 miles
Weather conditions: Sunny, hot, dry
Details:
One of these days I will remember that when visiting London I tend to walk a ridiculous number of miles there, and take proper walking socks.
I had a meeting to attend, which is normally over by early afternoon. The evening trains back are always cheaper than the afternoon ones, so I tend to have time to do a bit of wandering around. On this particular day I had two things planned, to visit Regent's Park, and to do a history walk around Bloomsbury that I'd found in a magazine. Fortunately, I had time for both.
Regent's Park
The meeting venue was on Portland Place, so it was just a quick walk up the road to reach Regent's Park. The park dates from the early 19th century. The area on which it now stands was seized from the Abbess of Barking in 1538 and styled as one of Henry VIII's hunting parks until after the Civil War, when the land was leased to tenant farmers. When it became more economical to build on the land than to farm it, a redesign was called for. It was landscaped by John Nash as an ornamental park for the Prince Regent, later King George IV. Ambitious building plans for a palace never materialised, and only a few of the proposed villas were built within the park. Initially it wasn't open to the public, but access was gradually granted.
I'd never been in it before, and on going in my first emotion was sadness that I'd been to London so many times and missed this every time. I think it's my favourite London park, for the variety and the activity. I love the formal gardens and the less manicured areas. I love that the playing fields were being put to good use by several local schools that afternoon. I saw the usual dog walkers and joggers, but also what I first took to be a Tai Chi lesson and later decided was something more like karate. There were lots of really old trees, with trunks so wide you could take a stroll around them. The landscaping and use of space sets it apart from the other London parks I've been in, which are just lots of lawn criss-crossed with paths and dotted with trees. Sadly I only have one photograph, as my phone memory was quite full and I wanted to save some room for the history walk. I'm not sure that was a good decision on balance, as the park was a lot more photogenic. Still, I think I may be going back there at some point.
I wandered around for a while, taking in the rose gardens, the boating lake and the avenue gardens, then stopped for a cup of tea before heading over to Euston Road to start the history walk.
History Walk
Being a place a lot of interesting and noted people have passed through at some point in their lives, London has rather a lot of blue plaques that mark their presence. Around 850 of them. Of those, about a hundred in whole or part commemorate the lives and work of women. The notes for the walk mention connections with 48 notable women. Less than 10 have blue plaques anywhere in London that mention them, though not all would yet meet the criteria and some places were not ones the women spent a lot of time in or were most connected to. I'm pretty sure you could play the Kevin Bacon game with all of the women if you substitute Virginia Woolf for Kevin.
The walk started at the Friends House opposite Euston Station, where the lack of hierarchy and equality of the sexes gave many women a voice they would not otherwise have had. The library has texts written by female anti-slavery advocates and material by Elizabeth Fry, a penal reformer. Passing through the gardens onto Endsleigh Street, the attic at number 7 was the next stop. Novelist and journalist Dorothy Richardson lived there for a few years at the end of the nineteenth century. Turning right then left into Gordon Square, I passed the former home of poet Charlotte Mew, and that of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen aka artist Vanessa Bell and writer Virginia Woolf. Also in Gordon Square was the location where the Bloomsbury Group met, and the former home of artist Dora Carrington.
Heading to the right from the southern end of the square I turned into Torrington Square, where poet Christina Rossetti lived and died.
I returned to Torrington Place and walked past the buildings of University College London. UCL was one of the first universities to award degrees to women, admitting them on equal terms with men in 1878. Oxford refused until 1920 and Cambridge until 1948, so many female students admitted there in years when they were denied any award at the end of their studies came to UCL for a formal qualification. Birth control campaigner Marie Stopes was awarded a BSc in botany and geology here in 1902. Crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale became UCL's first female professor, and was one of the first two women to be admitted as Fellows of the Royal Society in 1945. UCL's Chair of Egyptology was founded by the novelist Amelia Edwards. Margaret Murray also worked in this department and later became assistant professor. Alice Lee was employed at UCL as a researcher in the Biometrics Laboratory.
Turning left into Gower Street, I passed the former home of actress Sarah Siddons. Art historian and writer Vernon Lee also lived on Gower Street with poet A. Mary F. Robinson. I turned right into Chenies Street, where writer Francis Burney briefly lived, then back onto Gower Street. Further along to the right was Store Street, where Mary Wollstonecraft lived while writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Mary died in 1797 shortly after giving birth to the daughter who grew up to be author Mary Shelley. Back on Gower Street I continued down to Bedford Square.
The door arches in the square have ornamental keystones made of Coade stone, a tough, weather resistant artificial ceramic invented by Eleanor Coade. The stone has been used in many other places in Britain and abroad.
Also in this square the Bedford College for Women was founded by Unitarian, philanthropist and anti-slavery campaigner Elizabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford College is now part of the University of London. Literary society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell lived in Bedford Square and held parties for artists and writers there.
Back on Gower Street, I caught sight of number 2, the former home of constitutional suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett and her sister Agnes.
I passed this house unexpectedly on one of my first visits to London, and realised just how much I'd miss if I travelled around on the Underground all the time.
Turning left into Great Russell Street, I passed the British Museum, which has a wonderful room full of clocks and a statue of sculptor and writer Anne Seymour Damer.
I took a quick detour to the right into Bloomsbury Square, where American writer Gertrude Stein stayed briefly. Bloomsbury Square was also the home of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, which attracted a number of notable figures such as abortion law reformer Stella Browne, and writer and suffragette Cicely Hamilton.
Heading back onto Great Russell Street, I continued to Southampton Row, turning left and walking up this street to Cosmo Place, a tiny but busy street leading to Queen Square. The Mary Ward Centre has been based here since 1980. Mary worked with children of poor and working class parents to provide play schemes and other opportunities. In 1908 she became head of the Women's Anti-Suffrage League. Physicist, electrical engineer and suffrage campaigner Hertha Ayrton was a craft worker at the arts and crafts workshop at 26 Queen Square while studying mathematics at Girton College Cambridge. She was the first woman to be nominated for a Fellowship of the Royal Society, but was refused after a heated discussion among the council. She did get their Hughes Medal for her research though. The National Hospital takes up much of one side of the square, and was once the site of the Working Women's College founded by Elizabeth Malleson in 1864.
The housing reformer and co-founder of the National Trust Octavia Hill taught there, as did suffrage campaigner and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe and physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The college became co-educational ten years after opening.
Continuing to the far end of the square, I headed right onto Guildford Street. On the left is Coram's Fields, the site of the old Foundling Hospital.
Coram's Fields is now a park which reserves the right to refuse entry to adults without an accompanying child, which I thought was a great idea even though I didn't have any accompanying children and so couldn't go in. I took a picture through the bars. The old entrance is still standing, as is the alcove where many infants were abandoned by their destitute mothers.
It looks quite damp and sad. I took a quick detour right from Guildford street into Doughty Mews, which is amazingly neat and tidy for a street that most people probably walk right past.
This was where Amelia Edwards started the Egypt Exploration Fund, later the Egypt Exploration Society. Back on Guildford Street, I took a left down Doughty Street alongside the park. Writer Edith Lees started an experiment in communal living and free love here, almost a century before all that really caught on. Poet Charlotte Mew, mentioned earlier, was born here. Writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby shared flats here early in their careers, and novelist E. M. Delafield kept a flat here which features in some of her books.
Doughty Street becomes Mecklenburgh Street and then Mecklenburgh Square. Classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison lived at 11 Mecklenburgh Street.
Economic and social historian Eileen Power lived further up at 20 Mecklenburgh Square. Number 34 on the square was the shared home of the Women's Trade Union League, the National Anti-Sweating League and the People's Suffrage Federation. Virginia Woolf quite likely spent time here. Poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle and novelist Dorothy L. Sayers both lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. I walked through the square and on in a large loop along Tavistock Place and Hunter Street to Brunswick Square, location of the Foundling Museum, which was unfortunately closed (a lady at the window was very apologetic about this, but it was nearly 6pm by then).
From Hunter Street I continued down and turned right onto Bernard Street, where physician Sophia Jex Blake, one of the Edinburgh Seven, lived for a few years. After the decision by Edinburgh University to refuse degrees to women even after they had passed all their examinations, Sophia moved down to London to continue trying to gain a medical degree. Turning right up Woburn Place, I headed up to Tavistock Square. Across from the square at 9 Tavistock Place, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Mary Ward crossed verbal swords in debate, and Fawcett is reported to have won quite decisively. The Tavistock Hotel further along the road caused Virginia Woolf much complaint during its construction.
In the square there is a memorial to surgeon Dame Louisa Aldrich Blake, who graduated with honours from London University as the only woman on her Bachelorship of Surgery course, and went on to become the first woman to gain a Master of Surgery degree. On that note, I ended the tour and went somewhere nice to collapse in a chair with a cold drink.
I like history walks, because they're everything history wasn't at school. History in school was in books, it happened in places I didn't know and would never go to, and it was all about people who didn't seem to be anything like me. When you don't see people like you represented in the pages of history, you never believe you'll be part of it. Since I started doing history walks I have a different view of the subject, that takes in the small and everyday, the forgotten and unrecognised. It feels more relevant, and more interesting for it. There's loads of organized walks going on all over the place, and there are guide leaflets in tourist information centres and walks in newspapers and magazines. I highly recommend this as a thing to do, and I'll be trying a few more before the end of the year.
Evil Giraffe
Walk organized by: Self, with a little help from Herstoria Magazine
Start time: 14:30
Start location: Portland Place, London
Walk length: 8.557 miles
Weather conditions: Sunny, hot, dry
Details:
One of these days I will remember that when visiting London I tend to walk a ridiculous number of miles there, and take proper walking socks.
I had a meeting to attend, which is normally over by early afternoon. The evening trains back are always cheaper than the afternoon ones, so I tend to have time to do a bit of wandering around. On this particular day I had two things planned, to visit Regent's Park, and to do a history walk around Bloomsbury that I'd found in a magazine. Fortunately, I had time for both.
Regent's Park
The meeting venue was on Portland Place, so it was just a quick walk up the road to reach Regent's Park. The park dates from the early 19th century. The area on which it now stands was seized from the Abbess of Barking in 1538 and styled as one of Henry VIII's hunting parks until after the Civil War, when the land was leased to tenant farmers. When it became more economical to build on the land than to farm it, a redesign was called for. It was landscaped by John Nash as an ornamental park for the Prince Regent, later King George IV. Ambitious building plans for a palace never materialised, and only a few of the proposed villas were built within the park. Initially it wasn't open to the public, but access was gradually granted.
I'd never been in it before, and on going in my first emotion was sadness that I'd been to London so many times and missed this every time. I think it's my favourite London park, for the variety and the activity. I love the formal gardens and the less manicured areas. I love that the playing fields were being put to good use by several local schools that afternoon. I saw the usual dog walkers and joggers, but also what I first took to be a Tai Chi lesson and later decided was something more like karate. There were lots of really old trees, with trunks so wide you could take a stroll around them. The landscaping and use of space sets it apart from the other London parks I've been in, which are just lots of lawn criss-crossed with paths and dotted with trees. Sadly I only have one photograph, as my phone memory was quite full and I wanted to save some room for the history walk. I'm not sure that was a good decision on balance, as the park was a lot more photogenic. Still, I think I may be going back there at some point.
I wandered around for a while, taking in the rose gardens, the boating lake and the avenue gardens, then stopped for a cup of tea before heading over to Euston Road to start the history walk.
History Walk
Being a place a lot of interesting and noted people have passed through at some point in their lives, London has rather a lot of blue plaques that mark their presence. Around 850 of them. Of those, about a hundred in whole or part commemorate the lives and work of women. The notes for the walk mention connections with 48 notable women. Less than 10 have blue plaques anywhere in London that mention them, though not all would yet meet the criteria and some places were not ones the women spent a lot of time in or were most connected to. I'm pretty sure you could play the Kevin Bacon game with all of the women if you substitute Virginia Woolf for Kevin.
The walk started at the Friends House opposite Euston Station, where the lack of hierarchy and equality of the sexes gave many women a voice they would not otherwise have had. The library has texts written by female anti-slavery advocates and material by Elizabeth Fry, a penal reformer. Passing through the gardens onto Endsleigh Street, the attic at number 7 was the next stop. Novelist and journalist Dorothy Richardson lived there for a few years at the end of the nineteenth century. Turning right then left into Gordon Square, I passed the former home of poet Charlotte Mew, and that of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen aka artist Vanessa Bell and writer Virginia Woolf. Also in Gordon Square was the location where the Bloomsbury Group met, and the former home of artist Dora Carrington.
Heading to the right from the southern end of the square I turned into Torrington Square, where poet Christina Rossetti lived and died.
I returned to Torrington Place and walked past the buildings of University College London. UCL was one of the first universities to award degrees to women, admitting them on equal terms with men in 1878. Oxford refused until 1920 and Cambridge until 1948, so many female students admitted there in years when they were denied any award at the end of their studies came to UCL for a formal qualification. Birth control campaigner Marie Stopes was awarded a BSc in botany and geology here in 1902. Crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale became UCL's first female professor, and was one of the first two women to be admitted as Fellows of the Royal Society in 1945. UCL's Chair of Egyptology was founded by the novelist Amelia Edwards. Margaret Murray also worked in this department and later became assistant professor. Alice Lee was employed at UCL as a researcher in the Biometrics Laboratory.
Turning left into Gower Street, I passed the former home of actress Sarah Siddons. Art historian and writer Vernon Lee also lived on Gower Street with poet A. Mary F. Robinson. I turned right into Chenies Street, where writer Francis Burney briefly lived, then back onto Gower Street. Further along to the right was Store Street, where Mary Wollstonecraft lived while writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Mary died in 1797 shortly after giving birth to the daughter who grew up to be author Mary Shelley. Back on Gower Street I continued down to Bedford Square.
The door arches in the square have ornamental keystones made of Coade stone, a tough, weather resistant artificial ceramic invented by Eleanor Coade. The stone has been used in many other places in Britain and abroad.
Also in this square the Bedford College for Women was founded by Unitarian, philanthropist and anti-slavery campaigner Elizabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford College is now part of the University of London. Literary society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell lived in Bedford Square and held parties for artists and writers there.
Back on Gower Street, I caught sight of number 2, the former home of constitutional suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett and her sister Agnes.
I passed this house unexpectedly on one of my first visits to London, and realised just how much I'd miss if I travelled around on the Underground all the time.
Turning left into Great Russell Street, I passed the British Museum, which has a wonderful room full of clocks and a statue of sculptor and writer Anne Seymour Damer.
I took a quick detour to the right into Bloomsbury Square, where American writer Gertrude Stein stayed briefly. Bloomsbury Square was also the home of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, which attracted a number of notable figures such as abortion law reformer Stella Browne, and writer and suffragette Cicely Hamilton.
Heading back onto Great Russell Street, I continued to Southampton Row, turning left and walking up this street to Cosmo Place, a tiny but busy street leading to Queen Square. The Mary Ward Centre has been based here since 1980. Mary worked with children of poor and working class parents to provide play schemes and other opportunities. In 1908 she became head of the Women's Anti-Suffrage League. Physicist, electrical engineer and suffrage campaigner Hertha Ayrton was a craft worker at the arts and crafts workshop at 26 Queen Square while studying mathematics at Girton College Cambridge. She was the first woman to be nominated for a Fellowship of the Royal Society, but was refused after a heated discussion among the council. She did get their Hughes Medal for her research though. The National Hospital takes up much of one side of the square, and was once the site of the Working Women's College founded by Elizabeth Malleson in 1864.
The housing reformer and co-founder of the National Trust Octavia Hill taught there, as did suffrage campaigner and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe and physician Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The college became co-educational ten years after opening.
Continuing to the far end of the square, I headed right onto Guildford Street. On the left is Coram's Fields, the site of the old Foundling Hospital.
Coram's Fields is now a park which reserves the right to refuse entry to adults without an accompanying child, which I thought was a great idea even though I didn't have any accompanying children and so couldn't go in. I took a picture through the bars. The old entrance is still standing, as is the alcove where many infants were abandoned by their destitute mothers.
It looks quite damp and sad. I took a quick detour right from Guildford street into Doughty Mews, which is amazingly neat and tidy for a street that most people probably walk right past.
This was where Amelia Edwards started the Egypt Exploration Fund, later the Egypt Exploration Society. Back on Guildford Street, I took a left down Doughty Street alongside the park. Writer Edith Lees started an experiment in communal living and free love here, almost a century before all that really caught on. Poet Charlotte Mew, mentioned earlier, was born here. Writers Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby shared flats here early in their careers, and novelist E. M. Delafield kept a flat here which features in some of her books.
Doughty Street becomes Mecklenburgh Street and then Mecklenburgh Square. Classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison lived at 11 Mecklenburgh Street.
Economic and social historian Eileen Power lived further up at 20 Mecklenburgh Square. Number 34 on the square was the shared home of the Women's Trade Union League, the National Anti-Sweating League and the People's Suffrage Federation. Virginia Woolf quite likely spent time here. Poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle and novelist Dorothy L. Sayers both lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. I walked through the square and on in a large loop along Tavistock Place and Hunter Street to Brunswick Square, location of the Foundling Museum, which was unfortunately closed (a lady at the window was very apologetic about this, but it was nearly 6pm by then).
From Hunter Street I continued down and turned right onto Bernard Street, where physician Sophia Jex Blake, one of the Edinburgh Seven, lived for a few years. After the decision by Edinburgh University to refuse degrees to women even after they had passed all their examinations, Sophia moved down to London to continue trying to gain a medical degree. Turning right up Woburn Place, I headed up to Tavistock Square. Across from the square at 9 Tavistock Place, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Mary Ward crossed verbal swords in debate, and Fawcett is reported to have won quite decisively. The Tavistock Hotel further along the road caused Virginia Woolf much complaint during its construction.
In the square there is a memorial to surgeon Dame Louisa Aldrich Blake, who graduated with honours from London University as the only woman on her Bachelorship of Surgery course, and went on to become the first woman to gain a Master of Surgery degree. On that note, I ended the tour and went somewhere nice to collapse in a chair with a cold drink.
I like history walks, because they're everything history wasn't at school. History in school was in books, it happened in places I didn't know and would never go to, and it was all about people who didn't seem to be anything like me. When you don't see people like you represented in the pages of history, you never believe you'll be part of it. Since I started doing history walks I have a different view of the subject, that takes in the small and everyday, the forgotten and unrecognised. It feels more relevant, and more interesting for it. There's loads of organized walks going on all over the place, and there are guide leaflets in tourist information centres and walks in newspapers and magazines. I highly recommend this as a thing to do, and I'll be trying a few more before the end of the year.
Evil Giraffe