Writers, Artists and Ne'er-do-wells: A Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia Walk

Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia have long drawn London's most restless minds – and its most dissolute ones. On this walking tour, you'll trace the literary and cultural history of two central London neighbourhoods, from the grand squares of the Bloomsbury Group to the raucous pubs of Fitzrovia. You'll also discover how students, political refugees, struggling artists, and outright ne'er-do-wells lived side by side with intellectuals who reshaped British modernism.

The tour starts on Gray's Inn Road and moves into Mecklenburgh Square, where you'll hear how this neighbourhood attracted everyone from American poets to England's first female barrister. You'll pass Coram's Fields, skirt the edge of London University's sprawling campus, and hear how Tavistock Place's lodging houses once sheltered Lenin, Thomas De Quincey, and Mary Shelley – often within a few doors of each other. From the posh side of Bloomsbury, dominated by Gordon Square's Bloomsbury Group circle, the tour crosses into Fitzrovia's Charlotte Street, where the drinking was heavier and the behaviour considerably worse.

The tour ends outside BBC New Broadcasting House, beside a statue of George Orwell – a fitting conclusion for a walk that has traced the lives of writers who broadcast, published, drank, and argued their way through these streets for over a century.

On this 90-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Explore Bedford Square's Georgian terraces, home to Bloomsbury Publishing – the house that said yes to Harry Potter
• Visit the Fitzroy Tavern, where Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, and Kenneth Williams all drank together
• Discover how Senate House became George Orwell's model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Hear Jean Rhys's sharp-eyed account of life in a Bloomsbury boarding house on Cartwright Gardens
• Pass the site of the Hôtel de la Tour Eiffel on Percy Street, where Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis launched the Vorticist movement
• See the stunning Fitzrovia Chapel, a Byzantine-mosaic gem hidden inside a modern residential development

This tour is for anyone who has ever wanted to understand what made Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia the beating heart of British literary and artistic life – and who isn't afraid of a pub along the way.