Bloomsbury festival - Inside Outside

Starting with Bloomsbury Square, Dr McNeile will introduce walkers to London’s squares and their paradoxical existence, focusing on how the world found its way into spaces developed as ordered enclaves.

Starting with Bloomsbury Square (c.1661) and the arrest, trial and execution of Lord William Russell in 1683, weavers’ riots in 1765 and the Gordon Riots of 1780, it will continue into Bedford Square (c.1777) to note the grandeur and uniformity of its conception and to consider accounts of its making.

Did it embody the urbanisation of the countryside or improvement to the city? In Russell Square (c.1800) we will recall the appearance of gates on the edges of the Bedford Estate and the tensions these signified between an ordered and peaceful locale and a more urgent and chaotic London.

Finally we visit Woburn and Gordon Squares (c 1860), finishing outside Birkbeck’s School of Arts in its celebrated location of progressive thinking.