Museum Street and New Oxford Street, Bloomsbury - geograph

Museum Street is a street in the

Bloomsbury Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural, intellectual, and educational institutions. Bloomsbury is home of the British Museum, the largest mus ...

area of the

London Borough of Camden The London Borough of Camden () is a London borough in Inner London. Camden Town Hall, on Euston Road, lies north of Charing Cross. The borough was established on 1 April 1965 from the area of the former boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn, and St ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. To the north is the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

, hence its current name. The street is populated by cafes and bookshops to appeal to the international

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

-going public. To the north is Great Russell Street. To the south are Bloomsbury Way and

New Oxford Street Oxford Street is a major road in the City of Westminster in the West End of London, running from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch via Oxford Circus. It is Europe's busiest shopping street, with around half a million daily visitors, and as o ...

. The nearest tube stations are

Tottenham Court Road Tottenham Court Road (occasionally abbreviated as TCR) is a major road in Central London, almost entirely within the London Borough of Camden. The road runs from Euston Road in the north to St Giles Circus in the south; Tottenham Court Road tub ...

and

Holborn Holborn ( or ) is a district in central London, which covers the south-eastern part of the London Borough of Camden and a part ( St Andrew Holborn Below the Bars) of the Ward of Farringdon Without in the City of London. The area has its roots ...

to the southwest and southeast respectively.

History

The street goes back to the 14th century and beyond. It remained largely rural until the late 17th century when the growth of London caused its urbanisation. Known as a thoroughfare since records began, it soon came to be known as ''Peter Street''. The origins of this name are unsure though scholars agree it is unlikely to have been an eminent Peter (notwithstanding perhaps St Peter) and more probable it derives from a

saltpetre Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . This alkali metal nitrate salt is also known as Indian saltpetre (large deposits of which were historically mined in India). It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K+ and nitra ...

manufactory which is thought to have existed there long before the British Museum opened in the 1750s. During the early years the street was the site of hovels of slum tenements and rather unsavoury characters such as pickpockets and prostitutes. An attempt at gentrification saw its name changed to ''Queen Street'' and it became home to parish schools to ensure the spiritual and secular education of poor children in London. Around this time Charles Mudie opened his bookshop and stationers here, he soon explored the possibility of lending books as well as selling them and ''Mudie's Select Library'' proved so popular that it moved out to larger premises after ten years. The street also became a rather fashionable area with many of the foremost writers of the day gathering in taverns to converse and debate.

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

drank here when he was dedicating his energy to amateur dramatics,

John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculo ...

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitar ...

and the

Bloomsbury Set The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Stra ...

were also patrons. On the corner of Great Russell Street at the northern end is the Museum Tavern, a

public house A pub (short for public house) is a kind of drinking establishment which is licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. The term ''public house'' first appeared in the United Kingdom in late 17th century, and was ...

that traces its origins back to 1723.Henderson, John N. (1989). ''A history of the Museum Tavern in Bloomsbury''. London: Blemund's Books. . From 1723 to 1762 the pub was called the ''Dog and Duck'' (so called because duck hunting was popular in the ponds in the Long Fields behind Montagu House in the 17th and 18th centuries). The occult

Atlantis Bookshop The Atlantis Bookshop is an esoteric bookshop in Museum Street, London. Established by Michael Houghton in 1922, it is currently owned and run by Bali Beskin and her mother Geraldine. Atlantis has long been a hub for London's occult world.Carr- ...

was opened on the street in 1922. More recent history has seen the street set up as a paragon for pedestrian access. Camden's 2003, ''Car Free Day'' saw the streetscape give right of way to foot passengers — a success which was heralded across

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

as an example of best practice in cutting vehicular noise and pollution. Since 1987, number 30 has been home to the commercial art gallery

Abbott and Holder Abbott and Holder is an art gallery and dealership in London, England, that specialises in low-price, 19th- and 20th-century English paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints. The gallery has been located at 30 Museum Street, London WC1 s ...

References

{{coord , 51, 31, 4, N, 0, 7, 33, W, region:GB, display=title Streets in the London Borough of Camden Odonyms referring to a building British Museum Bloomsbury