Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury takes its name from the circle of early 20th-century writers and thinkers — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes among them — who lived and met around its Georgian garden squares, and the area has stayed intellectual ever since, anchored by the University of London and the British Museum. Russell Square, the largest of the squares, offers a shaded place to rest between museum visits, and the British Library sits just north near King's Cross. Charles Dickens lived on Doughty Street, now a small museum to his life and work. It's a quieter, more studious counterpart to the West End just to its south.