Venues in Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury pairs museum London with garden-square London — the British Museum and the Bedford estate’s Georgian squares, with townhouse hotels for private dinners and receptions.
Bloomsbury
Café Deco
European Restaurant
Up to 55 guests
Anna Tobias's Bloomsbury bistro, in Time Out's 50 Best and the MICHELIN Guide. The downstairs room takes 25; both floors take 55.
Bloomsbury
Fitz's Bar
Cocktail Bar
A dark, theatrical cocktail bar behind a side door at Kimpton Fitzroy London on Russell Square, available for exclusive hire.
Bloomsbury
The Bloomsbury Club Bar
Cocktail Bar
Up to 90 guests
The cocktail bar of The Bloomsbury hotel, in rich wood with a covered grotto terrace, live jazz and room for 90 standing.
Bloomsbury
Dalloway Terrace
Modern European Restaurant
Up to 24 guests
The Bloomsbury's year-round garden terrace, dressed in a new floral installation each season under a retractable roof, for semi-private or full hire.
Bloomsbury
The Bloomsbury
Hotel
Up to 320 guests
A Lutyens-designed Bloomsbury hotel with two chandeliered ballrooms, a coral-walled salon bar, a late-night underground club room and the flower-draped Dalloway Terrace.
Bloomsbury
Charles Dickens Museum
Event Space
Up to 80 guests
The Charles Dickens Museum on Doughty Street, hired exclusively as a whole museum for receptions, dinners and private tours.
Bloomsbury
The Foundling Museum
Event Space
Up to 250 guests
A Georgian institution in Bloomsbury whose reinstated Rococo Court Room and portrait-hung Picture Gallery host after-hours dinners and receptions, with the whole museum available for evening hire.
Bloomsbury
The British Museum
Event Space
Up to 1,000 guests
The glass-roofed Great Court and Grade I galleries of Bloomsbury's national museum, opened after hours for receptions and dinners from a single gallery table to a thousand-guest reception.
Bloomsbury
The Bloomsbury Ballroom
Event Space
Up to 700 guests
A Grade II-listed 1926 Art Deco ballroom on Bloomsbury Square — a fixed stage, two adjoining bars and space for up to 700 on an exclusive hire.
Bloomsbury
Senate House
Event Space
Up to 250 guests
The University of London's art deco landmark on Malet Street, with a marble Crush Hall and Beveridge Hall for gala dinners and award ceremonies.
Bloomsbury
The Academy
Hotel
Up to 80 guests
Five Georgian townhouses on Gower Street joined into a 50-bedroom hotel, with a cocktail bar, a courtyard garden and a whole-hotel exclusive use.
Bloomsbury
L'oscar London
Hotel
Up to 180 guests
A Jacques Garcia-designed boutique hotel in a Grade II* listed former Baptist church off Southampton Row, with a domed octagonal chapel, an oak-panelled Library and a heritage Committee Room for private events.
/ About Bloomsbury ▾
Bloomsbury was laid out over two centuries by the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford, whose estate gave the district its defining feature: a grid of garden squares set among Georgian terraces. Bloomsbury Square, planned for the Earl of Southampton around 1660, was among the first of its kind in London; Bedford Square followed between 1775 and 1783 and survives as the most complete Georgian square in the district, its uniform brick façades listed in their entirety. Russell Square, laid out by the landscape gardener Humphry Repton between 1800 and 1806, is one of the largest squares in central London. Railed private gardens between quiet residential streets still order the quarter.
The district’s landmark, and its principal event asset, is the British Museum on Great Russell Street. Founded in 1753 as the first national public museum, it moved into Robert Smirke’s Greek Revival building, raised between 1823 and 1852 around a colonnaded courtyard. That courtyard was reopened in 2000 as the Great Court, roofed in glass and steel to Norman Foster’s design and now the largest covered public square in Europe — a setting used for gala dinners and receptions beneath the canopy. Learning defines the surrounding streets: University College London was founded in 1826, and Charles Holden’s Senate House, the university’s Art Deco tower, was completed in 1937.
Bloomsbury lent its name to the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of writers and artists — Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell among them — who gathered around Gordon Square in the early twentieth century. Hotels and dining concentrate along the squares and around Lamb’s Conduit Street to the east, the restored townhouse hotels of the garden squares supplying private rooms at a domestic scale. Green space is never far, from the museum forecourt to Coram’s Fields. For access, Russell Square sits on the Piccadilly line, Holborn adds the Central line to the south, and Euston and King’s Cross St Pancras place national rail within a short walk.