Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury is where the Bloomsbury Group spent the early twentieth century painting each other, sleeping with each other and writing it all down, and the garden squares still look as if someone clever is about to be indiscreet in them. These days the benches under the plane trees belong to students eating meal deals over reading lists they have no intention of finishing. Most of the Georgian terraces were long ago taken over by universities, hotels and offices dressed up as houses, so the people who actually live here do it in flats and get used to sharing the street with a lecture theatre. Nowhere in London is better read, and nowhere gets woken more reliably by a wheelie suitcase at seven.