In Bloomsbury
As Matthew Ingleby writes in his book, Bloomsbury has been at the forefront of modernity in Britain — associated with secular liberalism in the nineteenth century and social democracy in the twentieth, carrying with it a broader cultural hope for a more emancipated and egalitarian future.
And of course, Bloomsbury is home to University College London, where I work. To my slight regret, we no longer speak much about UCL’s old reputation as the “godless college of Gower Street” — a nickname linked to its lack of a chapel or theology department — but I still feel that some of the area’s historic spirit survives in its embrace of intellectual openness and secularism shaped by generations of students and academics.
And then there are the Bloomsbury trees. As Amy Levy wrote in her poem A London Plane-Tree, while living in Bloomsbury:
GREEN is the plane-tree in the square,
The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for country air;
The plane-tree loves the town.
